I would like to briefly confront four apparently opposed conceptual approaches to the word anthropos which turn out to be decisive in interpreting the Anthropocene: Heidegger’s, Derrida’s, Chakrabarty’s, and Bateson’s. The different perspectives opened by this dialogue touch on our issue – “scaling infinity” – in a particular way. They all revolve around the same question: is the anthropos of the Anthropocene a who or a what?
For Heidegger, the traditional definition of the anthropos, the “human”, relies on a quid pro quo between the who and the what. A quid pro quo, as we know, is a misunderstanding that consists in a substitution, taking “something for something” else. For Heidegger, the metaphysical traditional definition of the human is grounded in a substitution of the “what” (“Was ist der Mensch?”) for the “who” (“Wer ist der Mensch?”). As he explains in the Introduction to Metaphysics, this “what” pertains to the traditional definition of the human man, as zôon logon ekon, animal rationale.
This definition of the human being is at bottom a zoological one. The zôon of this zoology remains questionable in many respects. However, it is within the framework of this definition that the Western doctrine of the human has been constructed — all psychology, ethics, epistemology, and anthropologyMartin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, Second Edition, translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, p. 158..
The metaphysical quid pro quo inverts priorities. First, of course, the priority between the ontic and the ontological. The human has always understood itself as “a being”, while, as Heidegger affirms, first, the determination of the essence of the human being is never an answer, but is essentially a question; second, the asking of this question and its decision are historical – not just in general, but as the essence of history; and third, the question of who the human being is must always be posed in an essential connection with the question of how it stands with Being. The question of the human being is not an anthropological question, but a historically meta-physical question. That is, the question cannot be asked adequately within the domain of traditional metaphysics, which essentially remains “physics”. Heidegger concludes: “Because humanity is itself as historical, the question about its own Being must change from the form, ‘What is human being?’ into the form, ‘Who is the human being?’Ibid., p. 160. “Weil der Mensch als geschichtlicher er selbst ist, muß sich die Frage nach seinem eigenen Sein wandeln aus der Form: ‘was ist der Mensch? ’ in die Form: ‘wer ist der Mensch? ’.” Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, Tübingen, Max Niemeyer, 1953, p. 110..” This “Wandlung”, this metamorphosis of the what into a who, of course raises the issue of responsibility. The anthropos of the Anthropocene, understood as a who, as a Dasein, is a being able to respond to its own catastrophe.
In The Beast & the Sovereign, Volume I, Derrida comments on this passage and clearly links the issue of responsibility with that of infinity.
I reopen the Introduction to Metaphysics rather violently, guided by what matters to us at the moment, at the point where Heidegger relaunches the question ‘What is man?’ Heidegger begins by asserting the secondary character, the fundamentally derived, late on-the-scene, and (from the ontological point of view) fundamentally very unsatisfactory character of a definition of man as animal rationale or as zôon logon ekhon. Incidentally, he interestingly and unassailably calls this definition ‘zoological,’ not only but also in the sense that it links the logos to the zôon and claims to render account and reason (logon didonai) of the essence of man by saying of him that he is first of all a ‘living thing,’ an ‘animal’ […]Jacques Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign, Volume I, edited by Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, translated by Geoffrey Bennington, Chicago & London, The University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 263..
He insists on the passage I previously quoted, “the question of man as to his own being is transformed, is no longer ‘What is human being?’ (‘Was ist der Mensch?’) but ‘Who is the human being?’ (‘Wer ist der Mensch?’)”. For Derrida, however, the substitution, the quid pro quo, is inevitable. The title The Beast & the Sovereign is a translation or reformulation of “man is a rational animal.” Sovereign is for rational, and beast for “animal”. The animal rationale is the sovereign beast, relying on the convertibility of who into what.
This grammar, the same and different, shakes up the decidable authority of the ‘who’ and the ‘what’ and the order of substitution. The beast – is it ‘who’ or ‘what’? When there is a substitution, there can always be qui pro quo, a who for a who but also a who for a what or a what for a whoIbid., p. 61-62..
