Learning Philosophy With Mr Data, A History Boy, 10/05/2014

I would definitely say that the first episode of Star Trek that really stuck with me was “The Measure of a Man,” and it’s only come to mean more to me over time. Those of you who know me personally probably don’t find it surprising that one of my favourite Star Trek characters, and one who I identified with myself as a child, was Mr Data. My favourite episodes of TNG as a child featured Data, and a lot of them are still personal favourites today. I first saw “The Measure of a Man” when I was five years old, and while I didn’t understand everything that was going on at the time, I knew I was watching some amazing television.

I don’t think a discussion of an episode of TNG that’s nearly thirty years old can be spoiled, though I’ll still add my 

SPOILERS!!!

sign for the sake of politeness. After all, Vaka Rangi and TARDIS Eruditorum don’t worry about spoilers, so neither will I. Starfleet robotics scientist Cmdr Maddox visits the Enterprise with a request that Data take part in an experiment to replicate his positronic brain, which would require that his memory banks be downloaded to an external hard drive and his brain and body disassembled. When Maddox can’t guarantee that he’d be able to put Data back together again, the android rightfully refuses, at which point Maddox produces a transfer order, and refuses to let Data resign to escape the experiment on the grounds that, as a machine, he is property of Starfleet and has no rights. 

When Picard asks the local starbase JAG for a trial to decide Data’s fate, he’s pressed into service as defence advocate, and Riker is ordered to be the prosecutor. Although Riker successfully proves that Data is a machine, Picard and Data successfully demonstrate his sentience and self-awareness. Maddox justified his desire to build a race of thousands of Data androids so they could be probes sent into dangerous environments to do the dangerous and dirty work that organic beings could not be rightfully pressed into. And because this hearing will have ruled them machines, they’d have no right to object. Since it would go against all the basic ethical principles of the Federation to build a race of robotic slaves, the JAG grants Data his rights, and he immediately refuses, formally, to participate in Maddox’s work.

Cmdr Maddox is certain that a bundle of electrical nets and
gears is incapable of true thought, of understanding
anything but the syntax and functions of poetry.

One aspect of the philosophical issues that inform this story is terribly obvious: the basic questions of philosophy of mind. All of the explicit conversation throughout most of the episode revolve around whether Data, as a machine, is really capable of thinking. At one point, Maddox thumbs through Data’s copy of the complete works of Shakespeare, and asks him, both fascinated and pathetically pleading with the android, if they are just words to him, or if he genuinely understands their meaning and significance. Data responds with a chipper affirmative, but Maddox still calls him ‘it’ for the rest of the episode.

This is the oldest issue in philosophy of mind. Indeed, it’s probably the definitive question of the whole sub-discipline. The sub-discipline was founded as the philosophical wing of the cybernetics research community, where the possibility of creating a genuine artificial intelligence with computer technology was paramount. For decades, its major problems revolved around what constituted the mind, because answering this ontological question would constitute a response to whether the Turing Test would succeed.

The Turing Test was a thought experiment, named after its first formulator Alan Turing, of course, that a machine would have achieved genuine intelligence if it was capable of pulling off a lie to a person about what it was, via exchange through a medium like text message that would keep the human from seeing it. The lie is usually depicted as the computer convincing a human conversation partner that it’s a human too. So a lot of the debate revolved around whether external activity was enough to guarantee the existence of a mind. Many thought experiments produced in response to this question attempted to pose this question with computers, (very technically specified) zombies, non-human animals, extra-terrestrials, convoluted translation apparatuses, and, naturally, androids. 

John Searle, a philosopher for whom I have distaste,
devised the Chinese Room thought experiment, in which
a simple translation and phrasebook algorithm achieves all
the Turing Test asks to prove sentience. Therefore, artificial
intelligence is impossible. His lack of imagination saddens
me.

Maddox treats Data just as some philosophers have conceived of mind: if it isn’t human (or at least organic) then it’s just a bundle of gears and mechanisms that spit very convincing responses to stimuli. Unfortunate for Data. But fortunately for Data, this is based on a premise that itself is up for philosophical debate: whether there is any aspect of the physical human organism (our squishier gears and mechanisms) which produces all that we call mind, or whether there is some immaterial aspect to the human mind’s constitution. If we’re all material, then a creature like Data could exist, if a machine (like the fictional positronic brain and neural net) could accomplish all that the human brain and perceptual apparatus does, or more.

