Human nature.

Over the course of its modernity the ways in which the Western philosophical imagination understands the human has undergone dramatic shifts. From its Cartesian investment in an understanding of the human as that divinely endowed animal that, with the exercise of its unique capacity for reason, could one day achieve security from nature, to the contemporary diagnosis of the sickness of reason, the ‘illusion’ of security, and the vulnerability of the human to the catastrophic capacities of the biosphere on which it depends, the philosophical imaginary of Western modernity has changed significantly. Liberalism has not been an exception to or victim of this shift. In actuality it has been constitutive of it. Liberal modernity originated as a kind of challenge to the Cartesian modern by foregrounding the biological life of the human subject. As Michel Foucault explained in numerous analyses, the birth and development of liberalism was inseparable from the birth and development of the age of biopolitics, enabled as the latter was by the birth and development of biology and its allied life sciences. Tasked with the problem of how to rule in accordance with the needs and interests of the human defined in terms of its species existence, so it was not liberal political theory, political science, or international relations that has contributed most to teaching liberal regimes how to rule biopolitically. It is instead the life sciences themselves, broadly conceived, that have taught liberalism most about how to deal with the problem of human governance. It is in the emergence of the life sciences, most especially the life science of biology, that the search to understand the conditions for species development and security was most earnestly conducted from the late seventeenth century to the late twentieth century. In turn it was in these sciences that the possibility arose of being able to distinguish between forms of life productive of life and those inimical to life; process and organisms that threatened life, rendered life vulnerable and insecure, warring against life and the realization of its potential. Here liberalism would learn how to pursue and realize the full emancipatory possibilities of species existence, and the material prospering of species life. The impact of these same life sciences can, for example, be traced directly in the thinking of liberal philosophers throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as much as to the twentieth century (Dillon and Reid 2009).

The trouble with life, biologically understood, of course, is that it can never actually be secured. By definition biological life is a phenomenon of vulnerability, because to live is to be a thing that can and must die— a thing that can only ever struggle to survive in competition with other living systems for the finite time of which it is capable of lasting. At best, prospering resiliently, amid its vulnerabilities to decay, by adapting innovatively to the environmental conditions it is exposed to and simultaneously dependent on. Conceiving the human this way has meant that liberalism has always been committed, unwittingly at least, to divesting the human of any belief in its abilities to transcend its mere biology and achieve security. This is precisely the point that Foucault makes concerning the origins of the liberal subject historically (2008). The liberal subject ‘is a subject who is not so much defined by his freedom, or by the opposition of soul and body, or by the presence of a source or core of concupiscence marked to a greater or lesser degree by the Fall or sin’ (2008: 271– 72) but by an irreducible and nontransferable choice-making capacity not referring ‘to any judgement, reasoning, or calculation’ (2008: 272) but grounded irreducibly in the subject’s preference for whatever brings it pleasure in denial of pain and the potential for suffering (2008: 271– 73). That which is irreducible to the liberal subject is its preference for security from whatever may be found to threaten or reduce its capacity to live out its life in a condition of relative security from pain and suffering.