Human Precedence

Abstract / Overview

Human Precedence does not place the human being as the absolute origin of reality. It examines material, environmental, bodily, relational, biological, temporal, linguistic, cultural, institutional, and technical conditions that are already active before a human subject becomes stable and begins to treat the world as an object of knowledge. The human emerges within these prior relations. Yet Human Precedence does not erase human agency. Once formed, human beings can act upon inherited conditions, alter them, leave traces, and pass changed conditions toward the future. Human existence is therefore situated within an ongoing generative circulation rather than outside it.

Full Text

Human Precedence is a theory of conditions that are already active before the human becomes established as an apparently self-sufficient subject.

The term precedence does not mean the superiority of human beings.

It indicates structural priority relative to the constituted human subject.

Material conditions, environments, bodies, other beings, life, time, language, culture, institutions, technologies, and histories are already active before a person fully understands, names, or objectifies them.

Human Precedence therefore asks what must already be active for a human being to appear as a human subject at all.

The word prior does not refer only to chronological history.

It does not mean only the world before the biological emergence of humanity.

It also does not mean only the period before one individual is born.

The concept refers to conditions that are active before human recognition, explanation, judgment, or self-description becomes stable.

Human Precedence is therefore not simply a reconstruction of a prehistoric world.

It is a theory of conditions that precede and support human intelligibility.

Modern models of the subject often place the human on the side of observation.

The human perceives an object.

The human gives meaning.

The human evaluates.

The human uses nature.

The human operates tools.

The human explains the world.

Such a structure can make it appear that a completed human subject exists first and enters relation with the world afterward.

Human Precedence questions this order.

Before a person observes the world, the world is already acting upon the person.

Before an environment is fully understood, temperature, light, sound, gravity, humidity, air, and terrain are already acting upon the body.

Before the body becomes an explicit concept, it already becomes tired, experiences pain, recovers, ages, and responds.

Before another person is fully understood, the presence of that other person can already alter action.

Before an individual freely chooses language, language is already present in the surrounding culture.

Before an institution is criticized, the person often already lives within institutional conditions.

The human does not therefore enter the world from outside.

Human existence takes form within a relational field that is already active.

This is the first proposition of Human Precedence.

Human Precedence does not deny the human.

It does not reduce human beings to nonhuman matter.

It does not claim that human existence has no distinctive significance.

Its purpose is to understand human existence more concretely by examining the conditions from which it emerges.

The human is not an abstract subject separated from reality.

A human being has a body.

A human being inhabits a place.

A human being lives through time.

A human being enters relations with others.

A human being receives language.

A human being inherits history.

A human being lives with technology.

A human being participates in institutions.

A human being is mortal.

A purely human subject stripped of all such conditions does not exist in concrete reality.

Human Precedence therefore does not weaken the human.

It returns the human to the concrete field through which human existence takes form.

A second proposition concerns the precedence of the body.

A person does not choose the entire body before birth.

The body precedes stable self-consciousness.

Before a child can explain the world through language, the body is already responding to it.

Temperature is felt.

Sound is felt.

Light is registered.

Touch matters.

Security and discomfort can be experienced bodily before they become explicit concepts.

Relation with the world therefore begins prior to the fully articulated self.

The body is one of the primary interfaces through which Human Precedence becomes visible.

The body distinguishes self and environment while also opening the self toward the environment.

Skin is a boundary.

It is also a surface of touch.

The ear receives sound from outside.

The eye receives light.

Breathing brings external air into bodily life.

Eating transforms what was outside the body into part of the body.

The bodily boundary is therefore not complete closure.

It is an open boundary.

Within Human Precedence, the body is not merely a tool owned by an already complete self.

It is one of the conditions through which selfhood becomes possible.

This bodily precedence connects Human Precedence with Self-Precedence.

The two concepts are related but not identical.

Human Precedence addresses the wider material, biological, environmental, historical, and cultural conditions that precede the stabilized human subject.

Self-Precedence addresses bodily sensation, orientation, gesture, affect, judgment, and generative possibility that remain active prior to a socially and linguistically stabilized self.

Human Precedence therefore forms a wider ground upon which Self-Precedence can be understood.

A third proposition concerns environmental precedence.

Environment is not simply a background placed around an already completed human being.

Environment participates in human formation.

Climate alters clothing.

Climate alters architecture.

Climate alters patterns of food and bodily practice.