Since all of the empirical evidence for the existence of human minds is our behaviour, Data’s behavioural demonstration of sentience and self-awareness is enough to declare him truly self-aware and sentient.

And the best part is, these ontological arguments are thrown out entirely for an ethical question. If we had an army of androids available to do terrifyingly risky tasks and labour, to be treated as disposable people, they would essentially be slaves, demarcated by their race: android. For people who know the horror of slavery, creating such a system with full knowledge of what you were doing would be intolerable in the deepest sense.

There is another ethical question in this episode, though, one that constitutes an idea that animates my own ideas for fiction work about my Alice character. She is an android that has overcome the human morality of resentment, who feels no impulse to punish for offence or wrongs, and seeks only to repair the damage to the wronged and the wrongdoer. Well, at least in this episode, Data is the one to do it first. 

Will Riker is forced to argue that one of his best friends is
not even a person.

Remember that Cmdr Riker was drafted to play the part of the prosecution, and he played it so well that if Picard and Guinan hadn’t thought of switching the case from an ontological to an ethical ground, Data would have been taken apart and died. By the end of the episode, Riker is miserable, because his actions almost cost the life of his friend. But Data is not offended; he’s grateful. If Riker had refused to prosecute the case, or do his level best to prove the Maddox’s case, the JAG would have ruled against Data’s having rights to self-determination. So Data says, “That action injured you, and saved me. I will not forget it.” 

That’s a greater wisdom than most humans possess, the ability to see past the immediate appearance of acts to their larger consequences and results. And with these in mind, he takes no offence, and praises his friend for the openly offensive acts that the situation had made necessary to save his life. His morality is guided by his knowledge. Data the character often spoke of his desire to become more human. Well, in this episode at least, he became more than human, better than human.

The Limited Good Use of an Argument, Research Time, 09/05/2014

This blog entry isn’t much more than an endorsement of someone else’s writing, because the subject is something that I don’t always feel too qualified to discuss on my own. I’ve been told to check my privilege before, and sometimes I’ve found myself responding in a way that sounds more like Tal Fortgang than I ever wanted to. I’ve always been suspicious of the language of privilege, but I’ve never really been able to articulate those suspicions until I read one piece that gave me the right framework.

Nishin Nathwani’s article in the Harvard Political Review came a month after Fortgang’s egotistical piece was published (in the Princeton Tory, of all reprehensible names that publication could have chosen), called “On Privilege: A Leftist Critique of the Left.” It’s a long, informative, if sometimes philosophically demanding article that criticizes the currently vogue technique of the appeal to the notion of privilege. 

The Idiot, seen here in Akira Kurosawa's adaptation, is one
of my favourite books, the depiction of a set of characters
who have to deal with a marginalized person, a man
suffering from mental illness, in their wealthy, mannered
world.

The criticism does not revolve around what is unfortunately the most popular perspective, which is that of the Princeton Idiot. I mean the term ‘idiot’ here in its most literal sense, that of the person so wrapped up in himself that he can’t understand anything around him. The basic idea behind the admonition to check one’s privilege is that before you declare what you consider to be an obvious perspective of a marginalized person, to listen to that person instead of simply deciding that you have figured out what they believe. It’s a rejection of the idea that pure reason could understand the perspective of a person, or at least that we can be confident that we can think according to such reason.

So it depresses me when a piece of rhetoric that is supposed to be used to shock people out of complacency becomes more frequently used to reinforce complacency. On one side, we have misusers of the privilege concept who reduce it to an ad hominem attack. It’s meant to open up a conversation that ultimately enlightens someone who was previously ignorant: one person listens for a moment to the perspective and experiences of a person whose identity has marginalized them to some degree. Instead, as in Nathwani’s example of a privilege-based dismissal of a criticism of Pride parades, an argument is not engaged with, but dismissed because of its origin with a person in a dominant group. Nathwani’s own point is that privilege discourse can too often reinforce the separation of those with different identities.

This is a delicate argument, and I’ll just refer you to Nathwani’s own piece (and link it to you again) for the details. But his central thrust is that ideological critique is the better way to critique a position that speaks illegitimately for another or behaves with condescension toward them. My friend the illustrious B. S. Nelson, when he shared a post of the article from my facebook wall, described one problem of an ideological focus in his comments: Which ideology is right? That question is open, and probably always will be. But critique via ideology doesn’t devote you to the vocabulary of critical theory, which often has troubles of its own. 

