The Loneliest Faculty
On self-location, the tribe and whether subjectivity is fit for the task of orientation
Having to orient yourself in this world, to work out your own values and then stand behind them, is liberating to some and alienating to most. I want to set that sentence down carefully, because it can be read as contempt and none is intended. The people for whom self-location was the best thing that ever happened to them are real; I know several, and on my better days I am one. They are also not the majority. And the majority is not failing a test of nerve. It is telling us something about what the task costs and the cost is not distributed the way the story of liberation suggests.
The task has been set by a turn that happened in philosophy long before it properly arrived in culture. When Kant put knowledge on a new footing he moved the center of the world: objects no longer set the terms for our knowing, our knowing sets the terms under which objects can appear at all.1 The subject stopped being a thing among things and became the condition under which there are things for us. That was meant as a rescue, a way of securing knowledge against skepticism. What it also did was inadvertently hand subjects a bill roughly two centuries later. If the world as it is given runs through me, then the question of where I stand in it runs through me too, and there is no longer an outside from which the answer could be delivered. What was an investigation comes back as a Zumutung, an imposition, addressed to every subject in modern Western societies, whether they chose it or not.
I use the German word because its etymology carries some weight for my argument. The word’s modern root, Mut, means courage. The word stems from the late Middle High German muot, which did not originally mean courage. Its original meaning was a person’s inner disposition, sense and soul, the force of willing and feeling, and zumuten meant to direct one’s own will or claim onto someone else and ask them to strive toward it with all of that.2 The meaning of the word transformed and narrowed over time. Mut contracted into courage. Zumutung contracted into what is hard to bear, at the edge of what may reasonably be asked of a person. Both are losses of the same thing. What was once addressed to a whole disposition now arrives as a demand one barely carries and the courage that used to belong to that disposition has become a word of its own, similar in sound, yet unrelated in meaning. Knowing yourself, your spirit, however, still takes courage and comes at a cost, the way courageous acts tend to. Which is why Zumutung reflects this point on another level than its English counterpart, imposition.
Some of the difficulty reaches further down than modernity. We came up in groups. Whatever holds us to one another is older than any form we have given it, older than the village, the confession, the party or the platform. The demand to orient alone therefore lands on a creature that has practiced something else for a very long time. However, turning ancestry into destiny would mean forgetting that the conditions under which we observe ourselves are themselves alterable and that we are not simply the sum of the pressures that shaped us. Our origin explains why being alone is hard. It does not say how much of it has to remain.
Between there and here sits a distinction language rarely bothers to make and most of the argument about individualism is an argument between two people using one word. Belonging can mean that a group defines me, that I dissolve into it and its boundary becomes mine. That is the belonging modernity set out against, with reason. The tie you did not choose, the village that registers every deviation and the family as fate can all be stifling as much as reassuring. Belonging can also mean standing in a relation that answers, where something of me arrives somewhere and something comes back, without my disappearing into it. Hartmut Rosa calls this resonance, and the term earns its keep here precisely because it does not describe fusion.3 Resonance requires two that remain different. A tone that dissolves into the other one does not sound. It phases out, it goes quiet.
So what we are short of is not precisely the tribe but more so the ability to have belonging without surrendering to it and to be a single person without being lonely. Observed cybernetically, this is a coupling problem, which is distinctly non-moral. It makes both failures visible at once. A system too tightly coupled to its environment loses its own dynamics and becomes an organ of execution, running someone else’s program with great sincerity. A system too loosely coupled circles in its own state space and gets nothing back, no correction, no friction, no news. Both states look like freedom from the inside. One feels like shelter and the other feels like sovereignty. In both the system has stopped learning and adapting.
Our present falls toward the second. Never have more belongings been available and seldom have fewer of them been binding. You choose your milieus, you leave them when the costs rise, you wear their signs for as long as they fit. What this produces is the form of belonging without its Zumutung and therefore without its yield, because what makes a tie load-bearing is exactly that it cannot be canceled without consequence. There is a whole economy resting on this arrangement. Ties that can be exited at no cost are also ties that can be sold to you again next quarter.
Which raises the question I actually want to put on the table.
If part of the difficulty is ancestral, if the trouble with orienting alone is a matter of what we were built by and for, then the thought that suggests itself is to change what we were built by. This is a transhumanist proposal that treats the substrate as a variable rather than as fate. Further evolution, or trajectories we would design ourselves, might carry us past the group pressures and the lineage pressures toward something that judges its own possibilities more autonomously. Everything I have argued so far says I have to take this seriously. I insisted the conditions of observation are alterable.
Taken seriously, the proposition starts to bend and the first bend is not an objection to the project but a question about its lineage. Transhumanism advertises itself as a break with what we have been, fundamentally. It looks to me more like an inheritance arriving at its last object. Instrumental reason worked outward for three centuries, taking nature apart and making it available, converting whatever it touched into something to be optimized and the enhanced human is what happens when that reason runs out of exterior. Transhumanism is not a departure from the Enlightenment. It is its most literal fulfillment and the subject that Kant installed as the condition of the world arrives at the far end of the story as the last remaining object of instrumental reason.4 A fulfillment can be an achievement. What it cannot be is the exit from a history it is itself completing. Such is the contradiction.
