(The impossibility of) acting upon a story that we can believe

Abstract

The historical sensibility of Western modernity is best captured by the phrase ‘acting upon a story that we can believe’. Whereas the most famous stories of historians facilitated nation-building processes, philosophers of history told the largest possible story to act upon: history itself. When the rise of an overwhelming postwar skepticism about the modern idea of history discredited the entire enterprise, the historical sensibility of ‘acting upon a story that we can believe’ broke apart into its constituents: action, story form, and belief in a feasible future outcome. Its constituent parts nevertheless still exist, either separately or in paired arrangements. First, believable stories are still told, but without an equally believable future outcome. Second, there still exists a feasible vision of a future (in the shape of what I call the prospect of unprecedented change, especially in prospects of technology and the Anthropocene), but this defies story form. And third, it is even possible to act upon that feasible future, but such action aims at avoiding worst-case scenarios instead of facilitating best outcomes. These, I believe, are the features of an emerging postwar historical sensibility that the theory and philosophy of history has yet to understand.

Keywords:

• Unprecedented change
• anthropogenic existential risk
• humanity
• acting upon a story
• historical sensibility

Notes

1. From the viewpoint of this essay, historians’ engagements with the Anthropocene fall into two categories. On the one hand, some historians ask how their discipline may contribute to the ongoing public discussion about climate change. This is the question asked by Guldi and Armitage (2014, 64–73). On the other hand, the more important and fruitful efforts follow Chakrabarty (2009) in asking the reverse question, that of what the Anthropocene demands from history. Although it makes sense to analytically differentiate between the two approaches, in practice they are often fused, as in Thomas (2014) or Chaplin (2017).

2. Critical posthumanism is of course skeptical about technological posthumanism. In the concise judgement of Rosi Braidotti (2016, 17), technological posthumanists ‘combine radical expectations of transhumanist enhancement, with a firm reiteration of enlightenment-based values such as rationality and liberal individualism. Apparently nonplussed by the internal contradiction of combining radical change with the perpetuation of tradition, they reject the critical edge of posthuman theory, appease venture capitalist interventions in fundamental research and strike a politically conservative note’. Yet, it seems to me that the grounds for this skepticism is the rather uncritical acceptance of the self-narrative of technological posthumanism. Above, I repeatedly try to raise awareness of the fact that the radicality of technological posthumanism lies in its prospective aims that completely contradict its self-narrative. When it comes to a comparative assessment of aims and prospects, I even think that the aim of critical posthumanism to extend emancipatory thinking over the non-human world by insisting on inherited conceptual tools (conceptual tools which have become textbook humanities criticism in the last decades) is far more conservative than the prospect of overcoming the human condition by the creation of literally posthuman beings. I nevertheless do not to intend this to be a value judgement as I find the conservativism of critical posthumanism indispensable in addressing the potential social inequalities so obviously entailed by technological prospects. Moreover, to be as clear as possible, my intention is not to advocate any future prospects, let alone, to predict the future, but to gain an understanding of the historical sensibility intrinsic to already widespread visions of the future.

3. For an introductory overview of the many transhumanist and posthumanist positions concerning enhancement and biotechnology, see Savulescu and Bostrom (2009); Sharon (2014); and Agar (2013).