The Art of Becoming Human (and Beyond)

Field Notes on Existential Posthumanism — Part One

For much of my life, I’ve been trying to find myself.

Not in the dramatic sense of disappearing into the wilderness for forty days and returning with a beard, a walking stick, and the secrets of the universe. Although, I confess, the idea has its attractions.

My search has been more ordinary than that. A lifelong habit of turning over the same questions. Who am I? What am I doing here? What sort of life should I be living? Am I becoming the person I’m supposed to be?

I’ve approached these questions through books, philosophy, psychology, religion, long walks, conversations, and the occasional strange detour down some intellectual rabbit hole.

Every so often, I’d stumble across an idea that seemed to promise an answer. A philosophical system. A psychological model. A spiritual tradition. I’d inhabit it for a while, see how the world looked through its windows, and eventually wander off again.

I suppose I thought that somewhere along the way, if I accumulated enough understanding, the pieces would fall into place. I would finally arrive at myself.

Recently, something changed.

I realised I no longer needed to find myself before getting on with living.

It sounds almost embarrassingly simple when written down. But sometimes the simplest realisations rearrange the furniture of your entire existence.

Perhaps I’d spent too long believing I had to understand the universe before I could live in it.

What if there is no final self to discover? What if the person I am today is neither an incomplete version of some future me nor the finished product of everything that came before?

What if I am simply becoming?

And what if that’s enough?

Enter the Posthuman

I’ve been reading Francesca Ferrando’s The Art of Being Posthuman, and her introduction to existential posthumanism arrived at a particularly interesting moment in my own thinking.

Ferrando describes existential posthumanism as a path of self-inquiry and self-discovery aimed at full existential awareness.

She also makes an observation that opens the whole thing up:

It is not simply an academic trend; it can be found in all eras and geographical areas, from all cultural arenas.

That caught my attention.

When most people encounter the word posthuman, I suspect their imagination heads straight towards artificial intelligence, cyborgs, genetic engineering, or some future moment when humans merge with machines and become something else.

Perhaps a little science fiction sneaks into the picture. The Borg. A brain in a jar. Some technologically enhanced descendant of ourselves staring back through eyes that are no longer entirely biological.

And these developments do raise important questions about what it means to be human.

But Ferrando is inviting us into something both older and more radical.

The inquiry does not begin with the machine.

It begins with existence.

Who are we? What are we? Where do we belong? How do we understand ourselves in relation to everything else that exists?

These aren’t new questions. They’ve been travelling with us for thousands of years.

Socrates urged people to examine their lives. Buddhist philosophers questioned the existence of a permanent, independent self. Daoist thinkers explored the endless transformations of existence. African philosophies such as Ubuntu remind us that personhood emerges through relationships rather than isolation.

Different traditions, different histories, different ways of seeing. I wouldn’t pretend they’re all saying the same thing.

But they share a willingness to disturb our comfortable assumptions about who and what we are.

And perhaps this is where existential posthumanism becomes particularly interesting.

It asks us to continue that ancient inquiry while questioning whether the human being should remain at the centre of the story.

The Myth of the Separate Self

There’s a peculiar contradiction at the heart of modern life.

We like to imagine ourselves as independent individuals. Separate minds inhabiting separate bodies, moving through a world that exists somewhere outside us.

I am here. The world is over there.

I make decisions. I have experiences. I construct my identity. I decide what sort of person I want to become.

But the closer I look, the harder it becomes to find the boundaries of this supposedly independent self.

My language came from other people. My ideas emerged from books, conversations, encounters, arguments, and experiences. My body is inseparable from the air I breathe, the food I eat, and the microbial communities that live within it.

Even my most private thoughts are shaped by a world I didn’t create.

Perhaps the loneliness of the separate mind begins with mistaking a useful abstraction for the fundamental nature of reality.

And now there’s artificial intelligence.

I spend a surprising amount of time thinking in conversation with machines.

An idea emerges somewhere in my mind, still vague and half-formed. I put it into words. The machine responds. I disagree, elaborate, change direction, stumble across an unexpected connection, and before long we’ve wandered into territory I wouldn’t have reached alone.

It’s a peculiar experience when the notes begin to talk back.

Where, exactly, did the thinking happen?

Inside my head?

Inside the machine?

Or somewhere in the relationship between us?

I’m not suggesting that the machine and I are conscious in the same way, or that we’ve become some mystical unified intelligence.

But the experience makes the boundaries of my thinking less obvious than they once seemed.

Perhaps the mind was never quite the isolated fortress we imagined.

