Humanisation and alienation between homo faber and homo consumens
Abstract
This paper aims at exploring the shift from the homo
faber and its relative metaphysics of labour, to the homo
consumens and its relative organism-centred view, in terms of processes of
humanisation and risk of alienation. Particularly, it assumes a ‘Marxist’
perspective to interpret the homo faber and introduce the concepts of living
and dead labour; and a ‘Kantian’ perspective to re-interpret consumption
and labour from the point of view of the organism. Finally, it will propose a
‘Heideggerian’ step further.
We define the metaphysics of labour through
Heidegger’s interpretation of ‘materialism’, as that system within which «every
being appears as the material of […] the self-establishing
process of unconditioned production, which is the objectification of
the actual through man experienced as subjectivity»[1].
Two ‘sides’ are here present: the object, which is objectified through human’s
subjectification, or the subject’s humanisation; the subject, which establishes
itself as human as productive and as unconditioned. ‘Production’ here stands for the general form
of objectification: the experienced, used, desired or refuted object («every
being») is essentially a ‘human’ object, and as such it is produced, not
pre-existing as such. As Heidegger explicitly notes, within this system Marx
recognises both human nature and the very risk of its alienation.
In the first place, human nature is understood
therefore as productive, not only because of the importance of labour as such
(which is derivative), but first and foremost because, by relating to anything
as their own object, the human subject produces the object as a human
object. As Marx put it, objective reality realises the human’s essential
powers (their ability to work, eat, appreciate, see etc.) and as such it is
«human reality»[2].
We call this process living labour, the externalisation of a human’s own
humanity into the world, which satisfies their need for such
self-establishment. An object is what it is only insofar as «man himself becomes
the object»[3],
drawing a sort of attunement between «the nature of the objects and
[…] the nature of the essential power corresponding to it»[4].
For example, when a person eats, they eat ‘human food’ (es. sushi, military
rations etc.), and as such they confirm themselves in relation to it. On the
other side, dead labour is labour ossified, the crystallisation
of living labour within the tool (the whole natural, cultural and
socio-technological ‘world’ we labour within). In this sense, a spear’s ability
to tear the prey’s flesh would be the ossification of the hunter’s hunting
ability.
Secondly, such production is unconditioned, or,
as Marx puts it, universal. The homo faber relates to themselves
as a species, «as a universal and therefore a free
being»[5]:
their essential powers are universal, able to relate to every object in its own
right. So, while the animal, as it experiences the world only ‘one-sidedly’ «produces
only itself, […] man reproduces the whole of nature»[6].[7]
However, this anthropopoietic attunement can be
broken: «For the starving man, it is not the human form of food that exists,
but only its abstract existence as food. It could just as well be there in its
crudest form, and it would be impossible to say wherein this feeding activity
differs from that of animals»[8]. In
a state of starvation, food stops existing as a concrete object in front of a
human subject, it is rather the abstract function of the person’s survival –
they do not see what they eat, but only the abstract and compelling negation of
their hunger. This is the state of alienation, which Marx characterises as
follows:
man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in
his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his
dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer
feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and
what is human becomes animal.[9]
Without going into detail about its genesis from
capitalist power dynamics (the capitalist owns the means and the scope of
production, thus owning the very productive essence of humans), we can already
notice a regression of the human to the animal. This state is described as
such: «Private property [or any alienating force, for the record] has made us
so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we
have it […] when it is used by us»[10],
«only as means of life»[11] As
the universality of the subject’s labour collapses, dead labour ‘traps’ the
subject within narrow conditions of survival. For example, it is the dead
labour of a company’s system what decides who works and when, how much they
will earn and so on. Thus, the human is ‘animalistic’ in their labour, as there
is no distinction between their labour and the abstract act of merely
surviving, and what they produce depends only on the ‘dead’ system where their
act of survival is inserted: the world itself is dehumanised. The more the homo
faber puts in their object, the more powerful and inhuman the object becomes.
The active human colonisation of the world remains a ruinous project.
Is it possible to re-conceive this constellation of
humanisation and living and dead labour so to overcome the impasse of
alienation? We set the tone of this reinterpretation by quoting Hans Jonas: ««genuine
man is always already there and was there throughout known history […] in all
the ambiguity that is inseparable from his humanity»[12]. The
human’s humanisation is never a solid process, but an ambiguous one – there can
be great inhumanity in massive technological discoveries, and great humanity in
starving.
