TH6. Philosophical Anthropology’s Mängelswesen

Not all thinkers of the spine have followed Burroughs and Morgan in emphasizing the ruinous effects of human evolution; some have positively celebrated the consequences of standing, and echoed Kant’s suggestion of a deep link between bodily uprightness and the human’s triumphant dominion over the planet. However, to avoid returning to the naive self-aggrandisement of Gregory of Nyssa, almost all have had to accept that uprightness may well be a poison (as Burroughs no doubt would be quick to protest) as well as a cure. It is because we can stand that we can fall, and because we stand for ourselves falling is our fault, and it is precisely this self-accountability that first forces us to produce the technical prostheses that unleash our power over the globe: this is a dynamic that is merely repeated (recapitulated?) in the age of the atom bomb by the fact that the technoscientific power to redesign our world in our image is simultaneously the power to destroy it. As ever, all of this flows from the ancestral spine.

In 1952, in an essay simply titled ‘The Upright Posture’, the German-American neurologist Erwin Straus (1891–1975) formulated what could be classified as a vestibular phenomenology. He argued that not only the ‘shape and function of the human body’, but by extension the entire human universe, ‘is determined in almost every detail by, and for, the upright posture’.1 The shift to bipedalism not only rearranges the hierarchical priorities of the senses, thus reorganizing the Umwelt (pivoting from an olfactory to an audiovisual universe), it simultaneously opens up new ‘action spaces’ or ‘affordance spaces’ for work and tool-use (‘lateral space is the matrix of primitive and sophisticated skills’, Straus notes), whilst changing our relation to the world from one of consumption-and-competition toward one of objectivity-and-recognitivity by freeing the mandibular infrastructure from purely masticatory, aggressive, and prehensile tasks, for use instead in precise phonetic micro-movements:

In every species, eye and ear respond to stimuli from remote objects, but the interest of animals is limited to the proximate. Their attention is caught by that which is within the confines of reaching or approaching. The relation of sight and bite distinguishes the human face from those of lower animals. Animals jaws, snoot, trunk, and beak—all of them organs acting in the direct contact of grasping and gripping—are placed in the ‘visor-line’ of the eyes. With upright posture, with the development of the arm, the mouth is no longer needed for catching and carrying or for attacking and defending. It sinks down from the ‘visor-line’ of the eyes, which now can be turned directly in a piercing, open look toward distant things and rest fully upon them, viewing them with the detached interest of wondering. Bite has become subordinated to sight. […] Eyes that lead jaws and fangs to the prey are always charmed and spellbound by nearness. To eyes looking straight forward—to the gaze of upright posture—things reveal themselves in their own nature. Sight penetrates depth; sight becomes insight.2

‘Distal sight grants foresight and allows for planning’ is Gallagher’s gloss on Straus’s schema.3 (Indeed, the very prefix ‘fore-’ expresses forwardness in time by relaying forwardness in space; gaining its meaning from the forwards-facing filtrations of the craniate sensorium, highlighting, once again, the synonymy of cephalization and chronognosis.) Straus continues:

Animals move in the direction of their digestive axis. Their bodies are expanded between mouth and anus as between an entrance and an exit, a beginning and an ending. […] Man in upright posture, his feet on the ground and his head uplifted, does not move in the line of his digestive axis; he moves in the direction of his vision. He is surrounded by a world-panorama, by a space divided into world-regions joined together in the totality of the universe. Around him, the horizons retreat in an ever-growing radius. Galaxy and diluvium, the infinite and the eternal, enter into the orbit of human interests.4

Similarly linking this shift from horizontal to vertical to the ‘capacity for foresight’, but with an eye to the ambivalence of its supposed benefits, Hans Blumenberg (1920–1996) spoke, more darkly, of the anthropogenic debut of bipedality—and the consequent influx of a panoramic universe—as a crippling confrontation. In this, he moves away from the simple optimism of Straus.

Cast out from the pronograde securities of bestial existence’s well-defined ‘life-world’ (Lebenswelt), the upright human confronts, for the first time, the terrifying ‘absolutism of reality’ (Absolutismus der Wirklichkeit). The human is the first to confront reality as an open-ended and absolute prospect—and thus a provocation—rather than as a well-determined biotope.

