Humanism

Response to Mark Kaplan’s Sartre Questions, part 1 of 3 [Mark's original question follows my response, the second and third parts of which - on Agamben and Sartre/Heidegger/Marx - will be posted in a day or so]

'The Humanist Controversy' + Reflections on Balibar

‘The human/inhuman distinction seems to be merely twin perspectives on a single entity’ – Mark Kaplan

The anthropological machine of humanism is an ironic apparatus that verifies the absence of a nature proper to Homo, holding him suspended between a celestial and a terrestrial nature, between animal and human – and, thus, his being always less and more than himself – Giorgio Agamben, ‘Without Rank’, The Open: Man and Animal.

Nihil humani a me alienum puto - Marx's favourite maxim

Is the question of ‘humanism’ badly posed? Current philosophical literature on humanism and antihumanism, not to mention constant casual and vague use of terms such as ‘human rights’, anthropocentrism, ‘humanitarianism’, entails confusion about the status of the ‘human’ relative to other disciplines. How does humanism relate to science, for example? Is science just what ‘humans’ do, or do its results continually demonstrate how unimportant humanity is at the cosmic level? What is its status vis-à-vis politics? Can we still speak of progressive emancipation in politics, or does this imply an illegitimate quasi-religious belief in some kind of anthropocentric historical destiny? What is humanism’s relation to religion? Does humanism possess the formal characteristics of a ‘new religion’, or is it still – as it once thought it was - the most powerful critique of religion? Even engaging in a rough separation of contemporary humanisms and antihumanisms is no easy task. We can perhaps point to three broad moments of contemporary humanism:

1. A juridical, moral and universalist commitment to ‘human rights’, whereby each individual is endowed with certain negative and positive freedoms.
2. An existentialist belief (either religious or secular) in the ‘inescapable’ nature of human choice that is possessed by us alone among species.
3. A scientific, or at least scientistic, commitment to the capacities of technology and scientific research to provide benefits to humanity (medical, technical, hygienic, alimentary etc.)

We can at the same time point to several contemporaneous manifestations of antihumanism:

1. The idea that all attempts to separate out man from animal are a post-religious hangover that neglect to point out that there is very little that differentiates us, either genetically or practically, from other animals, particularly other primates (none of the following are specific to humans: bipedalism, tool-use, war, sexual prohibition, sociality, politics, morality, aggression, symbolic communication, laughing, crying, etc.).
2. Any thinking that makes human needs and concerns central is either a form of speciesism, or a supreme arrogance that pays no heed to the contingency of emergence of the human as a species, and the indifference that nature/the cosmos surely has towards us.
3. A continued belief in a teleological idea of history and progress (such that humanity would be the ‘subject’ of such a history) fails to account for the sheer senselessness of either man-made disasters (war, famines) or natural events (floods, diseases).

Arguably, none of these loosely characterised positions, even ‘human rights’ moralism, imply a consistent or coherent conception of politics (either in the abstract, or in relation to really existing global or local politics or systems, most crucially, to what we could call ‘global capitalism’). But politics is the domain in which the question ‘what is man?’ has always been the constitutive element in its make up - far more so than science or religion. The recognition of the permanently political nature of the question of man (or, in other words, how politics and philosophy implicate each other) is crucial to the work of two contemporary thinkers, Balibar and Agamben. Rather than remain lodged in various arguments about ‘other primates’, ecology, or the illusions of progress, I shall examine here the complexification of philosophical notions of the human, and their implications for politics.

Balibar

In the essay ‘Structuralism: A Destitution of the Subject’, Etienne Balibar, whilst discussing the intricate relationships between humanism, antihumanism, philosophical anthropology, structuralism and ‘the subject’, makes the following key claim:

For the purposes of synthesis, we can suggest that structuralism constituted itself, in a polemical way, or was attacked from the outset, in a no less polemical way, as the challenging of a generative equation, whose speculative abstraction makes possible a wide variety of developments in which the humanity of man (understood in an essentialist way as a common form or eidos, in a generic way as a Gattungswesen [species-being], or in an existentialist way as the construction of experience) is identified with the subject (or subjectivity).

It is this essential, yet illegitimate, identification between, on the one hand, a putative abstract humanity (understood as biological, generic, phenomeno-transcendental, or, more often, a mixture of one or more of these conceptions), and the mapping of this abstraction on to the conditions of subjectivation that smuggle in a notion of ‘pre-established harmony’ between man and nature (such that man has a ‘natural’ way of experiencing himself as species, and simultaneously as surveyor of ‘nature’) that Balibar regards as the primary target of structuralism’s attack. In this way, much idealist and transcendental philosophy, and much political philosophy that takes as its starting point a correlative, constitutive relation between ‘subject’ and a notion of abstract humanity is perceived as the major target for this ‘destitution of the subject’. (And we should not forget that this subject is prey to a series or ‘concatenation’, as Balibar puts it, of significations: subject [sujet], subjection [sujétion and assujetissement], subjectivity [subjectivité] and subjectivation [subjectivation].) Subjectivity, he argues, is typically conceptualised within the teleological horizon of a coincidence or reconciliation between individuality (whether particular or collective) and consciousness (or the self-presence that effectively actualises meanings). In other words:

…if we situate ourselves on the ground of enunciation, it must authorize the appropriation of an I (or an I say, I think, I live) and its association with a We more or less immediately identified with a humanity distinguished in a transcendental fashion from the “world” or “nature” of which it is a material part.

