Kevin Temple - Philosophy and the Numismatic Image of the Human

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"Recording from the Marx & Pittsburgh School Conference, organized by The New Centre for Research & Practice & The Centre for Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education, University College London.
ABSTRACT: In “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” Sellars contends that we possess a “conceptual framework of persons” and that this network of concepts related to agency and intentionality makes human community possible. Yet we also (erroneously) project the conceptual framework of persons beyond the bounds of human community in our attempts to understand the world around us. This projection began with what he calls “the original image,” a world wholly animated by spirits, ancestors, and mana in which we grasped everything through the concepts of personhood. As we came to suppress the tendency to attribute agency and intentionality to nonhuman things, the “manifest image” emerged-i.e., our present, everyday experience and understanding of ourselves and our world. We learned to grasp nonhuman things largely through the category of personhood but as “truncated” persons, shorn of intentionality and agency. This achievement set the stage for the “scientific image,” which escapes the conceptual framework of persons to grasp the patterns of nature. Relieved of any epistemological burden, the conceptual framework of persons can settle into its only legitimate function: structure the fabric of human communities. We are left to grasp ourselves and our world in terms of patterns identified by the special sciences but only as communities of individuals who continue to treat one another as rational, intentional agents. By joining the manifest and scientific images in this way, Sellars aims to overcome our alienation from nature.
I argue that Sellars’ account of our progressive emancipation from the illusions of the original image traffics in discredited, stadial theories of human transformation from “savagery” to “civilization.” Drawing on the work of contemporary social scientists, I show how the same development is marked by progressive alienation and entrapment in structures of administration. Alan Strathern contends that the transition occurs in two stages, the first during the “Axial Age” (beginning in 800 BCE) and the second stage following the Reformation, coinciding with the rise of capitalism and the scientific revolution. As David Graeber has shown, the first stage coincides with the sudden increased reliance on coinage-the first era in which the Marx’s commodity-money-commodity (C-M-C) relation becomes dominant. The destruction of the original image coincides with this development. The second transition coincides with the inversion of C-M-C into the money-commodity-money relation, as Jason Moore has shown. It plays out in the global pursuit of ever cheaper human and natural resources. During this stage, the universal tendency to attribute intentionality and agency in a world teeming with life becomes suppressed, policed, pushed to the margins of our daily lives. I close by arguing that we should re-consider the function of the “conceptual framework of persons” as, more broadly, the means for instituting a more humane form of life.
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