MACROSCOPE
Science and the Theft of Humanity
In science's renewed interest in the human condition, a humanist sees the promise of a dialogue and a new golden age
Geoffrey Harpham
Poachers on Unguarded Turf
But the most exciting and unpredictable unintended consequence of
disciplinarity is the opportunity it creates for poaching, which
happens when one discipline opts out of the gentleman's agreement
allotting certain questions to certain disciplines and starts
answering questions it is not even supposed to ask. This is
happening today. Certain disciplines of science—having endured
the skeptical and even debunking attention of philosophy, history,
gender studies, cultural studies and literary studies, not to
mention "science studies"—have for some time been
engaging in a quiet counteroffensive by making a series of little
raids, each one limited in its scope and aspirations but potentially
immense in the aggregate, on the one question above all that has
been ruled off limits for them—the question of the human.
This question is so large that it has not been approached directly
even in the humanities disciplines, which have presumed rather than
interrogated it. Each of the fundamental categories of humanistic
research—history, philosophy and criticism of the
arts—investigates a basic or elemental feature of human being.
Philosophy is particularly interested in the limits of human
autonomy, of the capacity for self-determination, self-awareness and
self-regulation that is central to our conceptions of free will,
reason, the capacity for self-regulation and moral accountability.
These issues anchor one of the traditional cores of philosophy,
ethics, and also inform the more recent emphasis on language and
representation that has dominated much professional philosophy since
the "linguistic turn" that began in the 1930s. Where
philosophy presumes human autonomy, history presumes human
singularity, the distinctness of the species from other animals, the
environment and machines. Criticism of the arts focuses on human
creativity, which it defines as the human capacity to produce
meaningful representations or forms.
These presumptions have governed scholarship in the humanities, but
while humanistic scholars have been presuming core facts about human
nature, human capacities and human being, scientists have been
getting to work. One of the most striking features of contemporary
intellectual life is the fact that questions formerly reserved for
the humanities are today being approached by scientists in various
disciplines such as cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience,
robotics, artificial life, behavioral genetics and evolutionary
biology. (Indeed, some of the most suggestive work is being done not
just outside the humanities but outside the university, by inventors
and innovators in the for-profit sector.)
Aspects of the question of autonomy are being taken up not just by
philosophers but by investigators in cognitive science, genomics,
biochemistry and the technology of bioinformatics. In all these
fields, the presumed autonomy of the free human subject is being
interrogated and complicated. The presumption of singularity that
informs history is also being pressed hard by those working in
computational science, animal intelligence, genetic engineering and
evolutionary biology, all of which are making it harder to speak in
traditional ways about the splendid self-sufficiency of the human species.
And creativity—the most splendid of all properties of human
being, according to the humanities—is now being itself
redefined by linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience and even
software development, which are assigning new meanings to this term,
meanings that do not necessarily funnel back to the individual human
being in a state of inspired frenzy.
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