One can think in terms of critical ideology in a very simple way. When someone says something that is disturbing, offensive, or condescending, ask why they would think that way. What makes a person think the way they do? How has their history and the context of their lives contributed to the perspectives and ideas they express? 

This notion achieves what the basic purpose of the appeal to privilege does, without the danger of the critique slipping into an ad hominem attack through its form. It achieves what the best fiction does; it takes a complicated, unsympathetic character, and understands enough of him to perceive his humanity. Once this is done, even the most inveterate racist and fool can learn something, because you will have figured out where and what he is.

Final Countdowns, Twist Endings and Refrigerators, Composing, 07/05/2014

As part of the publicity for my upcoming sci-fi novella, Under the Trees, Eaten, I’m going to discuss a few ideas I’ve had about its composition and editing process here on the blog. We’re just in the last stages now, and my editor at Blank Space has given me a wonderful recommendation on some changes to the ending. We’re furiously working through the last few edits to the manuscript this week (while also working on our day jobs) so we can release it for this summer and I can start touring.

My promotions will take me wherever the GO Transit network or the cars of amenable friends will go. So my late-starting career as a novelist is finally taking off, at least in terms of having a product to push. I also have a philosophical essay coming out in an upcoming issue of Social Epistemology, but that’s another story.

Because of the inland, rustic setting of the story, I designed
the aliens to resemble ants. Their social practices also fit
well with the philosophical undercurrents of the narrative.

The changes we’ve been discussing don’t even affect the story’s ending itself. It just adds another wrinkle to the motivation of a central character, a wrinkle that nonetheless demonstrates the inadequacy of humans, particularly men, to understand the complex features of their world, and their otherworlds. While we’re pitching the book as a pulp story, from the start I always wanted it to be more than a pulp story, simply because I never want my work to risk being dismissed as ordinary. Ordinariness, to me, is a killer of creativity. 

You see, every project I conceive always has multiple motivations. I think it’s a side-effect of just having so many concurrent thought processes going through my mind at once. In terms of pure pulp factor, Under the Trees, Eaten is a fast read that’s an entertaining collision of Lovecraft tropes with a female protagonist designed after the fashion of Joss Whedon. But that combination of pulp and feminist characterization also contains an important ethical dimension. It was of the utmost importance for me that the protagonist Marilyn not end this story as a victim of any kind. 

Quite frankly, I’m really rather sick of stories that make women into little more than victims or pawns in the plans and machinations of male characters. I even included a reference to Women in Refrigerators in an earlier draft, but it ended up having to be cut. 

I decided on an ironclad rule for my fiction that no major
female character would be victimized for the sake of
developing the narrative or plot of a male character.

The story is about Marilyn being manipulated by the men that surround her in her life. First, she’s manipulated by her dead father. Not in a literal sense, but insofar as she finds herself on a quest defined by validating his memory, solving the mystery that consumed and eventually destroyed his life, discovering the nature of the otherworldly plane crash where his wife died. Of course, if Marilyn's father Paul were the central protagonist of this story (and he is a minor protagonist; he narrates sections of chapters two through four), his wife would be a woman victimized for the sake of his story. There’s Pierre, the mysterious fellow from the town of alien-human hybrids who has a multi-layered hidden agenda for Marilyn. And there are the hostile townsfolk who will commit whatever violence is necessary to hide their secret, who naturally want this outsider American woman crushed and jammed inside the nearest fridge. The narrative is constantly threatening Marilyn with victimization or co-optation into a man's plan. 

At the end of the day, Under the Trees, Eaten should express this fundamental ethical and moral point: for all that this capable, intelligent, and increasingly enraged woman is pressured into fulfilling the plans and goals of various men around her, she does not, and will not. The new twist we’re adding to the motivations of some of the male characters will better indicate precisely what her own ethics are, and why the efforts of the men of the story to control her will always be inadequate. Marilyn is not an instrument, and if you attempt to make her one, you will be sorry.

Heavenly Creatures, The Musical! Jamming, 06/05/2014

No, I did not have an idea to adapt Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures into a rousing, jaunty broadway musical. Although if my theatre career goes well after You Were My Friend, I’ll consider finding a composer with whom I can collaborate. 

Seriously, though. I watched the film again for the first time since high school when I’d regularly stay home on Saturday nights watching arty movies on Showcase, also home of the Trailer Park Boys, and of every good Canadian boy’s first erotic experience via Red Shoe Diaries reruns. Heavenly Creatures was, of course, a brilliant portrayal of how an atmosphere of cultural, psychological, and moral repression can turn young people to violence when they are broken down to the point where no other solution appears possible. The film is almost two decades old, so I don’t really have to go into what you can pick up from the general discourse about it anyway.