Once homo sapiens sapiens discovers the artifice of any circumscribed ‘life-world’, there is simply no going back: and this is the germination of the open-ended chronotope. Turning to this specific matter in his late work of the 1970s, Blumenberg claimed that this confrontation spurred the human on to its project of artificialization (first instanced in the ‘work of myth’, and later in the development of technoscience). Just as, in a biblical register, being naked wasn’t a problem until we became self-aware of our nakedness, so too reality wasn’t a pressing ‘problem’ until, before our very eyes, it became panoramic and absolutized—a step change delivered first by uprightness’s binocular aperture and distal gaze. The extending plane of an open-ended horizon, unlocked by a perpendicularizing skull, is granted to us only through our vertebral transcendence from this selfsame plane.

Certainly, self-awareness, inasmuch as it consists in differentiation of ego and environ, is always an exile; and yet one has to lose all sense of habitat and of habit—becoming utterly vagrant—in order to be first motivated to build for oneself a home worthy of the name. Only in ceaseless destitution does the upright subject ever balance herself. Our bodies speak of our anthropogenic relation to precarity. This interlocks with a notion alluded to by Straus:

While the heart continues to beat from its fetal beginning to death without our active intervention and while breathing neither demands nor tolerates our voluntary interference beyond narrow limits, upright posture remains a task throughout our lives. Before reflection or self-reflection start, but as if they were a prelude to it, work makes its appearance within the realm of the elemental biological functions of man. In getting up, in reaching the upright posture, man must oppose the forces of gravity. It seems to be his nature to oppose nature in its impersonal, fundamental aspects with natural means. However, gravity is never fully overcome; upright posture always maintains its character of counteraction.

(Morgan also notes that the ‘emergency’ hormone, aldosterone, is released into our endocrine system every time we stand up.) Straus seems to be implying that, on the physiological level, orthograde posture dimly prophesies rational uprightness. Vertical balance, he stresses, is something actively achieved, never passively received. For, inasmuch as the resting state of the human body is somewhere on the floor, standing upright requires continual vigilance and vestibular micro-revisions. Yet through this, and through this alone, it becomes something we have earnt. In much the same way, one can only claim to be ‘rational’ if one demonstrates a propensity to revise one’s opinions should they be shown to be incorrect. Thus, it is only through jeopardizing old claims that one reaches better thinking: this is why Kant had likened reasoning to a game of ‘betting’ where certitude only ever comes in degrees because incertitude is the very environing occasion of better reasoning.5 Shut off your vestibular vigilance and you are on the floor, refuse riskiness in thinking and you cannot even be so much as wrong.

To be caught up in the game of bets that is reasoning is to be constantly motile—‘conceptually cursorial’—just as upright standing requires continual revision from proprioceptor systems and mechanosensory feedbacks. This is why Straus sees a ‘prelude’ to rationality in such poise: just as precariousness is the very medium of upright standing, so too is it the very avenue by which we correct incorrect beliefs and demonstrate our propensity to have worthwhile beliefs in the first place. And one only displays this propensity, for revision and vigilance, to the extent that one is ‘liberated’ from blind instinct (which is precisely how palaeoanthropologists and philosophical anthropologists have long read spinal verticalization and our uniquely steadfast standing).

Roth and Dicke write that ‘cognitive ecologists converge on the view that mental or behavioural flexibility is a good measure of intelligence’.6 And flexibility is coincident with a diminution of reliance upon instinct, or ‘detachment’.7 The human is the detached animal, delaminated from the claustrophobias of heredity. Indeed, Gould theorized that, in the case of Homo sapiens, ‘behavioral flexibility’ reaches a heretofore unseen extreme via neoteny (the paedomorphic retention of childhood traits into adulthood). Despite engendering the lengthy dependency of the human neonate, neoteny powerfully prolongs brain plasticity and behavioural flexibility.8 The adult human—an essentially foetalized creature with its swollen head, overgrown eyes, and hairless skin—inherits an extended window of ‘cognitive pluripotency’, allowing for the uptake of conceptual recipes, stratagems, protocols and rules that are linguistically encoded rather than genetically inherited. (This ability to transmit is what led Burroughs, following the General Semantics of Alfred Skarbek Korzybski, to call the human ‘the time binding animal’.)9 It is precisely because the human is birthed preterm in terms of physiology that it can undergo the postnatal linguistic birth that is the influx of discursive consciousness. (Simply put, extending the ‘window of apprenticeship’ augments the scope and range of the skills achievable therein.)

