Andrés Vaccari

(Forthcoming in Techne: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 16:1 March 2012). I post an uncorrected proof in MS Word: vaccari_descartes__posthumanism

ABSTRACT: This paper is a historical inquiry into the philosophical fault-line that leads from mechanicism to posthumanism. I focus on a central aspect of posthumanism: the erosion of the distinction between organism and machine, nature and art, and the biological and engineering sciences. I claim that shift can be placed in the seventeenth century, in Descartes’ biology. Although Descartes is known primarily as the philosopher of the cogito, the mythical cradle of rational humanism, I argue that the dawn of the modern human was also the place of its undoing. The Cartesian fusion of the natural and the technological opened the door to distinctly posthuman understandings of the living body, its relation to technological extensions, and the possibility of its drastic alteration. Descartes’ scientific writings are a kind of laboratory, rehearsing the theoretical and practical amalgamation of machines and organisms in at least two senses:  (a) the prosthetic and instrumental enhancement of the body, its technological production, extension and mediation; and (b) the functional integration of machines and organisms in medical, industrial, military, and other contexts. Cartesian mechanicism demanded a reconceptualization of bodily boundaries, organismic unity, natural finality, causation, and bio/technological instrumentality-all of which Descartes boldly attempted to theorize in terms of the wondrous technologies of his day. As the living vanished into the immanent plane of the machine, nature could no longer be taken as a clear source of normative frameworks, and the category of ‘nature’ became nearly impossible to define. Also, Descartes’ radical proposal obscured the possibility of thinking the human as ontologically unique, or as having an ideal unity, despite its privileged relationship to the immaterial (the soul-body union). In
what follows, we will examine the posthuman ramifications of these aspects.