What I loved about this film was that it was essentially an
intense love story whose cultural context forced it to go
horribly, terribly wrong.

No, what I thought of this time was a mad proposal for any of my friends (including myself) thinking about diversifying their creative careers into television production down the line. Because if a story with a premise like that of Heavenly Creatures were to take place today, it wouldn’t be the twisted, psychologically tormented tragedy that the film depicts. And remember, this is pretty much the literal adaptation of a real-life murder, so it’s closest to the essence of the real culture of 1950s New Zealand as you can get without really being there. Maybe even it’s an improvement on being there, because cinema is necessarily so much more intense than real life in its narratives. 

The basic premise of Heavenly Creatures is that two young women in secondary school, who are social outcasts for their own peculiar reasons, combinations of health problems and social awkwardness, find each other and gradually fall in love through their common imagination. If this were to happen today, it would be a story of formal and informal discrimination, but there would be so much more hope for them. They would never have reached tragedy, either from at least one set of supportive parents and some friendly school-mates in the local gay-straight alliance club. 

So here is my basic pitch for my adaptation of Heavenly Creatures into a contemporary setting on perhaps Netflix-style streaming television. Two women, who are social outcasts for reasons of health and outrageous personalities, make friends in their uptight, especially conformist school. This first setting is in Florida, where Julia’s father is an administrator in a local state university, and Yvette comes from a lower-middle class family. But the two girls become friends and eventually lovers. 

Julia’s father and mother split up as his wife begins an affair with a local man, and Yvette’s parents are increasingly uncomfortable with their eldest daughter’s homosexual tendencies, as they like to call it. But perhaps Yvette’s father is a little more open to the idea of having a gay daughter. Perhaps he sometimes visits his brother, who his wife doesn’t like to speak with, and his common-law husband. And maybe, despite his wife being uncomfortable about their daughter’s relationship with this odd, assertive Canadian girl, Yvette’s father can understand, because when you talk about a gay person, he thinks of his brother. And he isn’t the type of man who wouldn’t be able to understand his own brother. 

So one day, Julia’s father and mother split up, and he gets the chance to return to a teaching position in Toronto. Yvette and Julia are ridiculously in love with each other and don’t want to separate. But Yvette’s father sees a way to get his oldest child out of the mediocre public school system where she’s stuck in Tallahassee. And on that point of the better education she could get in Toronto, he convinces Yvette’s mother to let her go with her girlfriend’s family back north. The rest of the series becomes a dramatic sitcom, where the lower-class Floridian Yvette has to get used to this strangely familiar yet alien culture of Canada. Meanwhile, she and her Julia are both navigating their first adult relationship at 17, and Julia’s father is the nebbishy head of the household trying to navigate a divorce and having a lesbian couple to raise. Meanwhile, they have to traverse their class divide and fully comprehend their sexualities at the same time, while their joint father feels continually out of touch and inadequate to the whole situation, which is more than he thought he’d ever have to deal with.

I think I can get at least one ten episode season out of that. Instead of an intense melodrama of the Fassbinder tradition, we have a subtle dramadey of the Mike Leigh tradition. An affirmative, optimistic story of the modern era that tells of personally difficult times and problems that are, with dedication, overcome. And maybe I could create a television show, or a play, or a novel that would help keep just a few troubled young women from going through the kind of personal torture that leads to modern tragedies of suicide or self-harm in the first place.

The Most Productive Possible Research Priorities, Composing, 05/05/2014

The last major chapter of Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman is about what a post-human research program would look like. She lists some examples of existing works of philosophy and critical theory that constitute a post-human perspective, and describes what the university institution would look like with post-human priorities.

With regard to the content of this new mode of knowledge, post-humanity, I feel as though I fit in quite well. The central ontological ideas of my Ecophilosophy project are that the world is primarily constituted through relations and networks, that the significant motor of change in the world is dynamic tensions among systems and bodies, and that the mathematics best suited to describe these dynamics are non-linear, of a type most commonly arising in probability and complexity theory. 

Fractal geometry and complexity mathematics do more
than create beautiful images. But the images are also
beautiful.