Human neoteny is, thus, an empowering underdetermination. This readily interlocks with the core rationalist notion that it is the nature of the human to be unnatural (‘unnatural’ here in the sense of somehow lacking full specifiability within naturalistic vocabularies alone). When it comes to worldedness, therefore, exile coincides with empowerment: it is in becoming delaminated from all particular biotopes that the orthograde ape conquered them all, inaugurating the psychozoic era. For Blumenberg, it was the new ‘distanced optics’ of the open savannah that provoked the first concretion of ‘rationality’ (Vernunft) as that ‘organ of expectation and of the formation of horizons-of-expectancy, an incarnation of preventative dispositions and provisory-anticipatory attitudes’.10 Announced first in our peculiar adoption of steadfast standing, this is the shift from heteronomy to autonomy, or from claustrophobia to capaciousness. It is the shift from a well-defined world to an open-ended one; from a circumscribed horizon to an unlimited one; from high domain specificity to domain agnosticism; from fragility to robustness; from the exigent to the interrogative; from the competitive to the recognitive; and from the expedience of immediate habitudes toward the spaciousness of irrealis attitudes.

André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986), in Gesture and Speech (1964), applied this notion to human phylogenesis as a whole, reconstructing the latter as a ‘series of successive liberations’ from flexile fish to orthograde person: ‘that of the whole body from the liquid element, that of the head from the ground, that of the hand from the requirements of locomotion, and finally that of the brain from the facial mask’.11 Each ‘liberation’ within this ‘paleontological adventure’ unto uprightness heralds an increment of lability, and does so to the exact degree that it is a diaspora from instinctiveness and the claustrophobias of specialization. Such a process finally culminates in ‘language as the instrument of liberation from lived experience’.12 That is, language, operating as a highly distributed model of ourselves and our world, affords an additional interface with reality, one that, despite being superadded to sense receptivity, is not itself governed by the local exigencies of incoming sense-data (which are constitutively tethered to an expedient present) but rather is regulated by nonlocal concerns (including, inter alia, criteria of correctness and coherence). And language, for Leroi-Gourhan, from a stance diametrically opposed to that of Burroughsian horror, announces the ‘freeing of the human brain’,13 which he connects with the ‘exteriorization’ attained by the invention of technical systems from cuneiform to computation. Certainly, the ultimate frontier of ‘liberation’ is to be found in the nervous system gaining an ‘extraorganic dimension’ by way of modern technoscience.14 Leroi-Gourhan, however, never ceases to stress the one axis around which this accelerating exteriorization revolves: each and every one of these subsequent developments hinges entirely upon our orthograde spine. He consistently argued that the bulging human cerebrum and its ingenious prostheses are merely the evolutionary beneficiary of an upright spine and not its evolutionary cause.15

Similar ideas abound in the German tradition, with zoologists such as Konrad Lorenz claiming, in 1967, that the human is a ‘specialist in being unspecialized’ and Adolf Portmann, in 1956, describing mankind as the ‘cosmopolitan’ (Weltoffen) animal in contrast to the ‘environmentally-bound’ (umweltgebunden) universe of the pronograde animal.16 The major source for such ideas, however, was the German tradition of ‘philosophical anthropology’ emerging during the twentieth-century, which insistently stressed spinal verticalization. (Portmann, indeed, had borrowed the terminology of biotopic cosmopolitanism from Max Scheler, a progenitor of the movement.)17 In 1940, Arnold Gehlen (1904–1976), a key figure in philosophical anthropology, published his Der Mensch: Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt. Therein, he picks up on Nietzsche’s dictum that humans are the ‘not-yet-determined’ or ‘not-yet-finished’ being, as well as Herder’s notion that we are the ‘creature of deficiencies’ (Mängelswesen).18 Gehlen emphasizes that ‘[f]rom a biological point of view, in comparison to animals, the structure of the human body appears to be a paradox and stands out sharply’.19 Our ‘upright gait’—that ‘special morphological position’—is the central feature of ‘the peculiar human bodily structure’, expressing the fact that our species is characterized ‘by deficiencies’ and ‘lack of adaptations’. And yet, such an inheritance of underdetermination is not only an endowment of ‘plasticity’ (Plastizitat) but also precisely a summons to ‘action’. For, to the extent that ‘man’ is ‘undetermined’, according to Gehlen, ‘his very body presents a problem and challenge to him’, and, concordantly, he is spurred to ‘develop an attitude toward himself and make something of himself’. It is because ‘man, dependent on his own initiative, may fail to meet this vital challenge’ of steadfast standing that

