8/9/2019 Anti Humanism

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/anti-humanism 1/4

Antihumanism

Not to be confused with anti-human sentiment .

In social theory and philosophy , antihumanism (oranti-humanism ) is a theory that is critical of tradi-tional humanism and traditional ideas about humanityand the human condition .[1] Central to antihumanism isthe view that concepts of " human nature ", “man”, or“humanity”, should be rejected as historically relative ormetaphysical .[2]

1 Origins

In the late 18th and 19th centuries, the philosophy ofhumanism was a cornerstoneof the Enlightenment . Fromthe belief in a universal moral core of humanity it fol-lowed that all persons are inherently free and equal. Forliberal humanists such as Kant , the universal law ofreason was a guide towards total emancipation from anykind of tyranny. [3]

Criticism of humanism being over-idealistic swiftly be-

gan in the 19th Century. For Friedrich Nietzsche , hu-manism was nothing more than an empty gure of speech[4] - a secular version of theism . He argues in Genealogyof Morals that human rights exist as a means for the weakto constrain the strong; as such, they deny rather than fa-cilitate emancipation of life. [5] Nevertheless the authorClaude Pavur in a book called Nietzsche Humanist arguesthat “there are excellent ground for reading Nietzsche rstand foremost as a humanist”. [6]

The young Karl Marx is sometimes considered ahumanist, [7] as opposed to the mature Marx who becamemore forceful in his criticism of human rights as idealist

or utopian . Given that capitalism forces individuals tobehave in a prot-seeking manner, they are in constantconict with one another, and are thus in need of rights toprotect themselves. Human rights, Marx believed, were aproduct of the very dehumanisation they were intended tooppose. True emancipation, he asserted, could only comethrough the establishment of communism , which abol-ishes the private ownership of all means of production. [8]

In the 20th century, the view of humans as rationally au-tonomous was challenged by Sigmund Freud , who be-lieved humans to be largely driven by unconscious irra-tional desires. [9]

Martin Heidegger viewed humanism as a metaphysi-cal philosophy that ascribes to humanity a universalessence and privileges it above all other forms of exis-

tence. For Heidegger, humanism takes consciousness asthe paradigm of philosophy, leading it to a subjectivismand idealism that must be avoided. Like Hegel beforehim, Heidegger rejected the Kantian notion of autonomy ,pointing out that humans were social and historical be-ings, as well as Kant’s notion of a constituting conscious-ness. Heidegger nevertheless retains links both to hu-manism and to existentialism despite his efforts to dis-tance himself from both in the “Letter on Humanism”(1947). [10]

2 Positivism and “scientism”

Positivism is a philosophy of science based on the viewthat in the social as well as natural sciences , informationderived from sensory experience , and logical and math-ematical treatments of such data, are together the exclu-sive source of all authoritative knowledge. [11] Positivismassumes that there is valid knowledge (truth) only in sci-entic knowledge. [12] Obtaining and verifying data thatcan be received from the senses is known as empiricalevidence .[11] This view holds that society operates ac-cording to general laws like the physical world. Intro-spective and intuitional attempts to gain knowledge arerejected. Though the positivist approach has been a re-current theme in the history of Western thought, [13] theconcept was developed in the modern sense in the early19th century by the philosopher and founding sociolo-gist, Auguste Comte .[14] Comte argued that society op-erates according to its own quasi-absolute laws, much asthe physical world operates according to gravity and otherabsolute laws of nature. [15]

Humanist thinker Tzvetan Todorov has identied withinmodernity a trend of thought which emphasizes scienceand within it tends towards a deterministic view of theworld. He clearly identies positivist theorist AugusteComte as an important proponent of this view. [16] ForTodorov " Scientism does not eliminate the will but de-cides that since the results of science are valid for every-one, this will must be something shared, not individual.In practice, the individual must submit to the collectiv-ity, which “knows” better than he does.” The autonomyof the will is maintained, but it is the will of the group,not the person...scientism has ourished in two very dif-ferent political contexts...The rst variant of scientism

was put into practice by totalitarian regimes.” [17] A sim-ilar criticism can be found in the work associated withthe 'Frankfurt School ' of social research. Antipositivism