Urban life and rural life produce different conditions of movement, sound, speed, visibility, distance, and encounter.

Environment does not merely contain action.

It enables action, limits action, and gives action direction.

In this sense, environment is a prior generative condition of human existence.

Human beings also act upon environments.

They build houses.

They establish roads.

They cultivate land.

They develop communication environments.

Once such environments are established, however, they act upon later people.

A generation that establishes a city and a generation born into that city do not occupy the same position.

For the earlier generation, the city can appear partly as a result.

For the later generation, the city appears partly as a prior condition.

Here a central structure of Generative Studies becomes visible.

A result becomes a later condition.

What has been generated participates in later generation.

Human Precedence places this circulation at the foundation of human existence.

A fourth proposition concerns material precedence.

Human beings alter materials, but they do not determine every material condition freely.

Wood has grain.

Stone has weight.

Metal has hardness.

Water moves.

Soil carries moisture.

Plants have patterns of growth.

These conditions are not identical to human intention.

In artistic practice, material is not simply passive.

Material can alter the direction of a work.

The condition of paint can alter expression.

The shape of wood can alter the method of production.

The growth of a branch can alter later pruning.

Terrain can alter architecture.

Weather can alter human plans.

Human beings therefore do not act upon a completely passive outside.

Outside conditions also shape human action.

This asymmetry is central to Human Precedence.

Material conditions affect possible human action before those conditions are fully interpreted.

A fifth proposition concerns the precedence of life.

Life does not wait for human recognition before it begins to live.

Plants grow without human observation.

Fungi remain active without human interpretation.

Animals inhabit sensory worlds that are not identical to human language.

Life proceeds prior to human meaning.

Human Precedence recognizes this generation of life that is not dependent upon human interpretation.

At the same time, the theory does not completely separate human life from nonhuman life.

People cultivate plants.

They live with animals.

They obtain food from living systems.

They alter ecosystems.

Nonhuman life also acts upon human life.

Microorganisms alter bodies.

Plants participate in food and environments.

Relations with animals can change emotion and everyday practice.

Human and nonhuman life therefore remain different while becoming conditions for one another.

Bonsai Heimat makes this structure especially visible.

Human beings intervene in plant growth.

They prune branches.

They provide water.

They alter placement.

Yet the plant also grows.

It responds to seasons.

It can become ill.

Branches extend.

Leaves fall.

Such changes alter the next human action.

The human is not the only generative participant.

Plant life and plant time participate as well.

Bonsai Heimat can therefore make Human Precedence visible through artistic practice.

A sixth proposition concerns temporal precedence.

Human beings measure time.

They use clocks.

They establish calendars.

They plan future activity.

Yet change takes place before human measurement.

Bodies age.

Plants grow.

Buildings deteriorate.

Memories change.

Wounds heal.

Death approaches.

Time does not begin with measurement.

The human is changed by time while also measuring it.

The human is therefore not only a subject who organizes time.

Human existence is also generated through temporal processes.

This gives rise to the phase difference of formal time and generative time.

An hour on a clock can be treated as an exchangeable unit.

An hour as lived reality does not always have the same density.

An hour of waiting can differ from an hour of artistic production.

An hour of bodily pain can differ from an hour spent with a loved person.

An hour close to death can carry another density again.

The formal measure can remain the same while generative experience differs.

Human Precedence includes this time that acts through bodies and reality prior to full formalization.

Such time includes irreversibility.

Today cannot be made completely identical to yesterday.

The body carries the history of yesterday.

Relations carry history.

Places carry history.

Reality therefore does not merely repeat.

It accumulates traces.

The human emerges within those traces.

A seventh proposition concerns the precedence of others.

A person is not born as a completely isolated self and only later enters relation.

From birth, human life already depends upon others.

Someone supports the body.

Someone provides food.

Someone gives a name.

Someone introduces language.

Someone offers protection.

Culture arrives through others.

The other is therefore not merely added after selfhood has already been completed.

Relation with others participates in the conditions of selfhood.

Yet the other cannot be reduced to part of the self.

The other retains difference.

This difference matters.

If the other were completely identical to the self, little genuinely new relation would emerge.

Difference allows the self to change.

Love can change the self.

Rejection can change the self.

Misunderstanding can change the self.

Trust can change the self.

Betrayal can change the self.

Silence and absence can also change the self.

Human Precedence recognizes otherness as a condition prior to complete self-sufficiency.

This provides one foundation for Co-Being.