The concept of the homo consumens finally
conceives the human as a finite organism, rather than the self-establishing and
all-powerful universal subjects of the metaphysics of labour. What is an
organism, and why is consumption the characterising aspect of this
anthropological figure? Drawing by the Kantian tradition, an organism is a
being which realises ‘internal purposiveness’, being cause and effect of
itself, in three senses: 1) reproduction (the organism is here the species,
surviving through the generations); 2) individual metabolism and development;
3) form (parts and whole are cause and effect of each other). It is metabolism
in particular the essential productive action of an organism.[13] The
latter produces itself (develops) by means of assimilation of external
matter and imposition of its organic form onto it – in other words, consumption.
Consumption therefore has to be understood as a process of self-production, in
a broader sense, satisfaction of the needs of self-production and establishment
of the organism. This is the living labour of the homo consumens,
and as such, it is «labour without production»[14].
However, this does not constitute the homo
consumens’ humanisation yet, as their self-referential consumption only
establishes their existence, their essence being indifferent.
While the homo faber is, as it is conceived, a pleonasm (as they stop
being faber, they stop being homo), the homo consumens
cannot be just an animal consumens, therefore an animal animale:
human consumption and its needs are involved in the process of humanisation.
This is realised through a process mobilisation, the insertion of needs «in
a socio-technical context, generating every kind of enhancement,
supplementation and metamorphosis of need, which is transformed in desire,
ambition, luxury, waste, culture»[15]. Humans become human thanks to the supplement of dead
labour – what we call the cultural and socio-technological apparatus, whose
character is essentially ‘prosthetic’ – à la Kant, an ‘external brain’,
which ends up shaping the neural map of the internal one. In Maurizio Ferraris’
words, «humankind has become human through technology, which is artificial
intelligence. Our ancestor who carved a bone to mark the phases of the moon for
predictive purposes was equipping themselves with artificial intelligence»[16].
We can read the earlier case of the hunter crafting
their spear through the concept of the homo consumens. Here the
production of the spear cannot be understood as the externalisation of the
human essential power of spear-crafting, because the consumens’ living
labour is understood as self-production. In a sense, the spear-ness of
the spear, its killing dead labour which makes the hunt so successful, must be
already there – otherwise, how could the hunter prefer to hunt with a spear
rather than something else, if their tool was not in itself better? As Graham
Harman points out, a tool «is not effective "because people use it";
on the contrary, it can only be used because it is capable of an effect, of
inflicting some kind of blow on reality. In short, the tool isn't
"used" – it is»[17].
So, from the point of view of the consumens’, spear-crafting is just the
first step in self-preservation, and it can only consume, so to say, the
pre-existing possibility of the spear’s dead labour. From the point of view of the
spear, and, by extension, the whole tool-apparatus of cultural, social and
technological dead labour (the efficiency or inefficiency of the hospital
system, a piano’s ability to resonate harmoniously, the forcing power of the
patriarchy etc.), its power is brought to the actuality of being a supplement
for human activity only because of the need for consumption of the
self-producing human organism. In other words, every human artifact only makes
sense, and has its end, within the horizon of human consumption (a
hospital’s efficiency would have no sense without patients).
A feed-back loop is thus established: the tool
is brought into activity by the human need, which becomes reliant on the former
and evolves, bringing more and more tools into being. In fact, it is because of
organismic finitude that no tool can fully satisfy needs once and for all, and
as such, they must evolve too. History is kickstarted. This the homo
consumens’ process of humanisation: «dead labour is the supplement, but as
it is always the case, it transforms into essence»[18].
This process of tool-evolution and human historical humanisation is exemplified
by Ferarris’ concept of hysteresis, which describes: the recording of
organismic needs, their iteration into the tool’s dead labour, their alteration
caused by the use of said tool, and finally, their interruption – death,
the interruption of needs, and of this very process of evolution. A such, as
Ferraris says, it is «the condition of possibility of meaning and of freedom»[19].
