This panel examines the complexities and anxieties around personhood and human identity from a variety of philosophical and aesthetic frameworks. The first paper puts Nietzsche in conversation with Leonora Carrington to think about the possibility of becoming hybrid selves. The second paper rethinks virtue ethics against detractors to show that the self-regarding nature of eudaimonism is not an egotistic defect but a liberative strength. The third paper constructs a dialogue between Buddhist notions of the non-self and emergentist conceptions of personhood. The final paper examines AI as an extimate technology, one that demonstrates what is both close and uncanny to the human.
Central to Nietzsche’s philosophy is his exhortation to ‘become what one is.’ This exhortation is addressed to a reader who is not yet himself, but something embryonic and unformed. Against narratives of maturation that predicate a redemptive arc of progress, such as those derived from Christian morality and nineteenth century evolutionary theory, Nietzsche counsels a course of development patterned upon the metamorphosis of a fantastic creature that transforms from a camel into a lion and finally a child. In this paper, I consider his metamorphic creature as a progenitor of the strange hybrid figures that populate the imaginary of the surrealist painter and writer, Leonora Carrington. I aim to show how Carrington, whose hybrid figures express possibilities for becoming something unthinkable within the constraints of patriarchal modernity, responds to the call to become what one is in a way that puts pressure on Nietzsche’s generally antipathetic view of the ‘herd.’
Despite the oft-lauded contributions of virtue ethics, virtue was and is a contested concept. Beyond its historical injustices, virtue ethics, and eudaimonism in particular, have been viewed as inherently egoistic and incapable of securing justice. Taking these criticisms seriously, this paper argues that virtue ethics, when attentive to its historical failures and its complicity in structural injustice, not only withstands its critiques but also is especially conducive for liberatory efforts. Virtue ethics brings to the table precisely what its critics need for their theories of justice to work: an answer to how we come to care about the right things, deliver on our obligations, and manage the complications that arise in holding institutions and one another accountable in our pursuit of a just world. In making my argument, I contend that the self-regarding nature of eudaimonism is not an egoistic defect but a liberative strength.
The Buddhist no-self teaching opposes the view that a human being is (or has) a nonphysical ātman as a persisting substrate, and in its place offers a nondualist account of human beings. How should this teaching of “selfless persons” be understood? In Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self (Princeton, 2022), philosopher Jay Garfield argues that the Buddhist no-self teaching is best understood in a nominalist way. Here, a person’s name refers to no entity in the world but is merely a conventional way of thinking and speaking. In this paper, I argue against this reductive account and recommend instead an emergentist account of personhood. On an emergentist account, a person’s name refers to an entity in the world with novel powers not possessed even partially by its constituent parts (e.g., powers of subjectivity and agency). This paper debates the no-self teaching in light of contemporary philosophy and neuroscience.
In mainstream public debates, AI is consistently measured against a presumed human baseline. Because this comparative register privileges a one-dimensional definition, "the human" now functions as the medium through which AI becomes thinkable, lovable, governable, and saleable. Yet the gap between AI's uneven capabilities and the intensity of public reactions (panic, awe, hope, or resignation) suggests that our projections of AI's future originate less in the technology itself than in our imagination of ourselves. To theorize this dynamic, I propose a definition of AI as an extimate technology. AI externalizes our most intimate cultural artifacts and returns them to us in a form that appears to belong to someone else. I show that technologists and futurists who anticipate the technological singularity fail to see this constitutive relation and are thus unable to ask questions that could guide a path toward a more ethical future of AI.