what's wrong with "humanism"?

i think calling someone "humanist" (in this sort of context) is basically saying you think their work is politically naive.

xpost Momus beat me to some of this

xpost tracer wtf is with this "philosophy shouldn't outlive its political or strategic usefulness"?? what about it being true or not?

i mean, isn't pomo's (or at least Momus's) field of interpretation kinda the same thing as humanism totalizing flatness, as you've describe it?

Their idea is that morality cannot be derived from Nature. Only fear of God can keep us sinful yobos from setting afire to one another, stealing, cheating, killing and lying our fool heads off. However, they don't seem to notice that it never worked all that well in the past.

for instance, last night the sky over my bklyn apt was a kind of orangey-black

Yeah, yeah, yeah... Momus's insight here is that many of the things humanists have taken for granted as being universal since the Enlightenment have been questioned. If you try to impose 'an overarching narrative', there are many newly empowered voices to say both 'wrong' and 'maybe but I don't want to hear it from you.' Personal property and self-interest for all are cornerstones of Whiggish apologiae for individualism/capitalism and i certainly have no sympathy for the kind of reductionsist leveller mentality that would make me share a toothbrush, but when massive accumulated wealth threatens democracy or an individual's right to own the majority of a country's media limits a nation's culture, we are right to question our 'narratives'. Indeed, they may be refined and improved by treating them not as graved in stone but as a mere distillation of one time's best thinking and thus available for remodelling.

but maybe you like guns too.

This from the intellectual giants whose (mis)anthropomorphism impells them to insist we are made in God's image.

Si Dieu nous a faits à son image, nous le lui avons bien rendu. ... - Voltaire

IN other words, if you're a cunt, you can co-opt pretty much any ideological framework to hang your twattyness. To cite humanism for this seems spectacularly short sighted since (to me) most emancipatroy and liberational pooiliticis is gorunded in the idea of potential unytapped, which in turn springs froma humanistic base.

Also, to slag off humanism in the midst of a religious fundy revival of xtianity and islam seems to be the classic kind of missing the wider political point that academia made with ID politics which the new right made economic hay.

look i don't fkn know! i was asking a pretty straightforward pair of questions, i thought...

Isn't there a school of postmodern humanism thought?

Now, let's dig into some BBQ!

2. who are the authors of this critique, Adorno, or what?

m.white wait till the gas runs out!

i think there is definitely a sub-movement in, say, film studies to back past this whole "overturning" to rediscover not necessarily "verities" but critical insights of those non-marxist non-freudian philosophers... or simply to reinstate a certain rigor of intellectual analysis (i.e. clarity and logic of discourse, an avoidance of the punning heuristic) from a discipline that's lost much of same. and i think this sub-movement has engendered a lot of defiant cries of "humanist!" which again, i think is stupid and lazy.

also the very idea of the word "humanist" being an epithet is, i think, kind of funny in the it's-so-funny-i'm-crying way.

:-)

i tried to sort of answer this with my limited knowledge (i.e. particular to film studies/cultural studies)

all of which is to say that humanism (and the enlightenment for that matter) are perfectly defensible positions but only within a (nearly infinitely) contingent historical situation. as is postmodernism itself: there's no escaping metaphysics.

dudley andrew and yale gets called a "humanist" sometimes because, for example, in his arguments about renoir, he's seen as downplaying the political radicalism of renoir's 1930s work instead assimilating them to "humanist" or universal ideas.

xxpost

metatheoretical (and hence objective, foundational) perspective with regard to foundations, that is, the idea that "all universalist claims are false" is itself a universalist claim.

yes, i think this is a common problem. someone who posits a universal or even a "contingent universal" is immediately greeted with angry protestations of "UNIVERSALISM" when the actual research/factual basis of the claims for these universals aren't challenged with much rigor or honesty.

xxxpost

stop being a dunce stuncil

of course it's complicated, one can simultaneously make a case for the films' radicalism and for their timelessness. i guess academics often get really excited over small differences.

if momus comes in with some fine rhetoric riff on the whole 1+1 thing and says "in some cases, 1+1 DOES equal 1" or some such thing, i'm going to...

shake my head in disblief, actually.

sorry for not getting more alex in nyc about it.

so when a philospher talks about the lack of foundations or universals, he is not suggesting that you might start to float off into the air.

