Chapter Three: Philosophy of Posthuman Artworks2
I became fascinated by grand narratives already during my teenage years. It was then that I began to realize how widespread categorical dualistic ontologies are and that they can be found in various fields, levels and strata of culture and life. When I talk about these kinds of dualities I am referring to distinctions like the one between good and evil, mind and body, culture and nature, the material and the immaterial or the organic and the inorganic. The examples I mentioned are an arbitrary choice and several others could be mentioned, too. One could wonder what is problematic with these distinctions, as we are using them every day, and it is at least not immediately clear why employing them could be problematic.3 The problems, which I started to realize first when I was still a teenager, were the ones related to the distinction between the immaterial mind and the material body. If human beings consist of two such radically separate substances, how could it be possible that mind and body interact with each other? If two substances do not have anything in common, then any kind of interaction seems highly questionable (Sorgner 2007, 46). The next thing I realized were the evaluations which were attributed to the two substances. The immaterial world was usually related to the good, stability, rationality, and unity. The material world on the other hand was connected with evil, change, feelings, and plurality (Sorgner 2010a, 193–211). This way of conceptualizing the world is related to the assumption that the good is something which is universally valid. The good stands for qualities connected with the notion of a good life. In this way of thinking, a good life can be described, and the description is universally valid for all human beings since anthropologically all human beings are identical in so far as they all possess an immaterial personal See: Sorgner 2021b. Material in this book is reproduced with permission of Springer Nature, it originally appeared as Sorgner S. L. (2021): Elements of a Posthuman Philosophy of Art. In: Hofkirchner W./Kreowski, H. J. (eds.): Transhumanism: The Proper Guide to a Posthuman Condition or a Dangerous Idea?, Cognitive Technologies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10. 1007/978-3-030-56546-6_5. 3 Selected thoughts have been integrated from a different short paper of mine (Sorgner 2016c) as well as from a monograph (2016e). 2