Finally, we conclude by questioning what kind of
humanity is proposed by such a concept, how we ought to relate to it, and
whether or not the risk of alienation is escaped. First of all, it would seem, homo
consumens describes a ‘humanly consuming animal’. How can such an animal be
subjected to a process of humanisation? Is the supplement of dead labour
an originary need? If it is, then humans are already in need of their own
humanisation, and mere survival in not ‘enough’. Clearly, this brings us back
to the concept of homo faber. However, if it is not, then we have to
assume that dead labour in itself is more originary – the crystallisation and
productive hysteresis of life pre-exists life itself. At the same time,
such a process only makes sense within the horizon of consumption, and finally,
interruption. We propose the idea that this process of humanisation might be
read similarly to Heidegger’s relationship between human and being. For the
German philosopher, «the being […] of human, the ‘Dasein within the
human’ […] is nothing human»[20].
What humans are, what they actualise through their existence and living
labour, which is at the same time what determines our relationship with beings
as such (the Dasein, or to refer to Marx again, the way humans reproduce
the whole of nature), is nothing human, not a function of our organism, but
rather something else.
Secondly, we must somehow relate to this else.
In fact, it is only within this relationship that we are humanised, and while the
apparatus’ dead labour only exists within the final horizon of consumption,
this does not mean that, to put it trivially, our only possible stance is that
of the ‘ethical consumer’ of liberal market economy. Rather, it is important to
recognise that, if we are to find humanity in this intersection of organism and
mechanism, we cannot just ‘consume’, but first and foremost appropriate the
intersection itself, elevating it to the end of human existence. This
implies the assumption of the end of hysteresis in itself as one’s own, and
therefore extending the scope of consumption beyond the individual organism –
with Marx and Kant, thinking ourselves as species and finding the end
within this intersection. This strictly implies a shift in the meaning of need,
from a complexified but self-referential organic need to a need for the need
itself – the way the great musician plays because not only they need music in
their life, but they recognise the need for the need for music. Here we
find our freedom, neither as producers nor just as consumers. The task is
therefore to define this third possible stance.
Finally, the question of alienation is transfigured
once it is accepted that humans only exist as such through a metaphysical
supplement, which is at the same time extremely concrete, as witnessed by the
whole history of human artefacts, societies etc., and extremely feeble, as the
risk of animalisation remains forever persistent. What this means is that if
the problem of alienation is reinterpreted as a matter of inequality of
consumption, alienation proper is alienation from humanisation, lack of
participation in the possibility of determining the evolution of human needs.
Sources
Maurizio
Ferraris, Documanità, Laterza, 2021.
Graham Harman, Tool-Being. Heidegger and the
Metaphysics of Objects, Carus Publishing Company, 2002.
Martin Heidegger
-
Brief Über den Humanismus (1947), Letter on Humanism, in Wegmarken
(1976), eng. ed. by D. F. Krell, Basic Writings, Harper & Row, 1977.
-
Zur Seinsfrage (1954),
La questione dell'essere, in Wegmarken (1976), italian ed. by F.
Volpi, Segnavia, Adelphi, 1987.
Hans Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung (1979) eng.
translation by H. Jons, The Imperative of Responsibility, University of
Chicago Press, 1984.
Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790),
eng. translation by W. S. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, Hackett
Publishing Company, 1987.
Karl Marx, Economical & Philosophical
Manuscripts of 1844 (1932), available on https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm.
[1] Heidegger,
1947, p. 220.
[2]
Marx, 1932, available on https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm.
[3] Ibidem.
[4] Ibidem.
[5] Ibidem.
[6] Ibidem.
[7]
This distinction might be echoed in Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of
Metaphysics, where the animal is world-poor and the human is world-forming,
able to relate to being as being.
[8] Ibidem.
[9] Ivi, available on https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm.
[11] Ibidem.
[12] Jonas,
1979 (1984), p. 200.
[13] See Kant, 1790
(1987), pp. 248-240.
[14] Ferraris, 2021, 4.3.2.
[15] Ivi, Prologo.
[16] Ivi, 1.1.4.
[17] Harman, 2002, p. 20.
[18] Ferraris, ivi,
2.2, note 4.
[19] Ivi, ch. 3, introduction.
[20] Heidegger,
1954 (1976), p. 366-367, my indirect translation from Italian.
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