1+1=2 is a tautology of sorts. It's empirical not rational at least. Whether humans like 'freedom' or 'security' is a judgment call that requires not only an investigation of humans but what the words mean.

Anyways, this is a good thread. I don't think I'm being that much of a dunce on it, but hey Amateur(ist) is surely wise.

And I'm still laughing my ass off at Momus.

there's both a biological and a social aspect to this, and so it's not exactly a biological universal but something more like a "contingent universal."

now let's some professor says, "no, that can't be, that's universalism, the ways in which people look at images is culturally based." well, the "universalist" claims in this case have empirical scientific evidence as well as rigorous deductive logic behind him; is there a counter-claim being made t hat has t he same degree of rigor? maybe yes, but in many cases no. it's often simply the assertion of a "naive" "universalism" that passes for criticism.

As does antihumanism. The problem the academy has with humanism, which I read the question as having asked, stems from their linking it to the sense of European exceptionalism responsible both for WWI and the atrocities involved with WWII. Like any abstraction, it's opinion, based on fear or wisdom, who knows.

xpost

but in response to your situation i would stress that the biological and social explanations of why that happens are in fact entirely distinct, with little overlap. BOTH make self-referential hermeneutic assumptions that CANNOT be avoided. does that make sense?

i can only affirm the superior nature of one of those interpretations from a particular, also contingent and self-referential, situation. and this is not to say that both are equally valid, because to do so would be to pretend i am objective enough to say so.

often in many humanistic (har har) disciplines, claims that have any kind of "universal" content are often challenged and dismissed as "humanism" whatever the basis for the claims.

It may be a 'contingent universe', but I think it's fair (or perhaps useful) to posit certain human universals. Are there exceptions? Sure, but the great majority of people are similar enough, it just takes some discussion/negotiation to figure out how.

anyway, i guess at one point (and maybe even now, sometimes) it was worthwhile to question or even disparage "humanism"--it had some constructive power. i guess it depends on context.... and the context in much of the american and european academy now is such that those who would ridicule "humanism" are in the majority, and i think for that reason the epithet doesn't have a lot of constructive value.

i dunno, i see this happening ALL THE TIME. it's a function of academia's premium on THEORETICAL NOVELTY and BOLD CLAIMS.

mom: "put it on a plate, son, you'll enjoy it more."

that's probably true. i would also contend that people elsewhere are being sincere in their enthusiasm for a certain brand of humanism that allows them to argue against redistributive forms of governance and generally big-up a "let the big dogs eat" ideology.

("straw man, tracer hand" sounds like a great truck-drivin' country song.)

i'd prefer a wicker man. talk about anti-humanist, that's just plain anti-human, full stop.

i always remember my sophomore teacher telling us about "humanism" and me TOTALLY not getting it. she was all like "this writer was real radikool" - poss. not her exact words - "because he insisted that individuals, humans, should be at the center of all his stories, that their experiences should be the primary focus of fiction" and, because this ideology had so totally stomped all others i was just like "er yes as opposed to what, centipedes?"

(I like that Bruno what's-his-name book. Letour?)

But why is it so great, and so liberal, to disregard contingency, to judge wearing a blindfold? One increasingly common defence in court is to say, sure, my client committed this crime, but look at the poverty she was brought up in, look at the abuse she suffered... Taking contingencies into account is the liberal thing to do, as is the assumption that the judge is not necessarily impartial. The judge has a gender, a social origin, a set of political opinions, and so on. What's more, it's the liberal position (in postmodernism) that the law is a codification of culturally rooted, politically-decided statutes rather than a universal guide to all human conduct. We are now much more interested in the particular and the contingent, and have much less faith in things proposed to us as objective or universal. In postmodernism, we don't see wearing a blindfold as a virtue. We want Justice to look at us.

the paradox is that you have to appeal to a historically/socially contingent circumstance to even justify any appeals to contingency. we shouldn't be under any illusions that postmodernism has lifted us into any higher truth, even the "truth" that there are no truths.

which is why the "we are now..." part of your post is the best part. maybe "for now..." would be even better.