The distinction between who and what falls into indifference, or non-difference. There is no way in which the quid pro quo, its mechanical reversibility, can be suspended once and for all, which also explains that rationality constantly falls into stupidity. The constant and inevitable inversion of the who into a what is, for Derrida, the exact trajectory of stupidity. Sovereignty is the accomplishment of the metaphysical definition of man, that is also the accomplishment of rationality as stupidity. The problem is that trying to stop the convertibility does not put an end to this stupidity but only appears as a new version of it, as obvious in Heidegger himself or in Valery who, in Monsieur Teste, attempts “killing the beast” in him, killing the what. Valery writes in the logbook of Monsieur Teste: “I am not bête because every time I find myself bête I deny myself – I kill myselfIbid., p. 184..”
The paradox is that the reversibility between the who and the what at the same time reveals their infinite difference. The relationship between the who and the what is, as Derrida says, “infinitely differentiated”. Therefore, responsibility is a matter of scaling such an infinity, but how? Does responsibility, that is also the act of scaling the infinity of the difference between the who and the what, reside so to speak “in the conscious self or in the bottom of the unconscious self, in consciousness or in the bottom or nonconscienceIbid.?”
Chakrabarty adds a new infinite gap within this infinitely differentiated indifference. This time, the gap is the one that separates life from inorganic matter, the biological from the biological. The human of the Anthropocene is not a rational animal any longer but a geological force. A what that is even more neutral and a-conscious.
[C]limate scientists posit that the human being has become something much larger than the simple biological agent that he or she has always been. Humans now wield a geological force. […] For it is no longer a question simply of man having an interactive relation with nature. This humans have always had, or at least this is how man has been imagined in a large part of what is generally called the Western tradition. Now it is being claimed that humans are a force of nature in the geological senseDipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses”, in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Winter 2009), p. 206-207..
An infinite ambiguity now appears between the who and the what. The what this time is that of a new stone age, indifferent and unmotivated, non-responsible. “A nuclear war would have been a conscious decision on the parts of the powers that be. Climate change is an unintended consequence of human actionsIbid., p. 221..” Chakrabarty asks:
Who is the we? We humans never experience ourselves as a species. We can only intellectually comprehend or infer the existence of the human species but never experience it as such. There could be no phenomenology of us as a species. Even if we were to emotionally identify with a word like mankind, we would not know what being a species is, for, in species history, humans are only an instance of the concept species as indeed would be aby other life form. But one never experiences being a conceptIbid., p. 220..
Such is the stony anthropos of the Anthropocene. With Heidegger, we have a who ontologically different from the what understood as animal or animal life. With Derrida, we have a who that constantly and mechanically transforms itself into an automaton, the automaton being the figure of sovereign stupidity, while the infinity between the who and the what is paradoxically maintained. With Chakrabarty, we have the hypothesis of a what that is the only access to the who. “This nonhuman, forcelike mode of existence of the human tells us that we are no longer simply a form of life that is endowed with a sense of ontology. […] We need nonontological ways of thinking the humanDipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change”, in New Literary History, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Winter 2021), p. 13..”
Ontological difference does not, contrary to what Heidegger affirms, access the crux of responsibility. The human is not only responsible for what is happening; he is the only one responsible for it. The problem concerns the type of consciousness called for by such responsibility. Chakrabarty affirms that the transformation of the human into a geological force interrupts the very structure of awareness. Between consciousness or awareness and stone, there is no possible reflexivity. And at the same time, Chakrabarty believes in the possibility to invent, create a “universal” new mode of responsibility: “you have to think of the two figures of the human simultaneously: the human-human and the nonhuman-humanIbid., p. 11..”
This is where Bateson intervenes, who characterizes this coexistence as the emergence of an eco-mental system. “You forget that the eco-mental system called Lake Erie is a part of your wider eco-mental system — and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experienceGregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology, New York, Ballantine, 1972, p. 484..” The mental becomes a frontier notion, but Bateson does not suspend the biological: the eco-mental system includes ontology, life and inorganic matter.
I would like to close on the way in which Felix Guattari, in The Three Ecologies, refers to Bateson when he insists on the necessity to create an ecosophy that would hold social ecology, mental ecology, and environmental ecology together. He declares that “all sorts of other ways of existing have already established themselves outside of consciousnessFelix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London & New Brunswick, The Athlone Press, 2000, p. 35..” Mental becomes then a more accurate term than conscious. Mental becomes the frontier-term that allows us to scale, at least tentatively, infinity and responsibility, the infinity of responsibility.