Hoping to Be There When the End Comes

Jeffrey L. Kosky considers Mark C. Taylor’s “After the Human: A Philosophy for the Future.”

By Jeffrey L. KoskyAugust 15, 2025

• Philosophy & Religion

THE END OF LIFE on earth is a certainty, human extinction an inevitability. At some point in the future, the sun will burn out, and as it dies, it will expand, incinerating the earth and all the life it sustains, including the human. Going about our daily lives, we do not live in this certainty, and do not think the thought of the end of humanity. It is so far away—not even a remote possibility. When it comes, we assume, technological wizardry will have already solved the problem. We applaud and richly reward the tech moguls who promise they will save us from our end. We can colonize Mars, they say, or live on a spacecraft.

What we see is not the certainty of humanity’s possible end but a collapsing sun and the triumph of the human that escapes it thanks to a command of technologies. The notion that spacemen might not be men, the saved not that which is in need of saving, is passed over thoughtlessly. We don’t give much thought to the end of the human, and these dreams of technological self-salvation support our avoidance. There is, I think, a despair in that thoughtlessness, a despair that fails to take humanity up all the way to its end. Leaving the planet on which we find ourselves being human would be a desperate act of despair at being human.

Another despairing thought of the end of the human is also common. It is found especially in young people who express resigned worries about the end they see in an imploding world order, global outbreaks of disease, and, above all, climate collapse. Their despair is understandable. There is no future, they say. The certain end appears to them in a present that is not so distant as the solar burnout—it’s already here. Many join the growing movement of anti-birthers, those who have resolved not to have children. When asked, they say that their reasons are ethical: to save unborn humans from suffering life on an earth already at its end or, more grandly, to save the earth and its inhabitants from suffering a humanity that has laid it waste. Either way, there is no future possibility for the human, and they have resolved to a desperate act of living in accordance with this actuality.

It takes no small measure of courage to resist despair and think the end of humanity—no small measure of hope to think the end of humanity and not despair. Mark C. Taylor does just that, however, in his new book After the Human. Where some might see the title as cause for despair, the work is the opposite: a courageous summoning of hope. To think what comes or remains after the human is indeed to think the end of human being by thinking beyond it. But it may very well be that hope for humanity depends on thinking an “after the human,” for the human that thinks itself unsurpassable is laying waste the earth on which the human depends. The book does, after all, bear the subtitle “A Philosophy for the Future.” One thing “for” means is pro—“for the sake of,” or “in favor of.” After the Human favors the future; it is thinking that keeps open the future. Being human has a future when we think there will be an end to human being, for the human being who thoughtlessly imagines its dominion to be infinite will destroy the conditions on which it depends.

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Taylor’s is not an easy hope, nor is it reassuring. It is not based on something—either about us or about God, the gods, or their technological placeholders—that gives confidence we can make a future for ourselves. It does not come from defining or establishing something special about human beings so as to argue for the preservation of this trait and the exceptional being it defines. To the contrary, After the Human considers attempts to define and establish human exceptionality to be the problem and efforts to secure and preserve the essence of human being to be self-defeating and destructive. Giving up anthropocentrism is the way beyond the Anthropocene, Taylor says, and that way opens the future of human being.

If his hope is based on anything, it is on a radical relationalism first conceived in the philosophical circles of late 18th-century Jena, Germany, according to Taylor, and then later confirmed by what cutting-edge sciences of the 20th and 21st centuries say about reality and the structure of the world. Each of the chapters in After the Human takes up one or several of these topics in a stunning display of erudition showing that, from the subatomic level to the cosmic, the real is relational all the way down, and all the way up. Every life-form, the human not excepted, is entangled (quantum physics), enmeshed (information sciences), enamored (Nietzsche), relative (Einstein), and not so different from other living beings that also feel, think, and even communicate (acoustic biology; mycology).

These are, for me, surprising teachings of hope. Many of us, educated in a simple version of post-Heideggerian thinking about technology, imagine that modern science belongs to the human subject’s rise to a position of mastery and control. Taylor sees instead that the sciences tell of a world characterized by “coemergence,” “codependence,” and a thoroughly “relational ontology [that] entails a relativistic epistemology.” Anthropocentrism is rejected by the best of science, as is any claim to independent or autonomous beings existing on the basis of themselves. “[W]e are plagued by oppositional ideologies in a radically relational world,” Taylor writes. They tear us apart by tearing the fabric of the world in which we are woven. Contemporary science tells of another world.

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In many ways, the central argument of the book pursues a thesis inherited from the author’s father, Noel A. Taylor: “Man and all other living things must learn to live together,” a line that serves as an epigraph to the book. Taylor teaches readers his father’s lesson by immersing himself in the writings of philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, but also by studying leading scientists and experts in a range of fields, from quantum mechanics, astrophysics, and information theory to organismic biology and ecology. A point Nietzsche makes in one of the uncollected fragments of his writing—a thing is nothing without its effect on other things; there is no thing-in-itself—holds true at every level of reality, according to the sciences.

Taylor’s is Big Philosophy, and maybe even Meta-Metanarrative—written at a cultural moment that may be passing, one that currently suspects every metanarrative of silencing marginalized identities and avoids philosophical grandeur and system-building in favor of speaking with a critical voice and of specialized problems. As with Big History, an emerging field of study that integrates the story of the cosmos, earth, life, and humanity in a comprehensive narrative in which human being is not the protagonist, Taylor’s Big Philosophy is integrative, constructive, and not anthropocentric. Integration and system-building, however, do not mean dissolution of difference. This “philosophy for the future” insists that differences appear in the relation of parts to the whole of which they are a part, as well as to each of the parts. Differences are not apart from the whole, are not stand-alone parts or things-in-themselves, but emerge in relatedness.