"I think that we should accept that universalism is a Eurocentrist notion. This may sound racist, but I don't think it is. Even when Third World countries appeal to freedom and democracy, when they formulate their struggle against European imperialism, they are at a more radical level endorsing the European premise of universalism. You may remember that in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the ANC always appealed to universal Enlightenment values, and it was Buthelezi, the regime's black supporter in the pay of the CIA, who appealed to special African values.

"My opponent here is the widely accepted position that we should leave behind the quest for universal truth — that what we have instead are just different narratives about who we are, the stories we tell about ourselves. So, in that view, the highest ethical injunction is to respect the other story. All the stories should be told, each ethnic, political, or sexual group should be given the right to tell its story, as if this kind of tolerance towards the plurality of stories with no universal truth value is the ultimate ethical horizon.

"I oppose this radically. This ethics of storytelling is usually accompanied by a right to narrate, as if the highest act you can do today is to narrate your own story, as if only a black lesbian mother can know what it's like to be a black lesbian mother, and so on. Now this may sound very emancipatory. But the moment we accept this logic, we enter a kind of apartheid. In a situation of social domination, all narratives are not the same. For example, in Germany in the 1930s, the narrative of the Jews wasn't just one among many. This was the narrative that explained the truth about the entire situation. Or today, take the gay struggle. It's not enough for gays to say, "we want our story to be heard." No, the gay narrative must contain a universal dimension, in the sense that their implicit claim must be that what happens to us is not something that concerns only us. What is happening to us is a symptom or signal that tells us something about what's wrong with the entirety of society today. We have to insist on this universal dimension."

Why do we want Justice to look at us? My kneejerk reaction is that it's because we think we are above the law (the law is for other people) and if Justice would only look at us, this would be immediately apparent to her.

(xpost)

"What's wrong with humanism? Well, what's wrong with humanism is that it's a kind of immune response to Darwinism. It's Darwinisticism, which suggests that everything is an approximation, or a kind of failed attempt, at us. All of the great things about Wells -- his enormous confidence in the capacities of human beings to define and to imagine and to project their own futures; it's that imaginative reach of Wells which is the most impressive thing about him -- goes along, I think, with this very worrying tendency to see... I mean, if eugenics is a good thing, what species should eugenics be on behalf of? We now have to think about the possibility of, as it were, a planetary eugenics. I mean, what about if we eliminate malaria? Well, one of the things that will happen is that there'll be no forests left. Because one of the points about mosquitoes is that they keep human beings out of places that they probably shouldn't rampage over."

Actually, this does connect with the sense of the term "humanism" that I was using. The Darwin imagery we're used to seeing is basically this one:

History is cast as a triumphalist progression towards what we are now. (Of course, it's much harder to find the "triumphalist" version of this image with Google than it is to find more modest, humble, jokey ones like this one, and I think that speaks volumes in itself about the decline of 19th century-style humanism.)

The postmodern attitude rejects this image very vehemently. It's taboo to show the hairy or the brown-skinned as "less civilised". In fact, it's taboo to say that anyone is "at an earlier stage of development" than anyone else. I was listening to the BBC World service yesterday and heard a reference to "indigenous Australians". Ah, what we used to call "aboriginals"! So you can't say "aboriginal" any more! But surely "indigenous Australians" is a misnomer too, because these people we can no longer call "aboriginal" were the original inhabitants of the continent and nation state we only later called Australia. The "natives" actually called the place Aotearoa. So shouldn't we call them Aoetearoans? But that would also be crazy. Just as "indigenous Australians" builds a parallel world in which Australian has always been Australia, even before it was called Australia, so "Aoetearoans" builds a parallel world in which control of the territory was never wrested from the natives by white men. Both terms distort history. They are "competing universalisms".

Our pomo PC pluralist mindset wants us to say there are many stories, many histories and herstories and queerstories. But there is only one world, and just as in evolution, there are winners and losers. Extinction is a real possibility. Ask the Aoetearoans.

The postmodern attitude rejects this image very vehemently.

sidebar: how far was 'pomo' a restatement of GE Moore?

but the other thing is that grand narratives do not have to be humanist: late marx [sound of can opening] was not a humanist [worms all over the shop]. but he believed, indeed demonstrated with evidence, in the existence of a grand narrative.