he is an endangered being facing a real chance of perishing. Man is ultimately an anticipatory [voresehend] being. Like Prometheus, he must direct his energies toward what is removed, what is not present in time and space. Unlike animals he lives for the future and not in the present […] man represents Nature’s experiment with an acting being.

And, for Gehlen, it is anticipation that wrenched us upright, in doing so further forcing us to augur and anticipate.

[Man] compensates for this deficiency with his ability to work and his disposition toward action, that is, with his hands and intelligence; precisely for this reason, he stands erect, has circumspect vision, and free use of his hands.20

For Gehlen as for Blumenberg, and recalling Kant’s theses on ‘togetherness’ and ‘orientation’, the spinal surge toward binocular world-openness (Weltoffenheit) engenders a ‘flood of stimulation’ that, in radically perturbating the neonate’s afferent system, forces it to efferently ‘orient itself’ in order ‘to cope with unpredictable’ and ‘changeable circumstances’. Gehlen’s ‘common root of knowledge’ is exposure to risk (first exampled in falling upwards) and the attendant summons to prudential culpability (whether sensorimotor or jurisdictive).21 Only through risking itself does the defenseless being secure itself for itself; it is only because we are liable to fall that we are responsible for our standing upright (an observation that reveals, inversely, the coincidence of the ‘radial regressive trend’ with the circumspect rejection of the burdens of intellect, or ‘Geistschmerz’: a jaded longing for the nonage of supine or spherical irresponsibility). ‘Man is the risky creature that can miscarry itself’, Blumenberg later wrote. ‘Man is the embodied impossibility; he is the animal that lives anyway.’22

Paul Alsberg (1883–1965), another major figure in philosophical anthropology, advanced similar theories in his 1923 Das Menschheitsrätsel (translated as ‘The Riddle of Man’). Preempting Leroi-Gourhan and Gehlen, Alsberg claimed that the principle of ‘body-liberation’ (Körperausschaltung) is central to hominization and can be detected in the ‘line leading from the imperfect posture of the Ape, over the stooping carriage of the Neanderthal Man, to the perfect upright gait of modern Man’.23 Anthropogenesis, ‘in all its successive phases’, he insists, is ‘a unitary event rooted exclusively in the principle of body-liberation’.24 This emancipatory upswell is counterposed to the animal’s principle of ‘body-adaptation’, or specialization, which Alsberg notes is, in fact, a ‘principle of body-compulsion’.25 It is in liberating itself from such atavistic immurements—concordantly becoming ‘naked’, ‘non-equipped’, and ‘unnatural’—that orthograde humanity embarks upon the unique quest of ‘extra-bodily adaptation’: its investment in the ‘organ-projections’ of technoscience that, in turn, have allowed it to reformat ‘the whole globe’ as its ‘laboratory’, ‘vegetable-garden’, ‘power-station’, or ‘park for wild and domesticated animals’.26 Our exoskeleton asphyxiates the globe; the encephalon exteriorized on a planetary scale.

Alsberg makes it clear throughout that, in standing upright, ‘Man’ embarks ‘upon a style of life in which the maintenance and welfare of his species is no longer supported and directed by a fixed set of instincts, but is entrusted, in increasing degree, to the free guidance of conscious ethical motives’:

Man has thus to face a new situation in which Nature no longer holds her protecting hand over him, but now charges him with the heavy burden of his own responsibility and obligations to himself, to the human community, and to Nature.

