Human Freedom and the Technic of Nature: Culture and Organic Life in Kant's Third Critique

In recent years, the impact of exponential technological innovation and globalization on all spheres of human life has led to the urgent questioning of the limits of the human and even to predictions about its imminent demise within the horizon of virtual reality and cyborg worlds where the boundaries of human bodies themselves seem to dissolve as they undergo limitless prosthetic extension. But the question of the end of man, or the posthuman, is not a new one. It is a grand old anthropologistic theme. As Jacques Derrida pointed out in 1968 (with special reference to Foucault's prediction of the disappearance of man at the conclusion of The Order of Things), the end of man in the sense of the exceeding of the limits of the anthropos always involves a transcendence of human finitude that points toward a higher end in the sense of an infinite telos.

The end of man (as a factual anthropological limit) is announced to thought from the vantage point of the end of man (as a determined opening or the infinity of a telos). Man is that which is in relation to his end, in the fundamentally equivocal sense of the word. Since always. [. . .] The name of man has always been inscribed in metaphysics between these two ends. ("Ends" 123) ¹

Simply put, it is the end of man to come to an end. This is what constitutes human freedom, which is also the highest end of man.

In this respect, radical antihumanisms are curiously allied to the most edifying humanisms. For humanism is also concerned with the endless surpassing of human limits, the most important of which, in modernity, is the limit between humanity and nature. As Ernst Cassirer observes in An Essay on Man, what is proper to human reality is the power to remake the physical world in the ideal image of humanity through purposive action, beginning with human physical nature. It is too easy today to dismiss this as the brutal domination of nature. The humanist end of man has many different permutations in which the highest end is man's harmonious reconciliation with and passing into nature understood as a larger, spiritualized whole, or an ecological organism. This version of humanism suggests that nature is not inhuman, even though it exceeds humanity, for we are part of nature and must acknowledge this if we are to overcome the destruction and crisis of modernity and be genuinely free. Instead, the inhuman is any finite limit of man, a defective feature of human existence, such as commodification, technology, totalitarian domination, and so on, that is not proper to the true end of man but that we have thus far failed to regulate. We quite properly compare such phenomena to animals or ghosts, associate them with death, and characterize them as subhuman precisely because they are both improper to us but also reducible to us. They must be overcome if we are to actualize human freedom. The most familiar version of this line of thought in literary theory is the high Romantic argument, but one should also situate here Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of instrumental reason as well as the thought of contemporary feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Vandana Shiva. The reach of this organismic-humanist (as opposed to the technicist-humanist) understanding of the end of man extends to arguments that are not ostensibly ecological, such as Habermas's attempt to defend the life-world from the encroachment of imperatives from the system-world, or the contemporary human rights enterprise, which is an attempt to provide an institutional basis for organizing humanity into a universal and reciprocal whole. ²

But if the passing of what is finitely human can be accommodated by humanism through the determination of these limits as inhuman [End Page 2...