"What do I know that you may value? It's what you know that I have forgotten."
-Art Garfunkel, “Letter to My Younger Self” (2013)
A classical modal argument of mid-century existentialists is the concept of nothingness. In essence, the realisation that we, as beings possessing a semblance of being have a capacity to assume that there is indeed something behind the nature of our being, with nothingness representing the (occasionally terrifying) reality that in our experience of the absurdity of life, there are no external forces truly validating our being, in effect establishing that there is a void of a lack of meaning to our existence. Therefore a perpetual point of our having a sense of being is that this being, through a conscious ability to question the very nature of being comes to us in the form as a placating notion to experience a life knowing of the existence of this question of nothingness that exists beyond our mortal coils. It presumes the void beyond us, as an infinitely cavernous presupposition of the totality of the meaninglessness of our existences. We must then strive to exist in criticality with this realization that nothing is out there to add intrinsic meaning to our lives.
As potentially horrific as the void may be, and however crippling a classical existential crisis is to our movement through our own times and spaces, we must be careful to recognise one of the very core problems with this already too complex idea: if nothingness is evidence of the lack of meaning in our existence, is that not just a point from the perspective of humanity? Meaning quite simply, we are unfortunately only able to experience such questions from the event horizon of a human-centric ontology. Our reliance on an anthropocentric ontology (a humans-only system of making and understanding truths) means that we are philosophically incapable of explaining our world, our existence, and the many questions surrounding these absurdities on any other terms than our own. A problem that would, and certainly to many, does mean absolutely nothing. Why do we care if we are the only ones who are able to make truth? And why should we worry about this when there are so many questions to search out the answers to?
This question though is of critical importance to understanding a singular fundamental question that has been in the minds of humans since the time of Gilgamesh. This question being: what is the nature of those other worlds we do not understand? In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the cedar forests and terrible monsters represent a world we cannot understand and the epic presents us the clash between the man Gilgamesh and the apocalyptic Humbaba, a monstrous ogre that stands sentinel over the mythical cedar forest. We as readers see this struggle between the man and the demon as heroic, as the battle for what is good and right, and a journey of growth for the man Gilgamesh. In this metaphor though, we often forget the faithful companion of our hero, Enkidu, who to anyone but true scholars of the text is simply remembered as “the sidekick” of Gilgamesh, Enkidu is the true metaphorical representation of humanity, despite his questionable membership in the ranks of humanity. Very briefly, Enkidu is wild, he is inhuman, he exists outside of the caste of what is considered humanity in the narrative, and so his journey is not towards glory in the face of mythical evil, but to humanity in solidarity with his companion. We are, in this instance, in this moment in human history Enkidu. We are trying ever-desperately to claim humanity, to grow into it, to bond with the pathways ahead of us in ways that bring us closer to those elements of our being that disconnect us from the rest of the natural world. We are searching for a meaning of what it means to mean, and in that search, we have arrived here.
Here being the present. Where we no longer are concerned with the here and now of our existence, but instead we cast our weary eyes forward on into the dawn. Posthumanism is a term in philosophy and literary theory that broadcasts scenes of post-apocalyptic ruin into the minds of many, to some it is the technocracy of AI running unbridled into the future, a Terminator futurity. To others, it is a hopeful glimpse into a future where the biosphere and the humanosphere come together yet again to form a kinship in solidarity, a dissolution of the object/subject binary and an establishment of a true cooperation with the natural world. In all cases, posthumanism grapples with the question not what will happen once we are gone, but what will be the nature of reality once we no longer hold dominion over its definition?
The frustrating question of only knowing the world on the basis of our own human-centred forms of knowledge construction is that we are incapable of imagining a world known by any other system of knowing. We cannot, for instance, grapple with the ways our dogs see and know the world we share, we cannot supplant humanistic traits of consciousness into beings with consciousness, and most egregiously, we limit the definitive reality of consciousness to a particularly small subset of living beings that we have determined possess sentience. Where then, is the capacity of a stone in the river to know its reality? Where is the knowledge of the trees or the leaves or the mycelium? The barrier of our inability to know the realities of those beings that are not human presents us with a critical point of investigation into our own nature. We would assume the inverse, that if we cannot know the trees or the rocks or the creatures at our feet, then we would at least be inclined to know ourselves.
Yet, we do not.
