Advancing the Human Self. Ewa Nowak

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СКАЧАТЬ they all show a conventional, normative and normalizing character, as they seem to elevate the individual, thus carrying them from their chaotic condition to that of organization, coherence, structure, strength, and mastery, or maturity or adulthood in terms of the life-span. But not all recent concepts of the self would offer recovery, empowerment, diachrony, teleology, wholeness, or, put briefly, growth. Rather, regression, fragmentation, “deskilling,” or “insanity”³⁴ are descriptive or normative expressions increasingly used to approach present-day self-identities; in particular, those influenced by technological factors. But diagnoses like these are already available. Therefore, searching for a new concept of the self should result in some epistemological and ontological security, and also guidance, in the light of a chronic crisis of the self,³⁵ and chronic disagreement between experts and therapists, as well as the immediately involved. To show their security potentials – as, e.g., vehicles of possible self-development, self-reconstruction, self-recovery, and self-strengthening, etc.–the limitations of these concepts must also be pointed out. Certainly, the narrative self and the embodied self belong to the most fashionable and most discussed contemporary concepts; the former because of its integrative properties, the latter because of its integral ones, and both because of their developmentalism.

1. Developmental Psychology Meets Phenomenological Psychology ³⁶

Developmentalism is one of the most powerful paradigms in contemporary cognitive psychology. Its original proponents were Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg. Their four- and six-stage theories of personal cognitive development, encompassing socio-moral growth, inspired a number of scholars who continuously developed the developmental approach. Searching for the trajectories of personal self-development, scholars such as Robert Selman and Robert Kegan (both developmental psychologists), Anthony Giddens (a sociologist) and Ken Wilber (a philosopher and theorist of integral human growth) also elaborated ←22 | 23→inter-, intra- and transpersonal “stages” of individual self-development.³⁷ Wilber’s inclination to spiritualism and esoterism made serious reception of his developmental model impossible. But reading the developmental manifestos of the theorists of posthumanism, their esoteric character can be noted, too: “the human desire to acquire new capacities (…), to expand the boundaries of our existence”³⁸ is rooted in a religious “quest to transcend our natural confines…:”³⁹

Neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal have We made thee. Thou, like a judge appointed for being honorable, art the molder and maker of thyself; thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape thou dost prefer. Thou canst grow downward into the lower natures which are brutes. Thou canst again grow upward from thy soul’s reason into the higher natures which are divine⁴⁰.

But the following book (with some critical exceptions such as Agamben’s and Lingis’ adoption of the “glorious” approach) does not explore esoteric and eschatological explanations⁴¹ of the human self’s posthumanist evolution (with its related perturbances). Instead, it draws on developmental and phenomenological psychology, the philosophy of biology, and philosophy of mind to examine posthumanism’s cognitive and experiential –and thus naturalist – foundations, including the new materialism theory as a posthumanist extension of the Embodied Self Theory. Developmentalism belongs to them, and its rise is parallel to the rise of the phenomenological theory of intercorporeality with its most recent, posthumanist ontologies.

Kegan’s construction of the evolving self concerns human growth in connection with the understanding of reality. Over time, across five developmental stages, a transformative learning process occurs. This process changes the way we know ←23 | 24→and understand things,⁴² in terms of objective reality and our relations with objects. “We have object; we are subject,”⁴³ he claims. Objects are “those elements of our knowing or organizing that we can reflect on, handle, look at, be responsible for, relate to each other, take control of, internalize, assimilate, or otherwise operate upon,”⁴⁴ e.g., identify with them, and, finally transform the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity. In particular, we cannot reflect upon the subject and the self without focusing on self-complexity, and the focus itself must coordinate different perspectives of consciousness. As Kegan’s perspectivism theory shows affinities with that of Kohlberg and Selman, and all these theories are well known, it would be sufficient to refer to the fifth-order consciousness, which Kegan describes as the most integrative – i.e., integrating the self and the other – and, therefore, as “self-transformational.” It is the other and the otherness that reorients one’s feeling of self from particular, ego-centered identity. The cognitive-structuralist approach to self-development corresponds with the phenomenological and the narrative approach of the self that is experienced or storied from the first-person perspective, and which needs to be complemented with the third-person perspective (the so-called objective perspective). However, integrating the self and the other, which was explored by Kegan at the level of conscious and subconscious (deep level) cognitive operations, found its “partner” in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the experience of one’s self as always already embedded in the world and not even related to the world. Contemporary phenomenological and cognitive concepts of the self, i.e., post-egocentric and thus extended, shared, allocentric and ecological, including the embodied self, seem to be extrapolations of the classic, self-developmental theory proposed by Kegan, especially because of the balance between egocentric and allocentric aspects of self-identity, which involves realism; meaning realism of the physical/material, social, or epistemic environment⁴⁵ with which one has relations.⁴⁶

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Developmental cognitive models of consciousness and embodied consciousness, and cognitivist models of mind and embodied mind inspired by Francisco Varela’s et al. The Embodied Mind,⁴⁷ seem to be equally supportive, as long as one is considering self and identity in terms of human beings. As the title of this book claims (as does the core thesis of the related research project), posthumanism and transhumanism emerge from the very foundations of humanism, such as a human being’ self-transcendence, human growth, development (evolution) of their identity, and even from their embodied self. Confirming that thesis through the suitable arguments is one of the aims of this book. Phenomenological and hermeneutic theories demonstrate this argumentative potential, as they do argue there are indissoluble interrelations between mind (conscious and unconscious) and body. They also support the concept of the experiential and cognitive horizon (field), which allows one to conceptualize those kinds of trans- and post-human agents that distinguish themselves by phenomenal features such as extended, ecological, intercorporeal, and crosscorporeal self-identity. Here, these features will be defined as representative for the posthumanist “stage” of human development. Agents exhibiting these features are to be defined as autopoietic or techno-autopoietic systems that are extended, ecological, intercorporeal, etc., in as much, as our ‘extensions’ may be artificial, not only natural (environmental). “Relational holism”⁴⁸ and inclusive, high-complexity, autopoietic dynamical systems are thinkable as one of the СКАЧАТЬ