Co-Being does not mean that self and other become one.

They remain distinct.

Reality takes form through their relation while difference remains.

An eighth proposition concerns linguistic precedence.

An individual does not invent an entire language before beginning to speak.

A person born into Japanese enters a world in which Japanese already exists.

The same applies to other languages.

The person learns words.

The person learns distinctions.

The person learns patterns of expression.

The person learns what can easily be said and what is difficult to express.

Through language, ways of dividing reality also take form.

The human therefore uses language while language also participates in shaping human thought.

This is one form of cultural precedence.

Language is not outside history.

Earlier generations formed and altered linguistic structures.

Once such structures exist, however, they become prior conditions for later people.

Later speakers alter language again.

Altered language passes onward.

Again, a generated result becomes a later generative condition.

The Theory of Language Derivatives approaches this circulation from another direction.

Language develops through reality and later acts upon reality.

From the perspective of Human Precedence, language externalized by earlier human lives becomes part of the world that precedes the present person.

A ninth proposition concerns cultural precedence.

A human being is not born into a completely empty cultural field.

Patterns of eating exist.

Ways of sitting exist.

Ways of greeting exist.

Forms of clothing exist.

Family structures exist.

Rituals exist.

Religious traditions exist.

Artistic traditions exist.

Architectural forms exist.

Money exists.

Social conventions exist.

Many such conditions precede the individual.

The individual receives culture.

Yet the individual does not only receive it passively.

A person can leave another mark.

A mark can be repeated.

Repeated structures can become Kata.

Kata can pass to other people.

Cultural transmission can then continue.

Culture is therefore both a prior condition and an ongoing generative process.

This is where Namelessness becomes important.

If a cultural form remains entirely enclosed within one individual intention, it has limited capacity to continue as shared culture.

When a form passes to others, undergoes repetition, changes through relation, and continues beyond its first maker, Namelessness can emerge.

Namelessness does not erase the maker.

It indicates that cultural generation is no longer closed within individual authorship.

From the perspective of Human Precedence, the Self-Externalization of earlier generations can become a prior condition for later human lives.

A tenth proposition concerns institutional precedence.

People establish institutions.

Yet many institutions already exist when an individual is born.

Family structures already exist.

Educational systems already exist.

States already exist.

Law already exists.

Money already exists.

Markets already exist.

Universities already exist.

Museums already exist.

Systems of scholarly recognition already exist.

A person does not choose all of these conditions before entering society.

The person enters a world in which they are already active.

Institutions influence which actions are possible.

They influence which actions receive recognition.

They influence what appears as valuable.

Institutions therefore act as prior social interfaces.

Yet institutions are not natural laws.

They are historical formations.

For this reason, people can act upon them again.

They can criticize them.

They can alter them.

They can establish different relations.

The human is therefore not only a passive result.

A person emerges within prior conditions and can later act upon those conditions.

Society changes through this circulation.

An eleventh proposition concerns technical precedence.

Technology arises through human activity.

Once it becomes established within society, however, it can become part of the environment inherited by later people.

Writing is inherited.

Paper is inherited.

Printing is inherited.

Railways are inherited.

Cars are inherited.

Telephones are inherited.

Television is inherited.

The internet is inherited.

Smartphones are inherited.

Artificial intelligence can also become part of this inherited technical environment.

People living now do not independently invent every technical condition before beginning everyday life.

They enter already technical environments.

Such environments can alter attention, bodily practice, movement, memory, communication, and access to knowledge.

Technology can therefore operate as a kind of second environment.

Smart Art approached this issue at an early stage.

Its concern is not only the advancement of technology.

The important question concerns how a human being encounters complex technical conditions through interfaces.

An interface can make technical complexity accessible.

At the same time, it can hide parts of that complexity from awareness.

Convenience becomes possible.

Another division of visibility also appears.

Some processes become easy to perceive.

Others become difficult to perceive.

Technical interfaces therefore participate in the formation of human reality.

A twelfth proposition concerns artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence does not emerge independently from human history.

Languages, images, knowledge, records, artistic forms, and cultural histories externalized through human activity become part of the conditions for artificial generation.

Once artificial systems enter social life, however, their outputs can act upon human writing, learning, artistic production, and judgment.

Cultural material externalized by humans returns through technical transformation.

A result becomes another condition.

This can also be understood as an expanded circulation of Self-Externalization.

Human beings and artificial intelligence do not need to be treated as identical.