Our accelerating diaspora from instinct—‘Nature’s means of control’—is ‘in itself a great but precarious achievement, and often enough has led to fatal errors’.27 Alsberg notes that orthograde Homo sapiens is the first and only species that could rightly be considered accountable for its own survival and potential extinction. This applies not only in the straightforward sense that we are now technically capable of omnicide (from nukes to nanotech) but additionally in the deeper sense that it is only through becoming capable of invoking such culpability that we are conjointly summoned to the tasks of prediction and preemption such that, correlatively, we come to prospectively understand any future extirpation (whether anthropogenic or not) precisely as our own failing. Body-liberation, converging upon encephalization, is precisely the undertaking of self-accountability. And, as Alsberg averred in an expanded English version of Das Menschheitsrätsel penned during the Cold War, ‘Technology, with which the [body-liberation] principle started, is still the pace-maker, and this gives our “Atomic Age” its profound significance’.28

Certainly, this ‘pace-maker’ tends to outpace its host. Already in the 60s, Leroi-Gourhan proclaimed that artificial life—as the ultimate exteriorization of the human nervous system—would soon leave the biological relic named Homo far behind. Body-liberation, at the limit, slides into self-immolation through auto-secession. Leroi-Gourhan foresaw that there would come a time when ‘Homo sapiens, having exhausted the possibilities of self-exteriorization, will come to feel encumbered by the archaic osteo-muscular apparatus inherited from the Paleolithic’:29

Freed from tools, gestures, muscles, from programming actions, from memory, […] freed from the animal world, the plant world, from cold, from microbes, from the unknown world of mountains and seas, zoological Homo sapiens is probably nearing the end of his career.30

Again, there is a point at which inward collapse, endogeneity, and ephemeralization all become indistinct from the utmost reality-egress, or extinction. At the Omega Point, transcension and senescence collapse. Certainly, Alsberg’s principle of Ausschaltung, besides translating as ‘liberation’, additionally connotes ‘exclusion’ and ‘elimination’. The exteriorization of neural functionality reaches fever pitch as the prime control system (or ‘neural sovereignty’) disinters itself from the zoologic human frame. The externalization of sensorimotor control, exampled today in fully autonomous robotic locomotors, ‘represents the penultimate possible stage of the process begun by the Australanthrope armed with a chopper’.31

The freeing of the areas of the motor cortex of the brain, definitively accomplished with erect posture [and the freeing of the hands for work], will be complete when we succeed in exteriorizing the human motor brain. Beyond that, hardly anything more can be imagined other than the exteriorization of intellectual thought through the development of machines capable not only of exercising judgment (that stage is already here) but also of injecting affectivity into their judgement, taking sides, waxing enthusiastic, or being plunged into despair at the immensity of their task.

Deliberation secedes from its neuronic substrate. Extending Samuel Butler’s conjecture that humans may be mere pollinators of ascendant machines, Leroi-Gourhan predicts that ‘[o]nce Homo sapiens had equipped such machines with the mechanical ability to reproduce themselves, there would be nothing left for the human to do but withdraw into the paleontological twilight’.32 After all, biological man, as Leroi-Gourhan writes, is already a ‘living fossil’.33 Can we escape our spine, or will we expire along with it?

