Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others

Chapter 12: From Neo-Platonism to Souls in Silico

12 From Neo-Platonism to Souls in Silico Quests for Immortality ‘‘Sie haben alle müde Münde / Und helle Seelen ohne Saum [they all have weary mouths / pure souls without a seam],’’ wrote Rilke longingly.1 Humans in their mortality could not hope to attain the enviable purity of the awe-inspiring and mysterious angelic soul. The yearning for soul has become far more complex in postmodernity , in that ‘‘soul’’ has been rendered moot in modernity’s various accounts of mind-body dualism. In its Cartesian version, mind as the ground of certainty came to occupy the void left by the evacuation of soul. With the demise of the modern subject, famously described as the ghost in the machine, we may now ask who comes after the subject. According to Jean-Luc Nancy, the question is about ‘‘the deconstruction of interiority, of self-presence, of consciousness, of mastery.’’2 With the emergence of a new conceptual landscape of dematerialization , unlike Nancy, many contemporary philosophers turn, not to a plural subject, a we, but to the subject is envisioned as an etiolated, mathematized body, a string of genes that have become the bearers of immortality. Consider these words in a popular account of the gene as the agent of natural selection: ‘‘The genetic material in organisms today traces back generation by generation through an unbroken chain of descent (with modification) of ancestral molecules that have copied and replaced themselves ever since the origin of life on earth about 4 billion years ago. . . . Only germline genes are potentially 189 immortal; somatic entities (ourselves included) are merely ephemeral vessels that evolved as a means of perpetuating DNA.’’3 I hope to show that Neoplatonic configurations of soul arise transgressively in genetic transfiguration. In what might be seen as acts of biological prestidigitation, we are brought back in and as our genes or, in Derridean terms, we re-arise spectrally: ‘‘For there to be ghost, there must be a return to the body, but to a body that is more abstract than ever. The spectrogenic process corresponds to a paradoxical incorporation .’’ One returns not to the old body but as ‘‘an incarnation in another artifactual body, a ghost,’’4 which haunts what I call the ‘‘Pythagorean body.’’ Has Darwin’s ‘‘dangerous idea,’’ to borrow Daniel C. Dennett’s phrase, drawn the specter of soul into the apocalyptic events of our world, or can Pythagorean bodies be read otherwise? In what follows, I point first to some manifestations of the depersonalized subject. Next I examine the accounts of soul in the Neoplatonist philosophies of Plotinus and Iamblichus, in order to show that the gene-self of evolutionary biology, surprisingly, evokes the Pythagorean soul of Neoplatonic speculation. I go on to describe the recent conceptual shift from the materiality of a visible and tangible body to the soul in silico. Finally, I consider whether identity, as constructed through invisible gene-links rather than through bodily resemblance, offers an opportunity to break with the twentieth century’s nefarious uses of evolutionary biology, or whether it perpetuates the danger. The Flight of the Subject By contrast with the ghostly self of postmodernity, the modern self is often posited as an individual entity, a body and the perceptual experiences it causes. Such an individual is born, persists in existence for a time, and dies. Consider analytic philosopher P. F. Strawson’s by now canonical mid-century description of the idea of the person as ‘‘the concept of a type of entity such that both predicates ascribing states of consciousness and predicates ascribing corporeal characteristics . . . are equally applicable to a single individual of that single type.’’5 Modernist notions of mind-body continuity, whether materially or linguistically construed, are challenged by depictions of contemporary socio-cultural upheavals. Jean Baudrillard sees a radical shift in the transformation of the play of appearances of the body into genetic code, blurring the boundary between the human and the inhuman . ‘‘At the level of genes, the genome and the genotype, the signs 190 Bodies distinctive of humanity are fading . . . immortality [of the soul] has passed into the (biological, genetic) code, the only immortal token which remains.’’6 He goes on to ask whether we have not returned to ‘‘a (clonal, metastatic) de facto eternity,’’ not in a beyond but in our world.7 At the same time, and paradoxically, Baudrillard notes a ‘‘galloping acceleration, a dizzying whirl of...