Product Code Database
In social theory and philosophy, antihumanism or anti-humanism is a theory that is critical of traditional humanism, traditional ideas about humanity and the human condition.J. Childers/G. Hentzi eds., The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (1995) p. 140-1 Central to antihumanism is the view that philosophical anthropology and its concepts of "human nature", "man" or "humanity" should be rejected as historically relative, Ideology or Metaphysics.Childers, p. 100
Criticism of humanism as over-idealistic began in the 19th century. For Friedrich Nietzsche, humanism was nothing more than an empty figure of speechTony Davies, Humanism (1997) p. 37 – a secular version of theism. Max Stirner expressed a similar position in his book The Ego and Its Own, published several decades before Nietzsche's work. Nietzsche argues in Genealogy of Morals that human rights exist as a means for the weak to constrain the strong; as such, they do not facilitate the emancipation of life, but instead deny it.
The young Marx is sometimes considered an antihumanist, as he rejected the idea of human rights as a symptom of the very dehumanization they were intended to oppose. Given that capitalism forces individuals to behave in an egoistic manner, they are in constant conflict with one another, and are thus in need of rights to protect themselves. True emancipation, he asserted, could only come through the establishment of communism, which abolishes private property.G. Gutting ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (2003) p. 243 According to many anti-humanists, such as Louis Althusser, mature Marx sees the idea of "humanity" as an unreal abstraction that masks conflicts between antagonistic classes; since human rights are abstract, the justice and equality they protect is also abstract, permitting extreme inequalities in reality.G. Gutting ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (2003) p. 244
In the 20th century, the view of humans as rationally autonomous was challenged by Sigmund Freud, who believed humans to be largely driven by unconscious irrational desires.Peter Gay, Freud (1989) p. 449
Martin Heidegger viewed humanism as a metaphysical philosophy that ascribes to humanity a universal essence and privileges it above all other forms of existence. For Heidegger, humanism takes consciousness as the paradigm of philosophy, leading it to a subjectivism and idealism that must be avoided. Like Hegel before him, Heidegger rejected the Kantian notion of autonomy, pointing out that humans were social and historical beings, as well as rejecting Kant's notion of a constituting consciousness. In Heidegger's philosophy, Being ( Sein) and human Being ( Dasein) are a primary unity. Dualisms of subject and object, consciousness and being, humanity and nature are inauthentic derivations from this. In the Letter on Humanism (1947), Heidegger distances himself from both humanism and existentialism. He argues that existentialism does not overcome metaphysics, as it merely reverses the basic metaphysical tenet that essence precedes existence. These metaphysical categories must instead be dismantled.
Humanist thinker Tzvetan Todorov (1939-2017) identified within modernity a trend of thought which emphasizes science and within it tends towards a deterministic view of the world. He clearly identifies positivist theorist Auguste Comte as an important proponent of this view.Tzvetan Todorov. The Imperfect Garden. Princeton University Press. 2001. Pg. 20 For Todorov,
A similar approach emerges in the work associated with the Frankfurt School of social research. Antipositivism would be further facilitated by rejections of scientism; or science as ideology. Jürgen Habermas argues, in his On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1967), that
Saussure held that individual units of linguistic signification - signs - only enjoy their individuality and their power to signify by virtue of their contrasts or oppositions with other units in the same symbolic system. For Saussure, the sign is a mysterious unification of a sound and a thought. Nothing links the two: each sound and thought is in principle exchangeable for other sounds or concepts. A sign is only significant as a result of the total system in which it functions. To communicate by particular forms of speech and action ( parole) is itself to presuppose a general body of rules ( langue). The concrete piece of behaviour and the system that enables it to mean something mutually entail each other. The very act of identifying what they say already implies structures. Signs are thus not at the service of a subject; they do not pre-exist the relations of difference between them. We cannot seek an exit from this purely relational system. The individual is always subordinate to the code. Linguistic study must abstract from the subjective physical, physiological and psychological aspects of language to concentrate on langue as a self-contained whole.
The structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss proclaimed that the goal of the human sciences was "not to constitute, but to dissolve man". He systematised a structuralist analysis of culture that incorporated ideas and methods from Saussure's model of language as a system of signifiers and signifieds. His work employed Saussurean technical terms such as langue and parole, as well as the distinction between synchronic analysis (abstracting a system as if it were timeless) and diachronic analysis (where temporal duration is factored in). He paid little attention to the individual and instead concentrated on systems of signs as they operated in primitive societies. For Levi-Strauss, cultural choice was always pre-constrained by a signifying convention.Appiganesi, p. 66-7 Everything in experience was matter for communication codes. The structure of this system was not devised by anyone and was not present in the minds of its users, but nonetheless could be discerned by a scientific observer.
The Semiotics work of Roland Barthes (1977) decried the cult of the author and indeed proclaimed his death.
Jacques Lacan's reformulation of psychoanalysis based on linguistics inevitably led to a similar diminishment 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 the mercy of language".Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (1997) p. 216 and p. 264 According to Lacan, an individual is not born human but only becomes so through incorporation into a cultural order that Lacan terms The Symbolic. Access to this order proceeds by way of a "mirror stage", where a child models itself upon its own reflection in a mirror. Language allows us to impose order on our desires at this "Imaginary" stage of development. The Unconscious mind, which exists prior to this Symbolic Order, must submit to the Symbolic Law. Since the unconscious is only accessible to the psychoanalyst in language, the most he or she can do is decode the conscious statements of the patient. This decoding can only take place within a signifying chain; the signified of unconscious discourse remains unattainable. It resides in a pre-signified dimension inaccessible to language that Lacan calls "The Real". From this, it follows that it is impossible to express subjectivity. Conscious discourse is the effect of a meaning beyond the reach of a speaking subject. The ego is a fiction that covers over a series of effects arrived at independently of the mind itself.
Taking a lead from Brecht's twin attack on bourgeois and socialist humanism,M. Hardt/K. Weeks eds., The Jameson Reader (2005) p. 150 structural Marxist Louis Althusser used the term "antihumanism" in an attack against Marxist humanists, whose position he considered a revisionist movement. He believed humanism to be a bourgeois individualist philosophy that posits a "human essence" through which there is potential for authenticity and common human purpose. This essence does not exist: it is a formal structure of thought whose content is determined by the dominant interests of each historical epoch. Socialist humanism is similarly an ethical and thus ideological phenomenon. Since its argument rests on a moral and ethical basis, it reflects the reality of exploitation and discrimination that gives rise to it but never truly grasps this reality in thought. Marxist theory must go beyond this to a scientific analysis that directs to underlying forces such as economic relations and social institutions.
Althusser considered "structure" and "social relations" to have primacy over individual consciousness, opposing the philosophy of the subject.Simon Choat, Marx through Post-Structuralism (2010) p. 17 For Althusser, individuals are not constitutive of the social process, but are instead its supports or effects. Society constructs the individual in its own image through its ideology: the beliefs, desires, preferences and judgements of the human individual are the effects of social practices. Where Marxist humanists such as Georg Lukács believed revolution was contingent on the development of the class consciousness of an historical subject - the proletariat - Althusser's antihumanism removed the role of human agency; history was a process without a subject.
Michel Foucault challenged the foundational aspects of Enlightenment humanism.G. Gutting ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (2003) p. 277 He rejected absolute categories of epistemology (truth or certainty) and philosophical anthropology (the subject, influence, tradition, class consciousness), in a manner not unlike Nietzsche's earlier dismissal of the categories of reason, morality, spirit, ego, motivation as philosophical substitutes for God. Foucault argued that modern values either produced counter-emancipatory results directly, or matched increased "freedom" with increased and disciplinary normatization.Gutting, p. 277 His anti-humanist skepticism extended to attempts to ground theory in human feeling, as much as in human reason, maintaining that both were historically contingent constructs, rather than the universals humanism maintained. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault dismissed history as "humanist anthropology". The methodology of his work focused not on the reality that lies behind the categories of "insanity", "criminality", "delinquency" and "sexuality", but on how these ideas were constructed by discourses.
|
|
