There is a biological and materiality inhumanity within which
human thought is stranded. The essence
of human consciousness lies buried within a mass of materials and flows which
far exceed it. In The Inhuman the
French philosopher JF Lyotard speculates on this condition of humanity as
stranded within the Inhuman:
“what if human beings, in humanism’s sense, were in the process of,
constrained into, becoming inhuman (that's the first part)? And (the second
part), what if what is ‘proper’ to humankind were to be inhabited by the
inhuman?”[1]
In doing so Lyotard raises the spectre of what inhuman might
lurk within human experience. The Inhuman
begins with the essay which asks: “Can thought go on without a body?” My
speculative answer to his challenge is no. Thought without a body can never be
possible but this claim comes with two qualifiers.
First there is an inhuman redundancy to every thinking body
that thought is nested within but which exceeds it. Those dead things that we
slough off, like fingernails and hair don’t think, but then neither do the
molecules like carbon that we share with the rest of the world. All of thought
needs a body, but not all of a body is doing the thinking. Parts of it are
shitting, wheezing, growing and dying.
Second those bodies that think don’t necessarily have to be
human; and other bodies will suggest different possibilities for thinking and
experience.
To rephrase Lyotard’s question: What if
Intentionality is not specific to Human thought? What if other entities exhibit
an intentional relationship to the world? Further, what would it mean to say
that intentionality is not even specific to biological life but, instead,
emerges from instances of systemic complexity?
The horizon for this question is the
attempt to consider the phenomenological notion of intentionality in relation
to complex systems. My claim is that intentionality is not a feature specific
to humans but a feature of all complex systems. Or, intentionality is not a
feature unique to consciousness but rather one that consciousness shares with
other systems.
At stake in this is the recognition that
if phenomenology is the study of phenomena as they appear in experience, then
this requires an expanded understanding of what experience means that extends
its horizon beyond human consciousness. This would provide an account of
intentionality in systems-theoretical terms that recasts phenomena in terms of
terminology specific to complex systems. That is: observation, recursion and
self-reference.
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