Our posthumanism is not the post-apocalyptic fallout-encrusted wasteland, nor is it the future of technocracy where the world is entirely engulfed in a digital dominion. Instead, our posthumanism is here with us, in the very moments of the present. Being itself is our posthumanism. This is to say that we are beyond the human condition with every second of our contemporaneous being, cast adrift in a new undiscovered reality where the horrors of the voids of existential dread so carefully curated by Sartre, are now untamed blank spaces on our maps of consciousness.
Our anti-being, our inescapable multitudes of meaninglessness beyond our consciousness are no longer the questions at the forefront of classical theology, existentialism, or mythology. Instead, our dissonance in existence is in the frightening question of what truly is reality for us now?
Reality, classically understood to be perceivable, knowable, and experiential, now exists in an entirely new frontier. An elementary component to our building of reality is the experience of the social world around us, from minuscule one-on-one interactions to the grandiose scale of normative reality, we are shaped by (and actively shape) our social realities.
This is where the nature of reality has shifted so drastically, where we have been hurled into a world of unknowns, where our posthumanism lives. The social, the ever-changing fabric of interactions from within and without our internal realities has so radically changed in the new millennium that we are now living in a new terra incognita of social illusion.
Our lives have become, for better and worse interspersed all across the world over through the interfaces of digitality. Social media, in one instance connects us all to rapid, at-the-moment information, a wealth of knowledge we as a species cannot comprehend, and instantaneous digital communication where in the same screen we may be exchanging nude photos with our partners at the same moment learning of the day’s newest most terrifying political news. For all of this access, we have seen, most transparently since 2016, the ways that the devices of infinite knowledge at our fingertips can show us realities that are neither real nor honest. We have now grown into a world where deception is even more insidious, where the nature of what we experience cannot now be easily discerned from clandestine constructions of deceptive realities.
We hear the words ‘post-truth’ thrown into the discourse, but it is deeper than this, our posthumanism existence is a world not without truth, but with an infinitude of truths whose composure we can only hope to understand.
This essay does not stand to take the position on the pulpit of condemning social media or yearning for the ‘good old days’ the reality of our reality is that these streams of competing truths are our reality now, they are our being. And so, in theorising a posthumanism of being, or an existentialism of now we are tasked not with the classical challenge to define what is real, but rather to understand what is real to us. In effect, we have strayed so far from the human/non-human dichotomy that we have ourselves become unrecognisable in the streams of our own being. In a sense, much like Enkidu, we have again become wild.
Where do we go, how do we reclaim our humanism? Is there such a reality in our futurity that represents an ability to return to that which we have lost? Idealists and self-help gurus would tell you to return to nature, to reclaim your wild heart, to forest bathe. We cannot re-acquaint ourselves with our humanity in any placating sense by such simple things. While feeling the moss in our toes does indeed ground us to reality, there must be something deeper than the simple act of entering the Cedar Forest.
To vanquish our wild untamed realities we must instead find what makes us human in the face of this new world. We must seek out what ultimately led Enkidu to grow less wild. In the epic it is not the battle of good versus evil, it is the quiet and warm romanticism of genuine connection. It is in the homoerotic platonic love that burns between Gilgamesh and his wild companion. In this parable we see the true path forward, not in homoeroticism directly, but in the romanticism of the mundane. The romanticism of the moments we share, the spaces we explore, the life that we live. There is truth in love, and that truth is the truth that ultimately will ground us in our new world. It is a love of the smallest of things, of watching the ants march in line, of the sunsets, the daybreaks, the quiet nights home, the streaks of dog saliva on our sunglasses, love of the littlest and most forgettable moments is what brings threads of reality back to our shattered posthuman world of digital illusion. This is not touching grass, it is creating art, it is seeing the world as art, it is writing, drawing, singing (however badly), and living life as close to those minuscule momentary flashes of happiness we may find in between our timelines.
If being in the modern age is an illusory digital posthumanism, then our return to humanism is in the iced coffees in the mornings, the terrible movies, the reality TV binges, the kisses, hugs, and slices of pizza. We cannot despair, nor can we give up in our pursuits for these little loves. In our quests for them, we may find ourselves back in the realm of being able to again ponder what it means to be a tree in the breeze, and question those unknowable worlds at our feet. We cannot question those kinships of nature until we again learn how to love the moments in the hours of our days that would otherwise pass into ahistorical obscurity. Find moments to love and hold them dearly.
TF