Oh the humanity!

Elliot talks about the little things we all do to “improve” ourselves. Like buying the nicer clothing, or a more expensive car, doing the little superficial things to make us better versions of ourselves. I certainly do it. I pick out my outfits to be hide the parts of my body I'm less fond of, I wear makeup nearly everyday and color my hair, I even go tanning every once and a while if I feel like I'm getting too pale. On the days where I haven't done any of those things, I look in the mirror and feel like I don't look like myself. Hardly anyone would fault me for the little things I do, most people do the same, but the question then becomes, how far is too far? When does it stop being what makeup artists call an “enhancement” of ourselves, and start being something else?

Look at Heidi Montag (yes, I watched “The Hills” and read the occasional tabloid. Don't judge.) She had ten plastic surgeries recently to become what she calls her most beautiful self, but she's had so many plastic surgeries done already (she's only 23) that I would hardly say she looks human. Certainly not natural. Arguably she's gone to some very extreme lengths to make herself look better than any human would, but will it ever be enough? Eventually, even Heidi will get old. Even with the lip injections and the enormous breast implants, the nose jobs and the cheek bone implants, she'll age and her face will show it. With each year she will get older, and, most likely, she will get more and more surgeries to be less and less human as it happens. But is it worth it? No one would be tricked into thinking that Joan Rivers is still 20, so what's so wrong with simply looking like a normal person?

Even our art strives to be something better. Dziga Vertov is famous for the kino-eye movement; for writing that man's eye is incapable of doing what the camera's eye can. With the camera, Vertov was capable of showing us a world better than we were able to see ourselves. Yet this world we watch, no matter how mechanical and superior, we still watch with human eyes. Even if we do get plastic lenses that can see the world better than ours, it is still the human brain that converts these superior images into meaning. Feldman writes that Vertov worked in a time “when there was still hope for a totally scientific understanding of the human experience” (from The Man with The Movie Camera), but when we are forced to understand the world with a human brain, can we ever really know it from anything outside the human experience?

So are we trying to run away from our own humanity? Marx and Engels write in The German Ideology that science and man are inseparable. There is no history of science that must not first be looked at as the history of man. So is this goal we are striving for even possible? To be able to see the world through inhuman eyes? Would that somehow be better than the falable, flawed eyes, the eyes that can only see what our brain is able to understand? Are we trying, through our desperate desire to make our selves better than human, to take away that which makes us what we are: our humanity? I guess the final question has to be, if we truly can make ourselves better than human, will we still be human at all?