Monday, March 25, 2013

Post-Humanism: an Impossible Project

Bertrand Russell once wrote: "nature is irrelevant to human value, and therefore may be understood only when we overcome (or ignore) our morals" (reverse translated from a Korean translation of "Do We Survive Death" (1936)).

I suggest seemingly impossible project: to overcome a humanist understanding of the world, such a Russellian nature/human dualism.  It can be thinkable that the border between the two duality itself an outcome of human thought and, after a series of thoughts, our understanding of everything has a fundamental limit called humanism.  This is the basis for some post-modernists in humanities or social scientists after 1980s who have tried to resist any humanist project including constructivism.  However, their project was impossible in nature: without such a dualism, of nature/human or more primarily of subject/object, any task of reflecting ways of human to the worlds could be unthinkable.


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