Reflections on ‘Humanity’ Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene

‘I’.

‘We’.

‘Human’.

The concept of the human, human centricity and the use of ‘I’/ ’we’ sets up the issue whereby the more they are used the less convincing they are when talking about notions of philosophy, particularly the narcissism enfolded in the exclusion of non-human agents in any discussion of process, life and world. ‘I’ is fundamentally an entangled mesh of a network of relations, which are made temporarily singular through the addressing of them in an instance of ‘I’. The struggle of ‘I’ is interesting when considering aspects of human activity, or even humans as a whole.

‘The more I try to evoke where I am—the “I” who is writing this text—the more phrases and figures of speech I must employ. I must get involved in a process of writing, the very writing that I am not describing when I evoke the environment in which writing is taking place. The more convincingly I render my surroundings, the more figurative language I end up with. The more I try to show you what lies beyond this page, the more of a page I have. And the more of a fictional “I” I have- splitting “me” into the one who is writing and the one who is being written about— the less convincing I sound (2007: 30)’ (Zylinska quoting Morton, 2014, 64).

Perception then comes into play, if to explore the idea of the evidence of human activity is human centric, positing human activity as a separate process and as perhaps more important would the question be better posed as human activity from a non-human viewpoint or non-human activity from a human viewpoint? The exploration could then become how human activity affects and is affected by others, (others in a non-human capacity and including as described by Zylinska ‘the universe itself is our most pressing “other”). An exploration to challenge anthropic standpoints to ‘give an account of, and simultaneously counter, what astrophysicists call “the strong anthropic principle”, a tendency to explain the universe from our human standpoint, as if it existed uniquely for us humans’ (Zylinska, 2014, 67).

‘This kind of post-humanist, or better, non-anthropocentric standpoint poses a challenge to human exceptionalism, but it also remains accountable, to cite Barad, “for the role we play in the differential constitution and differential positioning of the human among other creatures (both living and nonliving)”… to give an account of the differentiations of matter, of which we are a part’ (Zylinska, 2014, 68).

There is also an interesting section positing a somewhat concept of birth outside of human/biological reduction, ‘we come into the world unformed, lacking the basic capacities to move within it, communicate with others and transform our surroundings… It is only through relationality with what is not in us – with other living beings but also with the widely conceived “environment” that consists of animate and inanimate entities and processes – that we can activate the life that moves us’ (Zylinska, 2014, 68). This process can then be transferred to other entities and objects and even to events or situations, forming a life cycle of bringing into being. Finding the spark that activates the movement that carries us through the world.