Which puts the second bend at the assumption underneath the whole proposal, that subjectivity is a faculty for orientation at all, a capacity that can do real work in locating a person. Read the record differently and another version is available. Subjectivity may be less a faculty than an address, the place where the task was finally set down. God went, then the class, then the nation and finally, the task of orientation ended up on the threshold of the individual. Put the two readings together and the enhancement project takes on a strange shape. Instrumental reason, having run out of things to work on, arrives where the task of orientation was already put in place and offers to optimize the recipient subject for that task.
The third bend is the notion of potentiality in the transhumanist picture. We speak of possibility as though it lay open in front of us, the horizon of what could be. But what we are able to entertain as possible is formed by what has been. Our imagination of the future runs on inherited machinery, on the categories evolution left us with and the paradigms our history taught us to think in, which is why so many visions of the enhanced human return a familiar liberal subject with better hardware, still competing, still accumulating, still lonely and now efficiently so.5 The past is not only behind us as a set of constraints to be engineered away. It is inside the instrument we would use to do the engineering. Whoever wants to design past our lineage pressures has to design with a mind those pressures assembled, which is the situation von Foerster spent his life describing: an observer attempting to redesign itself, with no vantage outside itself from which to check the work. Second-order observation is the whole of the difficulty.
If transhumanism is offered as an exit from the threshold, as the far side we have been looking for, then it has quietly become another liminal destination lacking orientation, only living off of its symbolic order, a simulacrum of possible far sides.6 Every eschatology I have written against, secular or otherwise, works in a similar way: the present is a corridor, the meaning lies at its end, and the corridor is therefore something to be endured rather than inhabited. A named exit would take the weight off, which is exactly why I distrust it. What I have been arguing all along is that we need directions rather than destinations. A direction stays honest by remaining revisable.
That leaves the transhumanist question in a shape I can live with. Not as the far side of liminality but as one of the directions in which the far side might be found. It is worth pursuing and testing whether it increases the number of choices available to us or reduces them.7 Some of the transhumanist proposition seems to plainly increase our choices. I would argue, however, that it increases options and ability but not necessarily the ability to choose between those options. A body less determined by lineage is a body with more room and I would rather argue about what to do with that room than pretend the question is trivial and self-evident. Some of the proposition plainly reduces our choices and the reduction of the critical questions usually hides in who is doing the choosing in this fantasy. Because the difficulty here was never evenly distributed to begin with. David McKerracher draws a distinction I keep coming back to, between the uprooted and the unrooted, between the one who had roots and lost them and the one who never had any.8 To the second, the news that there is no origin to return to is not a liberation. It is a description of their situation handed back to them as an intellectualist argument. Whoever stands in dense relations can afford transformation, whoever stands in none experiences indefinite exposure to liminality. Any enhancement of the autonomous subject enters that same asymmetry and it will find it there whether or not its designers intended to.
Whether something can be built from this that resembles neither the commune nor the marketplace, I do not know. Before the political question there is the one underneath it, the one I would want answered first and cannot answer yet: whether subjectivity is fit for orientation at all, whether it is a capacity that can carry the task or the place where the task was put down for instrumental reasons. On the answer hangs what our present loneliness even is. Either it is an ability we have not yet grown into, in which case the work is to do so rather than heal it by reverting back to tribal structures. Or it is a demand that was addressed to the wrong recipient and every attempt to meet it individually, by therapy, by discipline or by enhancement, is futile and far too costly.
Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft 1, Die Kritiken Bd. 1 (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2020). The move Kant himself calls his Copernican turn.
On zumuten, from late Middle High German zuomuoten, and on muot as Sinn, Seele, Geist, Gemüt and the Kraft des Wollens und Empfindens rather than bravery, see the DWDS entry: https://www.dwds.de/wb/zumuten.
Hartmut Rosa, Resonanz: Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung, 1. Auflage, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 2272 (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019). Resonance as a relation of response between two that remain distinct, against both alienation and fusion.
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente, Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003). Reason that liberates by making everything available ends by making the one who reasons available too. I am putting transhumanism where that argument was always heading.
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). She makes the sharper version of this point from inside the history of cybernetics: what the posthuman keeps intact is precisely the liberal humanist subject it claims to have left behind.
I work this out in “The Far Side of Liminality”, Critical Cybernetics, https://www.criticalcybernetics.com/p/the-far-side-of-liminality.
Heinz von Foerster, Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition (New York: Springer, 2003). The ethical imperative: act always so as to increase the number of choices. It is the closest thing I have to a compass that does not require me to know the destination. Choices, it is worth saying, are not the same as options.
David McKerracher, “Why I Hate the Rebel Priest Class”, Theory Underground, 28 July 2026, https://theoryunderground.substack.com/p/why-i-hate-the-rebel-priest-class. The uprooted/unrooted distinction, and the argument that the loss of ground is not the same experience for those who never stood on any.