That’s pretty much what Braidotti says a post-human theory would do, particularly her vision of post-human critical theory. So I would fit in well among her collection of fellow travellers, which includes feminist epistemology (such as Evelyn Fox Keller, Henrietta Moore, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway), Peter Galison’s embrace of “the end of grand systematic theoretical discourse” regarding science, the philosophical elaborations on complexity theory that have flowed from Deleuze and Guattari to Karen Barad and Luciana Parisi, and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s historicist approach to the development of climate change science, not to mention Katherine Hayles’ approach to the digital humanities. 

Of course, we have important differences in our visions, as her own philosophical vision is shaped by the background framework of critical theory: the conception of problems as texts to be interpreted, common in the critical theory context, doesn’t really appeal to me. In one way, this is a personal preference. My own background and education has been through self-identified philosophy departments, and my first years of philosophical education was in a department that was very historically-oriented in its research and teaching. So I have a strong background in that canon of dead white male Europeans (and some Americans at the end). 

If studying the history of philosophy teaches you anything (aside from a head for details and anachronistic language), you learn that there are many different ways to engage with conceptual creativity. Critical theory is just one set of approaches, one school of style, in a history that includes many different ways to develop new ways of thinking. It gave me that taste for pure conceptual thought that isn’t necessarily wedded to a single style of expression. Yes, most contemporary philosophy has a fairly standard form of the academic essay, putting forth arguments and responding to them, piece by piece. But consider some of the innovations in form. 

I’m not just talking about Heidegger or Derrida’s games with language, or even the way Deleuze and Guattari pack countless layers of signification into so much of their writing that uncharitable readers almost think it all nonsense. Look at Russell and Whitehead’s masterpiece of symbolic logic, the Principia Mathematica, and especially their early drafts and dead-ended attempts. How Kripke and Lacan crafted brilliant books from intricate lectures. Marx’s monstrous interdisciplinary beast, Capital. Hegel’s dialectic via aufheben. Spinoza's geometrical argumentation. The first-person narration of Descartes’ Meditations has more in common with the stream-of-consciousness experiments of Virginia Woolf than most of the scientific writing of his day. Kierkegaard’s army of conceptual personae. The ancient Greeks used forms of writing that have no modern analogue: the aporetic dialogue that obscures even the author’s own beliefs; the philosophical poem that expresses philosophy as praise to the gods. Nietzsche.

I’m no innovator in the form of philosophy. The Ecophilosophy manuscript is a pretty clear extended, multi-part essay making an argument for what kind of ethic and self-conception a person would have to hold to live authentically according to an ecocentric morality, and that we should start thinking of ourselves this way for the sake of our species’ survival. But I’m glad I don’t wed myself to a particular style straight out of the gate. Who knows what I’ll be writing in ten years?

Being Exemplary Knows No Bounds, Composing, 03/05/2014

This weekend, I’m working on a commentary for someone’s paper at the Canadian Philosophical Association at the end of the month. Now, of course, I’m not going to write about that paper on this blog at all. Everything I’m thinking of regarding the content of the paper has to be kept secret until after the conference. I’d only discuss it after the session is complete, and only with my partner’s permission.

Let me explain to you something about the curious way philosophy as a discipline tends to run its conferences. Each session is devoted to the presentation and discussion of a single piece of work. The main speaker gets about 30 minutes for their headlining presentation. Then a commentator delivers about 10 minutes of prepared reply and response before the floor is opened for general questions. 

This year, the CPA is at beautiful Brock University! So
green, and . . . . rectangular. This building is such a fetching
shade of—well, it's beige, isn't it?

My sociologist friends find this a major shift from their usual style, where three or four people with vaguely related topics read a 15-20 minute version of a paper, and occasionally, a commenter raises a series of brief critical questions about all three of them, before opening the floor to general questions. I think I prefer my own discipline’s style, and not just because I’m accustomed to it, although I am quite accustomed to it. The multi-person panel only has unity because its participants wrote papers with maybe only a few common points. The organizers plonked them all in a session and slapped a vague, thematic name on them because they wrote it as individuals, but have to present it together. You can discover more interesting stuff you didn’t know about more easily from seeing it cobbled into a session with a misleadingly ambiguous title, but  the session can become chaotic and everybody ends up confused. In philosophy, the entire session is pre-planned. Coordinators spend weeks before the conference coordinating commentators, and we write our commentaries weeks in advance of the conference. At least I do.

When I do commentaries, I like to think of the major paper for the session as a collaborator of a sort. After all, their paper is the reason for my commentary’s existence. I’ve created a pleasant new piece of philosophy, and I couldn’t have done it without the first contribution of someone else. Philosophy is often a solitary art, which has its benefits, but also its drawbacks. We can sometimes let our research get stuck in its own world, I’ve too often found. And when I write a commentary, I consider it my contribution to a detailed and stimulating professional conversation.