Juxtaposed to this are political philosophies that understand subjectivation as produced, rather than constitutive/transcendental, and not as transcendentally reflecting some generic ‘truth’ of man, species and so forth. Balibar negatively characterises structuralists as

…those who agreed in their rejection of certain motifs coming from metaphysics, anthropology, and the philosophy of history – particularly in the form given them by transcendental philosophy (that of a subjective constitution of experience caught between the poles of a priori universality and the particularity of sensation).

Whilst making these broad claims about the ‘antihumanism’ that necessarily accompanies structuralism’s attack on its idealist forerunners, we must not, however, neglect to point out that this particular form of antihumanism worked far more against the conflation of man and nature and notions of pre-established harmony, than against certain radical Enlightenment notions of man and his capacities. There is an understanding of ‘science’ that, whilst manifestly opposed to teleological, progressivist conceptions of man’s abilities, nevertheless bases itself on an understanding of science as discontinuous, of delineating rationalities as possessing their own immanent logic (hence the importance of Koyré, Canguilhem, Bachelard and the tradition of French epistemology on such ‘structuralist’ thinkers as Foucault, Althusser and Lacan). There is a rationality proper to theoretical antihumanism, against the ‘false’ rationality of pre-established harmony and the constant revelation of man in every representation. This is why Balibar calls structuralism a properly philosophical undertaking, one that concerns itself with the classical question of rationality and its breaks (epistemes) – even if it ultimately manifests itself as non- or antiphilosophy, and even if its understanding of rationality is ultimately a long way from that of Kant or Descartes.

So what is at stake in structuralist antihumanism is less the ‘rationality’ of this putative subject (understood individually or generically), than a critique of the idea of any pre-existing correspondence between ‘man’ and nature, and of the idea of a logical fit between ‘man’ and his attempts to understand the world. Just as antihumanism is not necessarily anti-scientific or anti-rational, it is also not necessarily non-universalistic – its critique of universality lies at the level of the uncriticised confusion of the sensible and the rational. In any understanding of the history of the post-Enlightenment reading of Marx, we must avoid, as Geras unfortunately does not, the conflation of antihumanism with ‘the denial of the idea of a universal human nature’ (from his Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend). In many respects, one strand of the antihumanist political project, such as we find in Balibar’s work, attempt to analyses and utilise a non-naïve universalistic conception of man that avoids the pitfalls of conflating of ‘man’ with ‘subject’.

In a similar vein, we should note that historically, political criticisms of humanism (not necessarily structuralist criticisms) have not dispensed with the universalism that might also be seen to be its core feature. Even radical critics of humanism’s political hypocrisies, such as Fanon and Césaire, differentiate sharply between a universalist humanism and the radicalisms that masquerade as humanism (of course, we cannot escape the fact that a universalist understanding of humanity has more often been abused than practiced, but this is not necessarily a reason to dispense with it).

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Mark's original question: It has always seemed to me that Sartre is fascinated by the inhuman: the infamous crustaceans at the end of Altona, the factory girls whose consciousness has been colonised by the machine, whose dreams are machine-dreams. And before we talk about this as a philosophical concept, it seems to me to be a defining feature of Sartre’s literary method: the re-appearance of the human as inhuman - whether it be the repellent finger of the autodidact in Nausea, the beads of sweat ‘like lice’ running down the back in Age Of Reason, the nudity of the tree root and so on. Its as of at the back of the trompe d’oeil of familiarity, there’s this inhuman indifference.

On the one hand, this can be filed under ‘estrangement’ technique, but the estrangement always seems to work the same way, to pass though the familiar human skin and end up somewhere gross and engrossing. Its as if there’s something intimate about the inhuman, or on the ‘other side’ of intimacy.

Then there’s one of my very favourite quotes, which makes clear that you only have to, as it were change seats, and it is ‘Man himself’ that is inhuman, that the inhuman/ human distinction seems to be  merely twin perspectives on a single entity:

“The century would have been a good one, had not man’s cruel, immemorial enemy lain in wait for him, that carnivorous species that has sworn his destruction, that hairless, malignant beast, man himself!” (Sartre, Condemned of Altona).

Now mine are quite impressionistic examples, culled mainly from the ‘literary’ Sartre, perhaps, but I was very interested to see the ‘inhuman’ explicitly theorised and playing a vital role within the Critique. As I suggested before, I was particularly interested in what you wrote about man ‘interiorising a particular inhumanity’. And I was wondering whether you might say a little more about Sartre’s concept of the inhuman, how this features in the argument of the Critique, and whether the ‘inhuman’ is a unvarying ‘accomplice’ to man through history, or whether the human/ inhuman relation can itself be modified or transformed.