Advancing the Human Self. Ewa Nowak

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СКАЧАТЬ or Miłosz,¹⁰² for the polyphonic, polymorphous, multiple, meandrous, serial-pluralistic etc. selves explored by these authors rather develop in line with the fluxus of chaotic technological stimuli surrounding and penetrating a Western individual. In the Polish psychotherapeutic tradition, two names may, to some extent, correspond with the Japanese psychoenergetic tradition, e.g., Antoni Kępiński and Kazimierz Dąbrowski. It is, however, not silence and nothingness, but the immanent mental potentials of a disintegrated self that is able to re-integrate, and, therefore, to re-empower herself and to rise above crisis. ←36 | 37→A positive disintegration process requires dialogical space in which “internal dialogism” can be facilitated by the external one. However, the dialogized self, the narrative self, the post-narrative self,¹⁰³ and the “Japanese” open self are distinct concepts regardless of their weakening nucleus. Premodern Western concepts of the self were focused on such a “nucleus,” whereas the contemporary concepts were less and less “nuclear,” as Denis de Rougeamont demonstrates:

… distinguish the person from all it is not individual, persona, ‘strong individuality’, sensitive soul, intellect, even elementary and often deceptive self-consciousness – the fact remains that belief in a distinct self and recourse to an absolute value of the person are virtually universal in the West (…) Far from dissociating the self, the psychological researchers of the 20th century name and reveal those forces tending to dissociate it, the neuroses assailing it on all sides, and recover, by the detour of their ‘objective’ descriptions, the Pauline opposition of the two men in me: the tyrannizing natural man (tyrannized in turn by the law) and the liberating spiritual man (…) there are so many realities approved in the West and ignored in the East,¹⁰⁴

      and vice versa.

3.4 Literary Narratives on Becoming Posthuman

Contemporary literature loves voicing experimental narratives of transhuman and posthuman protagonists, while records on the authentic first-person self narratives are difficult to access and scattered throughout medical papers. Philosophers also conduct thought experiments to analyze what it might be like to be(come) an animal, to share one’s own brain with another human being that is a donor’s extension, or to replace one’s own natural brain with an artificial one to achieve a transtemporal identity.¹⁰⁵ Thomas Nagel¹⁰⁶ and Martina ←37 | 38→Nida-Rümelin developed related case studies to show human cognitive skills are limited, especially when confronted with inter-species reincarnation. Thus, becoming radically transhuman or posthuman would be a kind of anthropomorphic and anthropocentric illusion. In philosophy, using thought experiments remote from reality is a legitimate research method, as Nida-Rümelin admits.

      Two case studies developed in the thought experiment convention will be presented below. Both related narratives were selected from modern and postmodern literature, namely Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) and T. Richard Brown’s The Face in the Mirror (2012). They report on the radically posthuman experiences faced by the two main characters. Both novels are originally structured as first-person narratives with elements of internal and external dialogism. In both novels, the sequence of narratives and the actual course of events are correlated. It allows a researcher to follow the changes in both biographies and to detect, on the basis of the narratives, when the human and personal self abruptly confronted with non-human experiences face discontinuity and disintegration, and whether their subsequent persistence leads to growth (i.e., becoming posthuman) or, on the contrary, to regression and degradation. Both cases will be complemented by Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Heart of the Dog (1925), which is briefly recapitulated, for the novel includes first-person and clinical narratives about a fictional experiment which involves turning an animal into a post-animal. Of course, applying narrative methods unavoidably implies expression and understanding trans- or nonhuman experience through the anthropomorphic and anthropocentric filter. The fiasco of the narrative method could not be more spectacular than at the initial moment of its application, which can only be hypothetical or literary (as literature can transgress the bounds science must respect).

3.4.1 Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka¹⁰⁷ depicted, in a vivid way, the experience of a sudden and brutal reincarnation (Körperwechsel, Metamorphose)¹⁰⁸ of a man’s soul into a body of a ←38 | 39→monstrous insect. In Kafka’s biographical context, his Metamorphosis portends the approaching exclusion of a fraction of people from the human world, their dehumanization and, finally, the Holocaust. Metamorphosis emits a profoundly tragic message which can also be interpreted as a posthumanist à rebours. Gregor Samsa’s experience does not spread any breakthrough-related optimism which permeates present-day posthumanist visions. Samsa’s features, his behavior, his human and interhuman way of life get completely annihilated through different, repulsive traits and behaviors of a primitive animal organism. Although able to cognitively and emotionally track his day-by-day experience, which characterizes Kafka’s literary style when he starts narratively reporting on Samsa’s metamorphosis from a first-person perspective, it is an animal identity which predominates and absorbs his original identities as a young man with his human embodiment. To emphasize the key stages of Samsa’s gradual transition from a human to animal condition, related excerpts are accompanied by my meta-comments such as ««human experience; ««animal experience (««non-human experience, respectively); ««transitory experience; ««being out of the place in the human world; ««posthuman experience¹⁰⁹ to stress. However, taking Nagel’s conclusion seriously (that there is no possibility to cross the gap between human and animal first-person perspectives), transitory and animal experience remained out of Samsa’s cognitive and emotional scope. Let us track Samsa’s metamorphosis’ trajectory step by step, following the milestones of Kafka’s narration.

      • “This morning Gregor was unable to get out of bed unaided. Lying on his back, he lifted his head with effort and saw some strange belly divided in brown segments (««non-human, animal experience). Several struggling legs (…) waved helplessly (…) against each other (…) before his eyes…” (««animal experience).

      • “What has happened to me? he thought.” “Well, supposing he were to say he was sick?” (««human experience). “He felt a slight itching up on his belly (…) He was even unusually hungry” (««animal experience).

      • “… there came a cautious tap at the door behind the head of his bed. ‘Gregor,’ said a voice – it was his mother’s – ‘it’s a quarter to seven. Hadn’t you a train to catch?’ That gentle voice” (««human experience).

      • But “Gregor had a shock as he heard his own voice answering hers, unmistakably his own voice (…) but with a persistent horrible twittering squeak behind it like an undertone, that left the words in their clear shape only for the first ←39 | 40→moment and then rose up reverberating round them to destroy their sense” (««transitory experience).

      • “His immediate intention was to get up quietly without being disturbed, to put on his clothes and above all eat his breakfast, and only then to consider what else was to be done, since in bed, he was well aware, his meditations would come to no sensible conclusion” (««human experience).

      • “And he set himself to rocking his whole body at once СКАЧАТЬ