Artificial systems do not possess the same bodily history as embodied human beings.

They do not share human mortality in the same way.

Their relation to locality and biological time is also different.

Human beings and artificial systems therefore have different generative conditions.

Difference does not prevent relation.

Phase difference can itself support unexpected generation.

A phrase produced through an artificial system can alter human thought.

A human question can alter the next artificial output.

Their contact can bring forth a relational condition that did not previously exist.

This is also a form of triadic generation within Interface Ontology.

A thirteenth proposition is that Human Precedence is not a simple rejection of anthropocentrism through another absolute center.

Criticism of human centrality does not require treating the human as worthless.

Nature does not need to replace humanity as a new absolute center.

Artificial intelligence does not need to replace humanity as a new absolute center.

Replacing one absolute center with another leaves the deeper structure unchanged.

Generative Studies questions the absolutization of any single phase.

Human existence has distinctive conditions.

Human beings have bodies.

They use language.

They inherit histories.

They engage in self-reflection.

They participate in ethics and culture.

They live with awareness of death.

They engage in artistic production.

They can take responsibility for other people.

These conditions should not be erased.

At the same time, material, biological, environmental, and technical conditions also participate in generation.

The important point is not to make one phase the sole ground of all reality.

Distinct phases can remain distinct and still enter relation.

Human Precedence takes this position.

A fourteenth proposition concerns the precedence of place.

A place is more than a coordinate.

It has terrain.

It has climate.

It has history.

It has architecture.

It has human relations.

It has institutions.

It has memory.

It has sound.

It has smell.

It has accumulated time.

People do not only use places.

Places also shape people.

The same person can act and feel differently according to the place in which life unfolds.

Place is therefore a prior relational field.

Sayama Aesthetics School makes this precedence of place visible through practice.

Architecture is present.

Locality is present.

Everyday life is present.

The historical geography involving Sayama Pond is present.

Visitors arrive.

Conversation occurs.

Artworks are present.

Meals take place.

People sleep.

Each event leaves history in the site.

A later visitor does not enter a completely empty condition.

The person enters a place that already carries accumulated relations.

Yet a later visitor can also alter the place.

Place and human existence therefore generate one another.

Again, precedence does not mean strict determination.

The place does not fully determine the person.

The person also acts upon the place.

The important structure is circulation.

A fifteenth proposition concerns death.

A person cannot complete personal death and afterward retain that completed event as an experience of the continuing self.

When one's own death is complete, the present self cannot preserve it as an ordinary lived memory.

Human experience of death therefore begins primarily through the death of others.

When another person dies, reality changes.

Someone who was present is absent.

Yet traces remain.

Photographs remain.

Words remain.

Places carry memory.

Bodily feeling remains.

The experience of an absent person who nevertheless remains active through traces shows that reality cannot be reduced to present physical presence alone.

Reality carries history.

Absence can act within relation.

Death also reveals an extreme limit to the attempt of the human subject to place everything under present control.

Human Precedence approaches death not as a simple failure of knowledge, but as a condition that reveals the finitude of human generation.

A person is born into a world that already existed.

The world continues after that person is gone.

This temporal asymmetry belongs to the foundation of Human Precedence.

A sixteenth proposition concerns the human as an inverse problem.

A person does not directly know every condition that participated in the formation of that person.

Family history prior to birth is not remembered directly.

The long history of language is not remembered directly.

The full history of culture is not remembered directly.

The history of bodily evolution is not available as personal memory.

The history of a place is not fully contained within individual experience.

The formation of technical environments is not fully present to the person who uses them.

Yet these conditions act upon present human existence.

The present human can therefore be approached as a result from which earlier generative conditions are reconsidered.

This has an inverse-problem structure.

The human is not only a cause.

The human is also a result.

From the result, one can investigate the conditions that made the present condition possible.

Such investigation does not produce a perfectly unique reconstruction.

Many histories overlap.

Some records are absent.

Some conditions remain outside awareness.

Human Precedence therefore rejects complete transparency of self-grounding.

A person does not fully possess every reason for being the person that exists now.

This lack of complete transparency is not simply a defect.

It indicates that the self emerges from a generative field wider than conscious self-knowledge.

A seventeenth proposition concerns ethics.

If the human is not the only origin of reality, immediate human interest cannot automatically become the sole standard of value.

Future generations matter.

Nonhuman life matters.

Places carry histories.

