Robert Burns and the Inhuman

Abstract A great deal of modern thought has been devoted to questions concerning the limits of our humanity. The ‘nonhuman’, for example, is a category referring to creatures other than humans; the ‘posthuman’ invokes beings who will persist after humans, or at least after inherited concepts of the human have run their course. Robert Burns helps us engage a third category of inquiry: the ‘inhuman’. The inhuman critically engages how our societies shape us, often to adverse ends, even as it invokes alternative ways of being. ‘To a Louse’ and ‘Death and Dr Hornbook. A True Story’ reveal Burns’s satirical but sober assessment of human possibility in a society of Enlightenment progress, or ‘improvement’, that falls short of its own ideals. While these poems do not present concrete alternatives to the moral and socioeconomic problems they identify, the nuances attending their energetic presentation suggest a degree of sustained optimism in other people, our societies, and ourselves.