I think you have to be a bit careful with your syntax there. He narrated a grand narrative. You don't "demonstrate the existence of a narrative with evidence", at least not until the fiction becomes fact. Many of us dispute to this day the idea that the Soviet Union was the definitive "Marxist fact". In fact, the whole problem with utopias is that a narrative cannot be turned into a society. The rules of successful narratives and the rules of successful societies are too different.

But your portrayal of Marx above leads directly to literary criticism: "he believed, indeed demonstrated with evidence, in the existence of a grand narrative". That portrays Marx as a literary critic -- one who parses narratives!

the laws that were found by marx

Again, I don't think Marx really "found laws". I think he wrote some as part of a rhetorical strategy to presuade people to move towards a specific praxis. The image of "finding laws" is, of course, a mythological one: it's Moses, coming back from the mountain with the tablets. I think Marx and Freud were both obsessed with Moses.

So all explanations are mythology, whereas "society" is a Kantian thing-in-itself? Shadows on the cave wall...

might good to avoid the kantian terms, a better one is Nietzsche: "There are no facts, only interpretations. And this too is an interpretation."

i think it may be better to assert that nietzsche (at least middle to late period) believed that the liberal ideal of free debate could not be grounded.

his ideal of the battle was based on the fact that he was a linguist: i.e. he has to insist on certain interpretations of words as absolutely true even tho he knows they're subject to change

xpost ryan -- yes. there's the right-wing nietzsche, and there's heidegger's too.

And Foucault's. And Derrida's. And...

yeah, i was being funny and subtle. i don't understand the nietzsche cult. you can probably interpret anyone into anything, you can probably select jejeune bits from anywhere, but what's the use? put it this way: before the '60s almost all of nietzsche's fans were of the right, and it's creepy that he's so frequently cited by left-wing thinkers without *any acknowledgement* that in the main, on the whole, without being too fine about it, nietzsche was a proto-fascist.

xpost -- adorno, again, hardly an exemplary figure of the left.

it's rooted in the post-darwinian view of humans coming to be thru a bunch of random mutations that may or may not serve us in the future. (as opposed to a view of our being fashioned by God, and having to use our distinctly human quality of reason to reconcile ourselves with him)

ever notice how you see so much useless incoherent inverted snobbery from people with left-wing views on ilx? well nietzsche would say to them that they are engaging in ressentiment, turning their vices into virtues, which is a bad tactic that would only lead to a more oppressive way of doing things, not a less oppressive one

yes, because nietzsche thought that objections to the hierarchical social order were the trifling concerns of fools is why!!! this 'master-concept' is actually not massively illuminating 120-odd years on. i would say that fans of nietzsche are engaged in 'denial', turning a far-right thinker into one more amenable to their own liberal uncertainties.

inverted snobbery i will accept, but useless or incoherent not so much. i haven't been convinced of the virtues of perspectivalism yet anyway; except for the citation of big names, there's been no actual arguement.

yes but he also believed everything is an interpretation so left-wing people can use it in that sense

"Of course, in doing this, the anarchists also conveniently forgot his misogyny, his elitism, and his disdain for those who worked for social justice — as well as his own hatred of them! But then the fascists forgot Nietzsche's hatred of German nationalism; his admiration for the Jews; his advocating of racial intermarriage; his disgust of ressentiment (of whom Hitler is the personification of par excellence); and his disdain of the State, the market and the herd mentality, all of which the fascist system depended on.

"Nietzsche-positive left-wing anarchism is most clearly represented by Emma Goldman. She edited the magazine Mother Earth for 12 years until the US government arrested her for anti-draft activities in 1917 and deported her to the Soviet Union two years later. Mother Earth was common ground for anarcho-communists, individualists, mutualists, syndicalists and the many avant-garde artists who saw anarchism as a political extension of their beliefs (in much the same way that post-WWII counter-culturalists would do the same). The magazine, and Goldman, heavily promoted Nietzsche; not just did they print articles popularizing and discussing his ideas, but you could order Nietzsche's complete works from their mail-order bookstore.

