Human Identity

How does the subject enter the richness of his being? How does the person come into cognitive contact with itself, with the deeper dimension of the self? The task does not seem particularly difficult, since in this case no diaphragm is seemingly interposed between the knower and the object to be known.

Agazzi, however, notes very finely that the absence of diaphragms by itself does not eliminate the most bulky obstacle: namely, that any form of knowledge always involves the condition of otherness: that condition is not satisfied in this case. In fact, we would know ourselves in a direct way but we could know oursevelves only as ‘others’, from which paradoxically there follows the need for an epistemological mediation, namely the need for the subject to be known indirectly, through an ‘objective’ or ‘inter-subjective’ knowledge. In this sense the confrontation with the traditional objective knowledge, first and foremost scientific knowledge, which has largely replaced the religious or metaphysical forms, is almost inevitable. But how can scientific knowledge lead us successfully to self-knowledge? How does it make it possible to have access not just to the phenomenal but also to the metaphysical selves, that is, to the very heart of the human person, whose features have been described earlier? If, as noted by Agazzi, “[t]he conceptual space in which [we] encompass all [we] can know is reduced to matter and motion” (Agazzi 1997: 6), how do we achieve this goal? Modernity has not been able to solve this knotty problem, which remains essential. The price paid was a total loss of the unitary image of the human being. Let us add to this the fact that reductionist monism or various kinds of dualism have also reduced the scope of the enterprise of knowledge: the knowledge of the effect would be determined by the impact of the physical world on the doors of perception.

The outcome of this shift is certainly no small matter:

Not being able to count on an inner objectivity but only on a subjectivity barely offset by the perspective of the ‘transcendental’, in modern thought persons can be seen as obliged to save their personal individuality, their dignity, their freedom on the basis of pure moral ‘certainties’, which are postulated outside any genuine ‘knowledge’ (Agazzi 1997: 8).

The elimination of the sphere of human ‘mystery’ from the horizon of sciences is a goal which is only apparently achieved by the theories of man-machine interface and by the implementation of mechanical models of various types (chemical, thermodynamic, electromagnetic or cybernetic); these are fragile operations, because they are unsuitable to include in the modelling significant and ‘phenomenologically evident’ aspects of human reality. By replacing teleology with tele- onomy, by suppressing the level of the intrinsic or constitutive finality, we have gradually declined to adequately respond to the question about ‘what’ the human being is, namely, the question of the essence, although this term seems nowadays obsolete and somewhat elusive. We have given up grasping objectively the ‘ontological distance’ which is really perceived by us and separates us from any other living being and our own technological artefacts: accordingly we are not allowed to use these as hermeneutic and epistemic paradigms of our own nature. However, Agazzi does not hold a rear-guard position. He indulges in no way in a sort of return to the natural, understood as a primordial, original and pre-technological state, nor does he intend to propose a kind of dualism of natural and artificial. The reasons are almost obvious. The first, very intuitive, resides in the fact that such a condition probably never obtained. Man has always created the artificial, not as a separate universe, but as the expansion of his own capabilities and intrinsic ends. Therefore, on the other hand, as Agazzi rightly states, “the artificial is but the most typical manifestation of human nature, which is characterized by the fact that man assures his survival and his progress adapting nature to his own needs instead of adapting himself to nature” (Agazzi 1997: 33).

The attempt to naturalize the human being in all respects, instead, “reveals itself as a kind of regression to the pre-Socratic philosophical anthropology” (Agazzi 1995: 27), in which the human being is reduced to a mere part of nature.

But what does it mean to be part of nature? Which answer can be given to this question today? The artificial world is or is not our natural world today? The artificial is in effect “a part of nature that proceeds from the peculiar nature of the human being” (Agazzi 2004a: 84), which is clearly characterized by intentionality. But the artificial is also the hermeneutic screen that many have used in their attempt to prove the exact opposite, namely the lack of intentionality in humans, or rather its derivation from underlying physical processes. Nothing is more paradigmatic than the project of the so-called ‘artificial intelligence’; that name itself betrays a not inconsiderable philosophical contradiction. If in fact intelligence presupposes thought, then two fundamental questions cannot be avoided:

either we admit that the (new) machine can perform these [intelligent] tasks as it has an immaterial power, like thought; or it must be admitted that, if a material machine can do smart things, then it is not the case that humans are required to perform such things through an immaterial principle. In both cases there would be a reduction of human beings to a closely naturalist level (whereby they lose their specificity with respect to the natural world) and in the second case reduction would also have an explicitly materialist connotation (Agazzi 1991: 2).

Both these different conclusions point to a radical downsizing of human nature; consequently, they have a metaphysical scope and not just a functional one. In fact, in this perspective, the technological machine ideally would have not only an emulative but a simulative purpose as well: “in order to understand how humans do certain things you try to make a machine that knows how to do them (cognitive goal).

In this way the simulative aspect appears loaded with an analogical, heuristic and explanatory intentionality” (Agazzi 1991: 3). By the explanatory claim one means to reduce the ontological gap between human beings and their substitutes by implementing an operational identification. The simulated operationality undoubtedly follows the human transitive activity (the Aristotelian poiesis), but it can also trace some aspects of the immanent activity itself (praxis), to the extent that the latter employs representational and symbolic systems which can be reproduced. According to Agazzi what remains outside the margins of the simulation is the basic condition of the immanent and transitive activities: intentionality as a power “that allows the internal ‘intentional’ state to switch to the material symbol that represents it, (...) that allows us to interpret material signs as ‘meaning’ certain internal states” (Agazzi 1991: 10). This human capacity does not coincide with a particular physical state, but it is the ‘inner’ condition of the transition from one state to another, as well as the condition of the interpretation of the starting and final states of artificial cognitive systems.

Let us then return to the beginning. With respect to human nature it is not realistic either to imagine a return to the past, or to cultivate the utopian dream of a perfect and total knowledge, without shadows and dark sides, but it is desirable to ‘recover the interiority’, the genuine wellspring of science and technology. Interiority is not subjectivity, although it encompasses it; on the other hand, according to Agazzi, it may be objectified, even though it constitutively transcends the order set by naturalistic explanations:

We have to win back the idea of an objective interiority, because it is a reality that all persons experience (even if it is not sensory experience), that they can understand. They can talk to each other about that, they can probe it and they are able to teach other people to analyse it, following the steps which, of course, must be made by each individual (but can you in science do otherwise?) and which allow a certain mutual control of statements (Agazzi 1997: 40).

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Source: Alai M., Buzzoni M., Tarozzi G. (eds.). Science Between Truth and Ethical Responsibility: Evandro Agazzi in the Contemporary Scientific and Philosophical Debate. Springer,2015. — 337 pp.. 2015

Human Identity

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