Blumenberg, who explicitly linked our bipedal gait and binocular gaze to our singular conversancy with ‘existential risk’ (Existenzrisiko), relayed an illustrative thought-experiment.34 Suppose some future intelligent observer uncovers fossilized Homo sapiens but finds no trace whatsoever of our globe-spanning prostheses alongside. Quite rightly, all that this intellect would observe is a petrified primate. Possibly one with a peculiar posture—as well as a grotesquely enlarged brain-capsule—but nothing more than a simian, nonetheless. (Our deep future palaeontologist would have no clue, Blumenberg notes, of how radical an effect this glabrous imp had had upon the history of life and earth systems.)35 This simple Gedankenexperiment lets us know that ‘the human’ has already left its own cerebrospinal system (that ‘living fossil’—that ganglion stack hailing from the Paleozoic sea-bed). Our self-image includes far more than our bones. We live and think and have our being ex situ; Geist moves inwardly only ab exteriori. Yet Blumenberg is quick to note that this entails that the actual ‘flesh-and-blood’ human is now no more than a parasite within its ramifying prosthetic nexus and branching everted plexus. Citing Alsberg’s conviction that artificial exteriorization triggers somatic atrophy, Blumenberg notes that parasites, also, gradually lose their own organs of self-sufficiency by way of piggybacking upon inputs from the host-organism. ‘Man likewise becomes a parasite within the technological sphere of life’: foregoing sensory ‘reality-contact’ (Wirklichkeitskontakt)—undergoing attenuation of its indigenous nervous chronotope—in pursuit of artefactual-ectopic replacements. ‘The question is, whether there will be a persisting residuum, or limits to the degeneration of our resilience’, he observes.36

It was the intuition of twentieth-century philosophical anthropology, then, that our species—spinally exiled from any determinate topos—compensated for its biotopic vagrancy by retreating into the inward ramifications of a sequentially chirographic, mythical, artefactual, cultural, industrial and computational exoskeleton. This glorious retreat inward via exoskeletal externalization was by no means the end of our problems, however: aside from the ‘internal friction’ of risk endogeneity, such an inward-coiling autocomplexification makes the human like a hermit-crab lost in its own exponentially expanding shell. The lines between parasite and host, means and end, blur. As Marx foresaw, technologization leads to a reversal of ‘subject and object’—a ‘thingification of persons’ and a ‘personification of things’.37 Are we the cuckoo or is it our swelling prostheses? We become more our self-projection than ourselves. Whatever the case, in exteriorizing absolutely everything, we become ever more lost in our own labyrinthine shell—a carapace of radically extended cerebrospinal arcs.

In Blumenberg’s schema, language and technics may well be rational, but they are still the blossoms of spinal trauma. Schizophrenic tendencies, moreover, appear to be the price our species pays for glottogony.38 Bipedalism’s migration from ‘bite’ to ‘sight’ (via recessing prognathous jaw, liberating buccal cavity, and descending larynx for language influx) may be celebrated by neurophenomenologists like Straus as ‘liberation’, yet such ‘liberation’, as Burroughs would no doubt protest, merely opens an ecological niche for an invading schizo-linguo-parasite. Citing Leroi-Gourhan, Roland Barthes envisioned that ‘[s]hifting to upright posture, man found himself free to invent language and love: this is perhaps the anthropological birth of a concomitant double perversion: speech and kissing’.39 (A perversion, indeed: the very basis for thousands of years of misogyny and sexual violence, as Morgan would argue.)40 Yet earlier, in 1937, Walter Benjamin had proposed that the vertical spine ‘brings with it a phenomenon unprecedented in natural history: partners can look into each other’s eyes during orgasm. Only then does an orgy become possible’.41 What are you doing after the orgy?42

Aside from Straus’s sunny optimism, the myriad members of the twentieth century’s school of philosophical anthropology take a darker view of the connection between rationality and uprightness. They see uprightness as a burden—a continual toil—but they see our falling upward as a fortunate fall in that it is only by constantly having to fight off falling over that we are forced to become rational. Base gravity is the original ‘summons’ behind the vocation of man. We would be a heap on the floor without the burdens of vestibular vigilance, just as it is only through endless exile from received opinions that we earn the title ‘objective’. Our fortunate fall upward is not a question of God-given dignity, but a precarious position we have to earn via ceaseless striving. It is a burden.

Spinal Catastrophism takes this essentially tragic lesson to heart: the conditions for reason, enlightenment, and face-to-face speech are also the enablers of pain, perversion, and exodus from any home on the horizon. These ‘conditions’, then, would require some kind of therapy—but one that would have to go much further than ‘psychoanalysis’ traditionally conceived, since all our parochial neuroses are the sequelae of wounds not only terrestrial, but stretching beyond the earthbound and outward into the hoary galaxies. Nonetheless, it shouldn’t be a surprise that it was a psychoanalyst—albeit an utterly unorthodox one—that first stepped up to the tectonic p[a]late.