"In her autobiography, Living My Life, Goldman wrote about her first encounter with the works of Nietzsche in the 1890s. "The magic of his language, the beauty of his vision, carried me to undreamed-of heights. I longed to devour every line of his writings. . ." She also wrote that "Nietzsche was not a social theorist but a poet, a rebel and innovator. His aristocracy was neither of birth nor of purse; it was of the spirit. In that respect, Nietzsche was an anarchist, and all true anarchists were aristocrats." As Leigh Starcross details in I Am Not A Man, I Am Dynamite!, Goldman popularized Nietzsche's ideas in lecture tours and used many of his conceptions about morality and the State in her writings. However, she always combined his championing of the self-creating individual with a kind of Kropotkinist anarcho-communism."

it ain't simply 'one is as good as the other'; it's more a case of does it serve my purposes or not? reason can be used to achieve aims, but it does not create those aims in the first place, desire does.

this, and all the idiotic "herd" stuff, is exactly why i am not a nietzschean. (i'm not an anarchist for obvious reasons -- anarchism's total futility.)

xpost

it's more a case of does it serve my purposes or not?

ah yes, that's another reason why i am not a nietzschean.

and can you guys stop using 'perspectival'? it sounds like you made it up.

Was it Clémenceau who said that the law in its grandeur condemns the rich man for theft as much as the beggar's?

Still, we desire Iustitia to be impartial precisely because when she wasn't, the rich and powerful got all the breaks. They still get most of the breaks since they have more time and resources. To argue for consideration of particularity is irresponsibly utopian in my opinion. If anything, we a
should be arguing for greater impartiality and for easier access to resources for the poor.

"Nietzsche was not a social theorist but a poet, a rebel and innovator. His aristocracy was neither of birth nor of purse; it was of the spirit. In that respect, Nietzsche was an anarchist, and all true anarchists were aristocrats."

This is simply marvelous.

But to give a rich person the same fine as a poor person would be a grave injustice! Justice must take the situation of plaintiffs into account otherwise she cannot be just.

That's peeping, Justice!

I will not only concede that it is peeping but note that rich people have many resources available to them to adjust their annual income so as to pay less taxes, so why would that not be true of fines?

this is to do with the kinds of humanism that Momus wants to talk about, that rejected heirarchy and status distinctions and is intimately bound to the idea of the "public sphere," (i can't believe it took this long for someone to mention Habermas! although we have been discussing his ideas for many posts; or rather his distillation of ideas that have been percolating in culture since the coffee-houses of Germany in the 1700s) - where what one says is supposed to have force DESPITE who you are, not BECAUSE of it .. at this point i always take up Nancy Fraser who points out that simply declaring a deliberative space (like the courtroom, or the letters page of Smash Hits, or ILX) to be free of status distinctions isn't enough to make it so.

frankly i think when Habermas was growing up, and when Hemingway and Faulkner were growing up, it was important to say this stuff, as if by saying it enough they could make it be true. and of course that's the only way anyone ever does make anything true is by saying it enough, and in the right places, at the right times, and with the right accent for that situation. and with excellent organization. my problem is that the HUMANIST rhetoric which places individual experiences at the center of ideology, of life, of fiction, of history, obscures the real way that many things happened - rosa parks, for instance, the woman who refused to give up her bus seat for a white man. everyone's always taught that she was just this brave little old lady who stumbled on the legal chink in the entire edifice of race law in the South, and through individual pluck and courage brought racial inequality to its knees. along with a couple of other charismatic types like Martin Luther King, Jr. which is totally wrong. she was chosen by the NAACP, was actually their second or third choice. they had a legal strategy in place. they had their timing down. they chose the city and the bus line. she was incredibly courageous - her life was in danger from the moment she decided to do what she did - but she was part of a strategy that itself was part of the armature of a larger social movement. and Dr. King was a fantastic speaker but he was a notoriously bad organizer. without people working behind the scenes none of his speeches would have had the impact they did.

there are people who focus almost exclusively on social histories, histories of social movements rather than individuals - like Christopher Hill - although that too, loses something - often the real movement happens as a result of one or two people's dogged determination to make something happen - but it doesn't happen without the right climate, logistical support, and network of "readers" or peers out there whose particular state of mind one is striving to impress - if that state isn't there, it doesn't matter how loudly you shout.

