Back to index
Anthropocentrism
A world view with Man at the centre of existence. The capitalist paradigm is dominated for example by humanism, an anthropocentric metaphysics. See, by way of comparison, universocentrism.
We humans are not only powerfully attracted to anthropocentrism: a slightly grotesque tendency to constantly exaggerate our own position, power and importance in the Universe; a grandiose overestimation of ourselves that we have grappled with, without respite, throughout history. Unfortunately, the problem is even more serious than this. Our personal individuation – as individuals, our demarcation from the social flock – is namely actually dependent on a process that we term internarcissism: it is through constantly seeking validation of our own identity with other people, other beings of our own species – who accordingly find themselves in exactly the same existential dilemma as ourselves – that for a fleeting moment we can experience ourselves as happily liberated from our narcissistic prison, the pathological self-centeredness that is our constant companion.
However, no such legal object exists in nature. Minerals, plants and animals are, for example, completely unable to assimilate a text which is read to them, just as they lack the wherewithal to allow themselves to be entranced libidinally by the existence of a set of rules. There are quite simply no laws in nature. There are only fields, forces and relationships. When and if an event seems to repeat itself in nature before the human observer’s attentive gaze, it is merely because the conditions in terms of the forces and relationships in two or more different situations have been equivalent. Therefore, the law is an extremely clumsy and basically misleading metaphor for how nature works. Its popularity as a metaphor is entirely related to the human being’s internarcissism; it has no connection with any sort of science. Anthropocentrism, as we know, continually throws a spanner in the works for mankind’s understanding of the world around him. We believe that we are observing the world, but we are in fact looking into a mirror manufactured by ourselves, produced out of our self-centred ideas and delusions.
The recurring mistake is Man’s constant anthropocentric, internarcissistic projection on the terms of existence: it is the absurdities we experience in our own existence that make us regard the Universe as a mysterious coincidence where existence miraculously enough happens to defeat non-existence. This anthropocentrism rests on facts that are irrelevant for the cosmos such as the fact that only one of several million sperm succeeds in fertilising one of millions of eggs in order for ourselves to arise as embryos; or that millions and again millions of possible variants of ourselves die every moment to enable just one of all this infinite number of variants of ourselves to survive, all the way through to all the variants finally perishing when death catches up with everything living within us. But in the world of physics there are no such balances, no trade-offs between something and nothing as probable, equivalent alternatives. The possibilities of somethingness completely crush the probabilities of nothingness through the entheistic oceans of existence, until somethingness becomes the metaphysical foundation of model-dependent realism.
The shift from the human to the universal centre is the necessary and correct manoeuvre. In the oscillation between Pantheos and Entheos, Barad finds the new divinity that replaces the human being that had been declared dead by her predecessor Foucault, namely the universal subject as a kind of Bohrian supraphenomenon. It is important to point out that the purpose of Barad’s anti-anthropocentrism is not to eliminate the human being from all equations. Instead, it is concerned with giving the human being as agent her onto-epistemologically correct place in the greater phenomena that existence is comprised of, and this occurs only when the Universe is held up as primary and the human subject is reduced to something secondary. The Universe is not some transcendental category in Man’s orientation through existence, which Kant imagines in his autistic phenomenology. The Universe is instead real and expresses itself in and through the many billions of human subjects that it produces among other things, rather than the other way around. The Universe lives, thinks, speaks, creates, feels pleasure and multiplies through us. Nor is this all: through us the Universe dies and leaves room for constantly new phenomena. All this taken together is supreme motivation for naming Barad’s book Meeting The Universe Halfway a syntheist manifesto.
The physicist and philosopher Karen Barad champions the radical thesis that all philosophy that is produced prior to the advent of relationalism is all too anthropocentric and thereby misleading. The only way out of this fatalist cul-de-sac is to construct a completely new ontology with the existence of the Universe and not the human being as primary. Phantasmic anthropocentrism must be replaced by realistic universocentrism. The shift from anthropocentric to universocentric metaphysics is equivalent to the shift from Man to the network as a metaphysical centre. God is thus not in fact dead, it is just the human God who could only live under very special circumstances that has left us. The literally inhuman God lives and thrives and is at last being discovered and analysed by us humans. The inhuman God, the Universe as a glittering network, lives and thrives at the centre of the syntheological pyramid: God is a network.
This means that syntheism liberates Man from anthropocentrism and internarcissism. That the individual human being is freed from the responsibility of being an individual and instead is being encouraged to be a dividual is something that syntheism regards as a kind of existential salvation. Dividualism colours every fibre of the syntheist agent. Man is not the centre of existence any more than the ego could be the centre of Man (since it does not exist – see The Body Machines). Obviously, humanity and its attributes have no primary status in the Universe. Civilisations have arisen as an emergent phenomenon on a planet after aeons of history without any people at all. They have also perished without the Universe taking the slightest bit of notice. Humanity is a phenomenon that has sprung from other intra-acting phenomena. Nor is any human being created by other humans. Biological parents do not create their offspring – despite the fact that they would like to believe that this is the case – but are rather tools for the Universe’s constant production of new organisms furnished with bodies, language, ideas, consciousnesses and subconsciousnesses.
Let us go to the history of philosophical vitalism in order to seek an answer. The difference between the individualist and the dividualist paradigms could not be any clearer than the difference that exists between the otherwise closely-related French philosophers Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Bergson’s classical vitalism steadfastly sticks to the idea of the sacredness of life as an ontological foundation. For Deleuze however, the celebration of life becomes yet another banal anthropocentrism in a Cartesian universe that has been closed off and anaesthetised for no good reason. Instead, he sees the active intensity itself as the Universe’s fundamental expression for its existence in relation to itself. Deleuze’s pantheist rather than anthropocentric vitalism therefore remain – in the narrative about the Universe’s magnificent capacity for creativity and multiplicity – as much with the marvellous in quantum physics and cosmology as with the marvellous in plants and animals. Therefore it seems quite reasonable that Karen Barad’s, Manuel De Landa’s and Robert Corrington’s intensity-fixated variants of relationalism start from Deleuzian rather than Bergsonian vitalism. It is nature and not what is most closely related to Man that is the vital, and nature is vital in itself based on its own intensity. Therefore Deleuze, Barad and De Landa are naturalist philosophers. The self-confessed syntheist Corrington even calls his philosophical orientation ecstatic naturalism.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58