What is “Human”? | Blade Runner & Wittgenstein: On the Definition of Humanity
a Short Essay for the Modern Existentialist
Rick Deckard is a blade runner—a cop whose job it is to track down and decommission rogue replicants: bio-engineered, synthetic lifeforms designed to resemble human beings as closely as physically possible. Coerced out of retirement for one last big job, Deckard is a classic noir detective tasked with hunting down a group of fugitive Nexus 6s—the newest generation of replicant, now so advanced that they’re virtually indistinguishable from real, actual people.
And so, the question with which our Blade Runner must grapple… is this:
1 | Humanity as Essence
Deckard is taken down to the station, where he’s brought up to speed on the case. He’s told that there’s a group of these replicants which have broken protocol and illegally returned to earth from their faraway stations in space. From there, he’s sent to visit the Tyrell Corporation—the designers and manufacturers of these replicants—to examine a Nexus 6 so that he can establish a baseline and find out what exactly it is that he’s going to be dealing with.
Upon arrival, Deckard is greeted by a young woman named Rachael—a deeply-involved employee of the organization, and something like Eldon Tyrell’s protégé or assistant. Deckard shares a tense exchange with her before Tyrell himself appears.
Tyrell: Is this to be an empathy test? Capillary dilation of the so-called blush response? Fluctuation of the pupil. Involuntary dilation of the iris.
Deckard: We call it Voight-Kampf for short.
Tyrell requests that Deckard first perform the Voight-Kampf test on Rachael so that he can see what it looks like when the test is done on a human. Then, he says, they’ll bring out the Nexus 6. After an unusually long testing process, however, Deckard concludes that Rachael is actually a replicant—a replicant which doesn’t know that it’s one, but actually believes that it’s human.
Tyrell confirms his analysis, telling Deckard that Rachael is a Nexus 6 which has been implanted with someone else’s memories, thus grounding her and anchoring her to a human existence. Memory allows Rachael to believe that she has a past—that she was born and has lived an entire life as a human being. She was made to believe that she is human—however, Tyrell says, she has begun to suspect that something may not be quite right.
Upon discovering that Rachael is, in fact, a replicant, we can see that Deckard’s demeanor immediately changes. He seems suddenly disgusted—offended, as though he believes that Tyrell’s creation of something so close to human, yet still, so basically clearly not, makes a mockery of the very concept of humanity itself. Deckard is automatically convinced at face-value that Rachael isn’t human because she was built, not born—and, therefore, doesn’t possess human essence—that thing which makes all humans innately and inherently people. But even beyond that, he’s disturbed and confused; unnerved by the fact that, without the time and equipment necessary to complete the incredibly complex and time-consuming Voight-Kampf test, even he himself—a professional blade runner, who has spent his entire career hunting these… things—would never have been able to tell the difference.
And, if he couldn’t… then who could?
2 | Humanity as Behavior
Deckard returns to his apartment after a long night on the job. He’s accosted by Rachael in his elevator, and she follows him back to his apartment. She tells him that Tyrell has cast her aside and won’t see her—that she doesn’t know why he told Deckard what he did, because… obviously it couldn’t be true. Deckard, knowing that Tyrell now considers her to be an experiment which has failed to pass as human, is alarmed by her uncanny human likeness. He avoids her, attempting to return to his apartment and shutting the door behind him because, where at first he saw a beautiful, intelligent young woman, now he sees only a “skin-job”—a replicant. A fake, and a hollow shell akin to a walking corpse with no soul. When he looks at her, he sees nothing more than a bio-machine; a body composed only of behaviors—a being… without the human inside.
But then… he lets her in.
Rachael attempts to prove her humanity, showing Deckard a picture of her mother. Deckard proves to Rachael instead that her past has been implanted—that her memories were taken from Tyrell’s niece and given to her. Her past and her memories—her humanity is a sham. And so, she begins to cry.
Deckard, now unsure of what to do, apologizes and tells her to forget about it. He tells her that he made a bad joke, and that she should just go home—but, clearly, it’s already too late.
He knows that she’s a skin-job—a replicant. That she’s not human—not real. But when he looks at her—when he watches the way that she moves and acts and grieves—he can see nothing but the visage of a young woman mourning the loss of her own humanity.
…
Deckard begins Blade Runner as a Cartesian Dualist—that is, he first believes in the separation of body and soul. He believes that there’s some kind of innate essence—an animating spirit or incorporeal life-force which separates the real from the skinjob; the human… from the replicant. Replicants, therefore, are not and can never be human because they lack this essential component. While they may possess bodies which are virtually identical to those of real humans, there is nothing which inhabits them. Without that essence—without a soul—they remain nothing more than a set of simple behaviors coded into the husk of a bio-machine.
Rachael, however, is a perfect replica—she behaves exactly like a human being down to the very minute, basically-indistinguishable details. She appears to feel and react with the same actions and emotions that you’d expect to see from anyone who’d suddenly discovered that their life was a lie, their existence a sham, and that they were never really even human at all.
And so, if nobody can really tell the difference—if Rachael acts just like a real human being—then what really is the difference?
3 | Humanity as Performance
Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein would say… that there is no difference.
Through coming to know and growing close to Rachael, Deckard arrives at the realization that behavior is expressive of mind.
From a Wittgensteinian perspective, to claim that behavior is expressive of mind is just to say that:
The way in which something does or doesn’t act, move, or behave in the world… would seem to clearly indicate—or express—whether or not it’s driven by a mind.
In my opinion, I think that the most interesting question to come out of the analysis of Blade Runner isn’t so much “Is Deckard a replicant?”, or “Do humans have souls?”, or even “What if we’re all actually replicants, but we just don’t know it?”. Instead, the question which most interests me is one which addresses all of the above—and that is this:
Would it really even matter either way?
To paraphrase Wittgenstein:
If it walks like a man and it talks like a man, then what is the functional difference between it and a man?
Why does it matter if Deckard is a replicant? Does it really matter if humans have souls? What functional difference would it make if we were all actually replicants—because wouldn’t that just mean that replicants and humans are just practically the same thing?
After all, regardless of whether any of us possess naturally-born or artificially-created bodies, it still stands to reason that human status is not an inherent quality that belongs to anyone—but instead, that it’s only ever something which is acknowledged in us by other people.
We are not human by birthright—but instead, because we make each other so.
We are made human through the recognition of other people, and their acknowledgement of our performance. We become human… because we pass as human beings.
And so, the only coherent answer which we can offer to our question is this—that:
It doesn’t matter, and there is no difference—no functional distinction between a being which is human and one which perfectly performs humanity, because to be human is, in itself, only to perform humanity. There could be only an essential distinction—a difference in what we believe about that not-yet-human individual; and, once even that belief has fallen away, there can be no reason left to doubt that person’s humanity.
To be human is nothing more than just to seem human. Seeming—appearance, and appearing-ness—is the only existence which we can know. The actual—the essence and the “truly-true truth”—is something that we can only posit; which we theorize, but of which we can’t possess anything close to absolute knowledge.
We can’t know for certain that anybody we walk past on the street is a real, conscious human being, and not just some kind of skin-job fake—but… does it really matter? All we can know is that they act human—that they appear to possess conscious self-awareness—and thus, that it only really makes sense for us to just… assume that they are for so long as they continue to demonstrate their humanity.
After all; behavior… is expressive of mind.