xpost!

and thus that one is basically as good as any other (or that the grounds for deciding this are not rational), then any attempt to change society is doomed.

you're bring up relativism right? as i have repeatedly tried to stress, and which the Nietzsche quote paradoxically brings into focus, is that relativism is an objective position of the kind not available to us.

our attempts to change society, and the standards by which we decide to change it, are always born out of a specific contingent situation. we have to respond to our situation as best we can with what we think is right, at the same time acknowledging that we have no access to metaphysical principles. on top of this, the contingency, or complexity, of the situation is always beyond our ability to understand, and as such the decisions we make will always come up short in this regard, the lack of metaphysics, or the idea that Being withdraws with time, helps us to change when we need to.

This critique of humanism is on a par with critiques of democracy and 'bourgeois liberalism'. It's entertaining and all, but when it comes time to actually getting rid of their vote or losing whatever liberty they cherish, people tend to squeal.

P.S. Amateur(ist) I don't think Zizek is an idiot, though I haven't read his stuff explicitly devoted to film. He really does have quite an interesting perspective in terms of trying to think through the particular/universal (and, by implication therefore, the anti-humanist/humanist) deadlock.

1. What is the ultimate origin of everything?
Random Chance
2. What is the source or suffering, evil, or oppression?
Humanity
3. What is a solution that would set things right again?
Humanity

If that's what secular humanism is, than that seems to take faith (claiming those answers) and is just as much a religion as others.

xxpost

Their idea is that morality cannot be derived from Nature.

This is totally wrong. (many people's perspective of Christianity often is) There are plenty of bible verses that explain how knowing good and evil is in the heart of man (human nature)

Genesis 3:5
1 John 4:2
1 Cor 2:12
etc. (I can look these up for you and type them in if you want)

on Zizek: he can be good sometimes, but is probably more trouble than he is worth in the long run. his points about christianity in that interview are good.

i.e. it is good to think with.

i do have really strong reservations about the modes of film analysis ("readings") that zizek employs (and in many ways represents), but that's for another thread....

I thought boors were stale! Fresh boors... what a fresh idea!

But the point about all the most original thinkers is not whether they're right or wrong, it's the way they take us around a familiar problem until we look at it from a different and suggestive angle. Zizek's "two frames" or McLuhan's "hot/cold media" have the virtue of making us think about things we think we know all about in ways that admit of new doubts, and take on new perspectives. This is always valuable in the humanities, especially if it's done well, done by a master charlatan or a master stylist.

oh and the attempt to say "when i say dialectic i mean 'dialectic' in the sense that has nothing to do with Hegel" is totally bogus. that's like "when i use the word paradigm pretend that Kuhn never existed" or "when i talk about fags you should assume that i mean cigarettes and bundles of wood and not homosexuals".

That's just a question, I don't even know.

Last week someone told me at a party that 2005 was the year of Badiou. I asked her what the previous few years were and she said (from memory):

2001: Zizek
2002: 'Empire'
2003: Agambin
2004: Derrida (slight and well-timed return)

I dunno Some Lady, there's a lot of communists and sincerely embarrasing nerds who are also anti-humanist. If anything it's the annoying humanists (as in the humanists who are annoying; not all of them are obv) who appeal to the 'real world' over good ideas.

one problem I see with this definition is that in the 'real world' human values are faulty, their capacities are limited, and what their worth depends on varies among differing beliefs. 'Good ideas' are also under these conditions as they are in the 'real world' too.

Isn't that the whole idea? (It reminds me once of how Asimov posited a future form of language that essentially meant all you'd have to with two people equally steeped in it is that depending on their surroundings and context you'd just have to raise an eyebrow or slightly point a finger and entire paragraphs would never need to be said. Then again these were all self-conscious elites so maybe it was a parody of the superman deal.)

Wow.

On this thread I have learned whole new meanings of "humanism" not found in any dictionary (while the actual historical socio-political meaning has gone largely unremarked) and now I find out that the entire right-wing intelligentsia has been howling about "postmodernism" as...what? A smokescreen to hide the fact that it's really a tool of The Man?