Cultural inheritance matters.

Other people cannot be reduced to present personal interest.

Human beings live within a world received from earlier conditions.

At the same time, present action leaves conditions for the future.

An altered environment becomes part of the world inherited by later people.

An institutional change can shape lives not yet born.

A widely adopted technology can become part of later everyday reality.

An artwork can enter future cultural memory.

The human is therefore both a receiver and a transmitter.

Responsibility emerges from this position.

Responsibility does not require complete prediction of every future consequence.

Such complete prediction is impossible.

Responsibility means recognizing that present action can become a prior condition for others.

Human Precedence therefore also contains a future-oriented structure.

What a person externalizes today can become part of the already existing world encountered by future beings.

An eighteenth proposition concerns felt reality and Reality Grounding.

Contemporary life often operates through highly abstract systems.

Numbers.

Evaluations.

Prices.

Rankings.

Institutions.

Language.

Information.

Algorithmic processes.

Such abstraction is necessary for many forms of social organization.

Yet when general abstraction becomes too strong, abstract structures can appear identical to reality itself.

Bodily sensation that is difficult to measure can appear weak.

The history of a place can appear secondary.

The felt presence of an absent person can appear irrational.

The slow time of plant growth can disappear from attention.

Small details of everyday life can lose visibility.

Human Precedence recalls that reality is already active prior to complete abstraction.

People feel before complete explanation.

They enter contact before complete evaluation.

Things exist before price.

Life proceeds before naming.

This awareness connects with Reality Grounding.

Grounding does not mean abandoning abstraction.

It means returning toward the concrete conditions from which abstraction developed.

This is also a movement from general abstraction toward particular concretization.

The circulation of these two forces prevents abstract structures from becoming completely detached from lived reality.

A nineteenth proposition concerns art.

Art is not only a completed object to which a human later gives meaning.

Artistic practice itself is contact with conditions that exceed prior intention.

Materials participate.

Chance participates.

Other people participate.

Places participate.

Time participates.

Bodies participate.

Plants can participate.

Technologies participate.

Institutions participate.

The artist does not know every result in advance.

Some understanding becomes possible only through making.

This structure corresponds with Human Precedence.

Art can preserve forms of contact that occur prior to complete human objectification.

Discomfort can act before explanation.

Attraction can act before explanation.

Allure can act before explanation.

Fear can act before explanation.

Touch can act before explanation.

Felt distance can act before explanation.

Such conditions can form a relation with an artwork before they become explicit concepts.

Art can therefore become an interface through which Human Precedence is experienced.

An artwork does not need to provide a final answer.

It can offer a condition through which a person becomes aware that the human is not the absolute center of every relation.

Something precedes the self.

Something acts before complete understanding.

Reality continues without complete human control.

A work can acquire a history beyond the intention of its maker.

The experience of this limit can itself become an artistic event.

A twentieth proposition concerns the position of Human Precedence within Generative Studies.

Generative Studies does not make the human its final ground.

It also does not erase the human.

Being takes form through relation.

Human existence also takes form through relation.

The self takes form through relation.

Workhood takes form through relation.

Culture takes form through relation.

What has been generated becomes a condition for later generation.

Human beings receive prior conditions.

They alter those conditions.

They externalize traces.

Those traces enter the world.

The altered world becomes part of the conditions received by later beings.

There is no need for one absolute first subject or one final completed result.

Generation continues.

The central proposition of Human Precedence can therefore be stated as follows.

The human is not the unconditional origin of the world.

Before a person understands the self as human, materiality, environment, body, otherness, life, time, language, culture, institutions, technology, place, and history are already active.

The human emerges within this relational field.

Yet the human does not remain only a passive result.

Once formed, human beings act upon prior conditions.

They alter environments.

They leave language.

They develop tools.

They alter institutions.

They produce artworks.

They form relations with others.

They leave these results within the world.

What has been generated through human action can then become a prior condition for later existence.

Human Precedence therefore does not negate the human.

It relocates the human from the position of a sovereign observer outside the world to the position of a generative participant within the world.

The human is neither the first cause nor the final endpoint.

Human existence receives a world that precedes it, alters that world through relation, and passes an altered world toward what comes next.

In this sense, the human is itself a generative interface within a reality that began before it and will continue beyond it.

Keywords

Human Precedence; human; relational priority; body; environment; materiality; life; otherness; time; nonhuman; technology; culture; generation; anthropocentrism