It is Hegel who formulates the principle of relationality best, according to Taylor. After describing this theory in the opening chapters, Taylor turns to contemporary sciences to confirm, empirically as it were, what Hegel conceived: that reality in each of its domains (from the quantum through the organismic and ecological to the systemic and cosmic) is radically relational. From a philosopher’s standpoint, Taylor’s move is fascinating: he is doing Hegel in reverse; to progress back to nature discovered by natural science is to do reverse philosophy. But more than that, it’s a daring recovery—primarily because Hegel is a favorite whipping boy of postmodernist deconstructions, postcolonial critiques, and postindustrial politics, but also because of Taylor’s own longtime engagement with Hegel’s greatest challenger, Søren Kierkegaard.

Taylor often says that his thinking is strung out between Hegel and Kierkegaard, the both/and of the former and the either/or of the latter. In After the Human, it is Hegel who emerges as the intellectual forefather, while Kierkegaard is placed within the anthropocentric tradition, in a lineage that runs from Descartes’s truth as certainty of self-presence to Kierkegaardian truth as subjectivity. Taylor is not wrong in this reading, but he overlooks what in my opinion is a valuable direction that could come out of thinking truth as subjectivity. If it means that I find myself involved in the truth, that I am implicated in it, that what is true touches on or affects me too, the subjectivity of truth might be needed if we are to be moved to action.

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Taylor’s father’s words return at the end of the book, this time as he recounts telling them to his grandson Jackson, who—sitting with his “morfar” (Taylor, that is) one afternoon, drinking lemonade on the porch overlooking the mountains across the valley—speculated that things would be better off without human beings.

Intimate moments like this punctuate the book. Amid the meticulous accounts of science and philosophy, Taylor includes personal stories about sick friends, his brother’s death, and his mother’s melancholy. Superficial readers will take these to be digressions, but they are more than that. The personal stories indicate that the information Taylor shares with us, the knowledge he has produced, the ideas he has formed—all this matters deeply, to him, to us, and to others, for it belongs to a life lived by a particular person. These are not simply facts but facts of life; they appear in a life where things are personal, even when also “objective,” “factual,” and “scientific.” The personal stories tell of the lives that are at stake in that life. On both sides of our research, that of the scholar and that of the subject matter, there are lives at issue in the production of knowledge. In this case, the personal stories tell me that Taylor’s hope comes with the recognition that there is more than enough about life to justify hopelessness; despair can easily seem the logical conclusion to be drawn from the facts. Hope is not easy, therefore, nor always logical. Wisdom knows that hope comes with effort and attention to practices that sustain it, even though there is no guarantee it will be fulfilled.

One of those practices is the intergenerational transmission of care we see Taylor engaged in with his grandson. Intrigued by Jackson’s declaration that things would be better off without human beings, Taylor, ever the teacher giving assignments, asks him to write an essay explaining why the end of humanity would be good for the earth and the living beings on it. Taylor finds himself challenged and at a loss to respond to a nine-year-old who seems already committed to the cause of the anti-humanists for whom swearing off birth is at the top of their list of action items. Thinking the end of humanity as that thought is presented to him by a child, Taylor recalls the rock at the entrance to a nature preserve in Westfield, New Jersey, named for his own father. It is a memorial to the great-grandfather who died before Jackson was born. A photograph of it is included in the book in which Taylor responds to Jackson, whose reading skills in the present are not capable of grasping it. On the rock are Noel Taylor’s words: “Man and all other living things must learn to live together.”

This is a telling moment. It speaks softly to the intent and import of what the book gives us to think. In the midst of thinking the certainty of the end, we find an act of hope in the intergenerational transmission that sustains the future. Taylor gives to his grandson the memory of his own father in the hope that Jackson will take that memory on into the future, extending his own memory beyond him. Will it work? He can only hope. Jackson will live beyond him. Whether his project succeeds, Taylor will never know. Taylor also gives to Jackson a future, a future he, Jackson, has foreclosed in his despair but now receives from his grandfather in the form of a past to sustain. He has never known his great-grandfather; the past he has been given is incomprehensible to him, the memory immemorable, yet it lives on into the future only with him, his memory now including what he never knew. In sum, Taylor has given Jackson a future to care for by giving him a past he never knew. It is all the better that this past is incomprehensible to him, for he is not beholden to its wishes and has a lifetime and beyond to figure out its significance.

Will Jackson succeed? Most of us will never know the answer, for we will be dead long before him. He will never know either, for the past he cares for is incomprehensible to him, the memory of a great-grandfather whom he never knew. Nobody will ever know, really, for his success entails passing it on to the generations living on beyond him. One can only hope this quiet scene of intergenerational transmission is enough.

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The sun will die and, in its death throes, incinerate the earth on which the human depends. The techno-saviors do not believe there will be an end, and I believe they are driving us to destruction before our end arrives. Others think the end is already here and have given up on a future when it will arrive. Mark Taylor’s After the Human calls us to ask another question, a more hopeful one: what is to be done so that human being can make it to its end? It is a strange hope that hopes to be there in a future when the end comes.