It’s why I always feel so disappointed when I see a commentary that’s purely antagonistic to the paper. Criticism is a key part of philosophical discourse, and it’s for refining existing ideas and developing new ones. Too many times in our discipline, if we can’t think of anything kind to say, we say something mean. I hate that the tendency to critique is too often mistaken for a licence to argumentative aggression. And when I say ‘too often,’ I really just mean, ‘ever.’

So whenever I ask a philosophical question, but especially when I produce a detailed commentary on another person’s paper, I always try to make my point constructive. I introduce a new angle that the paper’s perspective could address. Sometimes I read the point in a different context. Sometimes I introduce an angle or a source that the paper didn’t mention. I always like my commentaries to give someone something they can use to carry their project forward.

The best compliment someone could pay my commentaries is that I gave them an idea for a new paper. When I present papers, I hope my commentators aim to do the same for me. They don't always, but I'd prefer if they did.

Living Your End as an Affirmation, Research Time, 01/05/2014

There’s often a strange sort of synergy in my research, such as today, when I’m reading Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal at the same time as Rosi Braidotti’s chapter of The Posthuman on her philosophy’s engagement with the human experience or encounter with death. After all, Roth’s novella is a first-person depiction of a lothario facing his own mortality, which he understands as the last chance he’ll ever have to make regular love to a beautiful woman before his body simply breaks down from age. He is so pathetic in his desperation, yet he understands himself so well, that it makes such a slimy man dignified, or at least understandable. That’s the power of literature: Roth, Vladimir Nabokov, and Robert Bolaño are masters at conveying the disgusting with dignity.

Now that I've been reading the novella The Dying Animal, I
have an even greater desire to see how they adapted it into
a film as Elegy. So much of the character and philosophy
develops through the voice of the narrator, I wonder what
they managed to do instead.

But this post isn’t really about Philip Roth. It’s about a curious way of thinking about death that avoids this crisis. It’s a very old way to understand your mortality, but it’s very difficult to master. Unlike most protagonists of Roth’s novels, it requires letting go of the ego. 

I know that’s an old idea, so old that it’s become cliché, especially in the middle of a generally liberal urban landscape where simple Buddhist and Daoist ideas fly around the culture like leaves on a windy Fall day. But it is very difficult for most people. Braidotti follows (without saying the man’s name, as is something of a modern convention) the notion of Henri Bergson that life’s diversity and ecological fluctuation and transformation constitutes a powerful force in itself. Bergson himself spoke literally of a vital force, which, like most of his terminology, is essentially insightful, but a little too naive to accept. But the basic principles of ecological science rely on complexity theory, the mathematics of turbulence, thresholds, and phase transitions, a conception of the world as a collection of populations, a world in constant flux.

In the face of a world whose primary property is its constant roiling change, the world of life, of ecosystems, the traditional notion of the purity of the subject becomes laughable. This is a basic point in my own Ecophilosophy manuscript: if we’re going to develop a self-conception in which an environmentalist consciousness is common sense, it’s going to require seeing the subject as a product of the world, not its purpose. A reasonable scientific attitude shows that well enough. You learn enough about cosmology, ecology, biology and its central principles of evolution, and you’ll understand yourself as one member of a species that arose from contingent processes in a fragile world. The role of philosophy is working out the implications of this framework for a theory of subjectivity, our ethics, and our social moral principles. It would be a subject that was equally fragile.

Not only would we conceive of ourselves as fragile, we’d be okay with that. We often conceive of ourselves as an absolute presence in our lives. Roth’s narrator, David Kepesh, accepting the inevitability and proximity of his death, writhes in desperation as every experience reminds him of the end of his life. Braidotti, in contrast, conceives of the dying person as someone who waits peacefully, and with some enthusiasm, to be dispersed throughout the flux of becoming that is life. Losing the membrane that separates you from your surroundings is the end of everything for the Modernist, the Humanist. For the Posthumanist — we could also call her a Poststructuralist, Bergson, Deleuze, Spinoza, or maybe even a secular Buddhist — it’s a radical departure, the beginning of a new journey.

To achieve this state of mind, we would have to accept in every fibre of our thoughts that the universe is larger than we could ever be ourselves, that what matters includes far beyond our daily concerns. I don’t know how many people could actually manage that.