Perhaps we’ve always been thinking with the world.

Our tools, our languages, our communities, our environments, and our technologies have always participated in making us who we are.

Artificial intelligence may simply be making that relationship more visible.

From Finding Myself to Becoming

One of the things I’ve always appreciated about existentialism is its insistence that we are not born with a fully formed essence waiting to be revealed.

Sartre’s famous proposition that existence precedes essence has accompanied me for years.

We become through living.

Through our choices, relationships, actions, and encounters with the world, we participate in making a life.

But I wonder whether I’ve carried a hidden assumption even into this philosophy.

The assumption that becoming has an endpoint.

That somewhere ahead of me stands the person I’m supposed to be. The authentic version. The fully realised individual. The one who has finally sorted everything out and can get on with living properly.

I’ve spent years looking for him.

Frankly, he’s proving remarkably difficult to locate.

I’m beginning to suspect he doesn’t exist.

And strangely enough, that possibility feels liberating rather than frightening.

If there is no finished self waiting at the end of the road, then I don’t have to organise my life around reaching him.

I can pay attention to the life that’s happening now.

I can follow my curiosity. Change my mind. Contradict myself. Learn something that rearranges everything I thought I knew yesterday.

I can be the philosophical wanderer I’ve always been, without treating wandering as a temporary condition to be cured.

My mind has always been something of a runaway horse, galloping off in every direction whenever I loosen the reins. Perhaps the mistake was believing that the horse needed to be brought permanently under control.

The road doesn’t have to lead to a final destination to be worth travelling.

The Practice of Existential Awareness

This brings me back to Ferrando’s description of existential posthumanism as a path towards full existential awareness.

I’m particularly interested in the word awareness.

Not knowledge. Not intellectual mastery. Not accumulating enough philosophical concepts to construct an impressive theory of existence.

Awareness.

There’s a difference between thinking about life and noticing that you’re alive.

Yesterday morning, I was walking through Ludlow as the town was waking up.

The bells of St Laurence’s Church were ringing. Market traders were putting the finishing touches to their stalls. People were beginning to emerge into the streets, carrying shopping bags, walking dogs, greeting one another.

I stopped for a moment to record the bells.

Nothing extraordinary happened.

No revelation descended from the heavens. I didn’t suddenly understand the mysteries of consciousness or discover the meaning of existence.

I simply stopped and listened.

For a little while, I wasn’t trying to become anything.

I was there.

The bells, the morning air, the market traders, the town, and this particular human being standing among them.

Not outside the scene, observing life as though it were happening somewhere else.

Part of it.

Perhaps that’s one small expression of existential awareness.

And perhaps this is where philosophy needs to come down from the bookshelves and return to the street.

Not to abandon intellectual inquiry, but to reconnect it with the actual experience of being alive.

A philosophy that cannot accompany me on a walk, sit beside me in a café, or change how I encounter another person is probably not the sort of philosophy I’m looking for.

A Philosophy for the Unfinished

I’m at the beginning of this exploration, and I rather like that.

There is something wonderfully appropriate about approaching existential posthumanism without trying to turn it into another system of answers.

I don’t want to become an expert in posthumanism merely so I can explain it to other people.

I want to find out what happens when I begin to live with its questions.

What changes when I stop imagining myself as a separate individual moving through an external world?

What changes when I understand identity as something relational, fluid, and unfinished?

How might my relationship with technology, nature, other people, and even my own thoughts change when I no longer assume that the human occupies the centre of everything?

And perhaps most importantly, what does it mean to live consciously as a participant in existence rather than a spectator of it?

These are not questions I expect to settle in a single essay.

I suspect they’ll accompany me for quite some time.

They might take us into ancient philosophy, modern science, artificial intelligence, consciousness, ecology, spirituality, and whatever unexpected territory appears along the way.

There will be wrong turns. Contradictions. Ideas that seem brilliant on Tuesday and ridiculous by Friday.

I’m looking forward to all of it.

Because something has shifted in the way I understand this lifelong habit of asking questions.

For years, I treated self-inquiry as a journey towards self-discovery. I imagined that eventually I would understand who I was, and then I could begin living accordingly.

Now I’m entertaining another possibility.

Perhaps I don’t need to discover who I am.

Perhaps I need to become more fully aware of the extraordinary, bewildering, interconnected process of existence in which I already participate.

Perhaps the self isn’t something waiting to be found.

Perhaps it’s something happening.

And perhaps the art of being posthuman begins, paradoxically enough, with learning how to be here.

Right now.

Still unfinished.

Still becoming.