1

8/9/2019 Anti Humanism

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/anti-humanism 2/4

2 6 SEE ALSO

would be further facilitated by rejections of ' scientism ';or science as ideology. Jürgen Habermas argues, in hisOn the Logic of the Social Sciences (1967), that “the posi-tivist thesis of unied science, which assimilates all thesciences to a natural-scientic model, fails because ofthe intimate relationship between the social sciences andhistory, and the fact that they are based on a situation-specic understanding of meaning that can be explicatedonly hermeneutically ... access to a symbolically prestruc-tured reality cannot be gained by observation alone.” [18]

3 Structuralism

Structuralism was developed in post-war Paris as a re-sponse to the perceived contradiction between the freesubject of philosophy and the determined subject of the

human sciences;[19]

and drew on thesystematic linguisticsof Saussure for a view of language and culture as a con-ventional system of signs preceding the individual sub-ject’s entry into them. [20]

Lévi-Strauss in anthropology systematised a structuralistanalysis of culture in which the individual subject dis-solved into a signifying convention; [21] the semiologicalwork of Roland Barthes (1977) decried the cult of theauthor and indeed proclaimed his death; while Lacan 'sstructuralist psychoanalysis inevitably led to a similar di-minishment of the concept of the autonomous individual:“man with a discourse on freedom which must certainly

be called delusional...produced as it is by an animal at themercy of language”. [22]

Taking a lead from Brecht 's twin attack on bourgeoisand socialist humanism, [23] Marxist philosopher LouisAlthusser coined the term “antihumanism” in an attackagainst Marxist humanists , whose position he considereda revisionist movement. Althusser considered “structure”and “social relations” to have primacy over individualconsciousness , opposing the philosophy of the subject. [24]

For Althusser, the beliefs, desires, preferences and judge-ments of the human individual are the product of socialpractices, as society moulds the individual in its own im-

age through its ideologies .For Marxist humanists such as Georg Lukács , revolu-tion was contingent on the development of the class con-sciousness of an historical subject, the proletariat . In op-position to this, Althusser’s antihumanism downplays therole of human agency in the process of history.

4 Post-structuralism and decon-struction

Post-structuralists such as Michel Foucault and JacquesDerrida rejected structuralism’s insistence on xed mean-ing, its privileging of a meta-linguistic standpoint; [25] but

continued all the more to problematize the human sub-ject, favoring the term “the decenter-ed subject” whichimplies the absence of human agency. Derrida, ar-guing that the fundamentally ambiguous nature of lan-guage makes intention unknowable, attacked Enlighten-ment perfectionism, and condemned as futile the exis-tentialist quest for authenticity in the face of the all-embracing network of signs. He stressed repeatedly that“the subject is not somemeta-linguistic substance or iden-tity, some pure cogito of self-presence; it is always in-scribed in language”. [26]

Foucault challenged the foundational aspects of En-lightenment humanism, [27] as well as their strate-gic implications, arguing that they either producedcounter-emancipatory results directly, or matched in-creased “freedom” with increased and disciplinarynormatization. [28]

His anti-humanist scepticism extended to attempts toground theory in human feeling, as much as in humanreason, maintaining that both were historically contingentconstructs, rather than the universals humanism main-tained.

5 Cultural examples

The heroine of the novel Nice Work begins by deningherself as a semiotic materialist, “a subject position in aninnite web of discourses - the discourses of power, sex,

family, science, religion, poetry, etc.”[29]

Charged withtaking a bleak deterministic view, she retorts, “antihu-manist, yes; inhuman, no...the truly determined subject ishe who is not aware of the discursive formations that de-termine him”. [30] However, with greater life-experience,she comes closer to accepting that post-structuralism isan intriguing philosophical game, but probably meaning-less to those who have not yet even gained awareness ofhumanism itself. [31]

6 See also

• Anti-foundationalism

• Antimaterialism

• Humanism

• New Historicism

• Marx’s theory of human nature

• Modernism

• Nancy Fraser

• Postmodernism

• Stanley Fish

• Structural Marxism

8/9/2019 Anti Humanism

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/anti-humanism 3/4

3

7 References

[1] J. Childers/G. Hentzi eds., The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (1995) p. 140-1

[2] Childers, p. 100

[3] Childers, p. 95-6

[4] Tony Davies, Humanism (1997) p. 37

[5] Genealogy of Morals III:14

[6] Claude Pavur. Nietzsche Humanist . Marquette UniversityPress, 1998

[7] Marxist Humanism

[8] Karl Marx On the Jewish Question (1843)

[9] Peter Gay, Freud (1989) p. 449

[10] What becomes of the Human after Humanism?

[11] John J. Macionis, Linda M. Gerber, “Sociology”, SeventhCanadian Edition, Pearson Canada

[12] Jorge Larrain (1979) The Concept of Ideology p.197 , quo-tation:

one of the features of positivism is pre-cisely its postulate that scientic knowledgeis the paradigm of valid knowledge, a postu-late that indeed is never proved nor intendedto be proved.

[13] Cohen, Louis; Maldonado, Antonio (2007). “Research

Methods In Education”. British Journal of Educational Studies (Routledge ) 55 (4): 9. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8527.2007.00388_4.x ..

[14] Sociology Guide. “Auguste Comte” . Sociology Guide.

[15] Macionis, John J. (2012). Sociology 14th Edition. Boston:Pearson. p. 11. ISBN 978-0-205-11671-3 .

[16] Tzvetan Todorov. The Imperfect Garden. Princeton Uni-versity Press. 2001. Pg. 20

[17] Tzvetan Todorov. The Imperfect Garden. Princeton Uni-versity Press. 2001. Pg. 23

[18] Outhwaite, William, 1988 Habermas: Key ContemporaryThinkers, Polity Press (Second Edition 2009), ISBN 978-0-7456-4328-1 p.22

[19] Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (2005) p. 332

[20] R. Appignanesi/C. Garratt, Postmodernism for Beginners(1995) p. 56-60

[21] Appiganesi, p. 66-7

[22] Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (1997) p. 216 and p.264

[23] M. Hardt/K. Weeks eds., The Jameson Reader (2005) p.150

[24] Simon Choat, Marx through Post-Structuralism (2010) p.17

[25] Appignanesi, p. 76-9

[26] Quoted in John D. Caputo, The Tears and Prayers of Jacques Derrida (1997) p. 349

[27] G. Gutting ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (2003) p. 384

[28] Gutting, p. 277

[29] David Lodge , Nice Work (1988) p. 21-2

[30] Lodge, p. 22

[31] Lodge, p. 153 and p. 225

8 Further reading

• Roland Barthes, Image: Music: Text (1977)

• Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1966)

• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1977)

• Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” (1947)reprinted in Basic Writings

• Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” (1843)reprinted in Early Writings

• Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals(1887)

• Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism that is not Human-ist (2010)

9 External links

• James Hearteld, Postmodernism and the ‘Death ofthe Subject’

8/9/2019 Anti Humanism

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/anti-humanism 4/4

4 10 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

10 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

10.1 Text• Antihumanism Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antihumanism?oldid=654264818 Contributors: Skysmith, JasCollins, Banno, Jfd-

wolff, Benw, Karol Langner, Zenohockey, Pearle, Woohookitty, Jshadias, Hanshans23, Bhny, Retired username, Anetode, Morgan Leigh,Thevmail, Rhwentworth, SmackBot, Zazaban, AgentFade2Black, Fuhghettaboutit, Savidan, Adamarthurryan, Navidnak, Byelf2007, SantaSangre, Mr. Here, JoeBot, RookZERO, CmdrObot, Smoove Z, Shanoman, Alaibot, Bobblehead, Transhumanist, Car54, Zahakiel,NewEnglandYankee, CA387, Tomsega, Struway, Jacks.place1, SummerWithMorons, Saddhiyama, SPECVLVMSINCERVS, Niceguyedc,Sirius85, SoxBot III, XLinkBot, Addbot, Lightbot, Geistsucher~enwiki, Jarble, Yobot, Eduen, AnomieBOT, Worldsgreen2012, J04n, Om-nipaedista, Yejiel19, FrescoBot, Baucham, Arman Cagle, Jacobisq, Mcc1789, ClueBot NG, BG19bot, AK456, Asisman, BreakfastJr andAnonymous: 69

10.2 Images• File:HumanismSymbol.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/HumanismSymbol.svg License: GFDL Con-

tributors: Own work utilizando ésta imagen Original artist: Andres Rojas

• File:Text_document_with_red_question_mark.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Text_document_with_red_question_mark.svg License: Public domain Contributors: Created by bdesham with Inkscape; based upon Text-x-generic.svgfrom the Tango project. Original artist: Benjamin D. Esham ( bdesham )

10.3 Content license• Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0