Does any of this have anything to do with anything?

i object to words like "play" because i think the imply a sort of objectivity with regard to practice--like i can do xyz and not really mean it, or be above it, or see the world as a "limited whole" to use a phrase from Rorty. play, or deconstruction even, cannot be objectively grounded, you can't just do it to do it. deconstruction as a practice only makes sense as a response from within certain situations--and you shouldn't fool yourself that it is grounded somehow outside of the situation.

Who will say those values? Some one person or group will come along and do that?

material conditions which might allow them to flourish

What does material have to do with it? With materialism (or scientific naturalism, secularism) where is the room for values?

In "How the Mind Works" Steven Pinker wrote Ethical theory requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused. Yet, the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events.

One is human as machine "3-pound computer made of meat" the other is that values have no basis in truth, but are affirmed anyway (in a mystical way).

By "material conditions," cultural studies umbrellas many societal institutions--for the sake of discussion here, we might consider education. When the majority of children in the world are properly nourished and enjoy the quality of education which the children of privilege currently do, then the values humanism celebrates might approach realization such that their discussion will no longer be so freighted with the skepticism necessary to achieve their fruition.

'his view of the natural supremacy of the philosopher-warriors'

where is it? his idea of the ubermensch(en) is linked to notions of saying yes to life, mastery of one's self and one's environment (which may include mastery of others but only secondarily, self-mastery is the key here) and flourishing as an individual free from unnatural concepts such as guilt, evil or an afterlife. 'his ideal of the battle was linked to his vision of an aristocracy of the blood lording it over the plebs': it's most certainly not an aristocracy of the blood - he totally repudiates any crude Darwinistic/evolutionary interpretation of it, and its not really about lording it over the plebs either. if anything 'philosopher-warriors' reminds me of Socrates, the man who he repudiates for being ugly (i.e. with a non-rational argument), and by implication repudiates the philosopher (thinking, knowing, rationalising being)-as-king which is explicit in Plato and implicit in the Western philosophical tradition. you have totally missed one of the major points: that 'God is dead' and with him Western humanism and metaphysics

'nietzsche was a proto-fascist': nietzsche was used by fascists to justify what they did, he was also used by anarchists, Marxists, avant-garde artists, feminists - and he can easily be used against all those. the anglophone view of him until the 1950s was based on the extremely poor translations which missed certain elements of an extremely subtle writer, at this time in continental europe, the only people who saw N. as a proto-fascist were fascists. i'm willing to accept that his extreme individualism is not compatible with left-wing thought, but i'd like to know how it's compatible with totalitarianism

unless those words now mean 'peace-loving deconstruction fans'

i'll admit i'm not too well up on the pomo Nietzsche, but can I hazard a guess that their stuff is in the spirit of the nihilistic/scientific mid-period N., not the N. of the ubermensch

haven't been convinced of the virtues of perspectivalism yet anyway; except for the citation of big names, there's been no actual arguement.

the argument in Nietzsche is that before you think you have to live, that reason and thought should be in the service of this-wordly enjoyment and flourishing (though not exactly in the Aristotelian sense)

it's more a case of does it serve my purposes or not?

ah yes, that's another reason why i am not a nietzschean.

I have been misleading here, it's a case of does it help life or impede it

would still say that before the 60s most of nietzsche's fans were of the right

well you would be wrong to say that. Lenin had a copy of Zarathustra in his office

i don't understand the nietzsche cult

perhaps it's because your knowledge of him is based on some 10-page gloss you got from Russell or Eagleton.

a thinker as thin as nietzsche

you're an idiot

'nietzsche was a proto-fascist': nietzsche was used by fascists to justify what they did, he was also used by anarchists, Marxists, avant-garde artists, feminists - and he can easily be used against all those.

of course i'm aware that you can't simply blame nietzsche for fascism etc etc, we know how THOROUGHLY MISGUIDED that would be because the CONTENT OF HIS WORK in no way reaches BASICALLY FASCIST conclusions which have to do with "life" and nothing to do with mastery of others -- that's merely SECONDARY. but it's great he can be used by avant garde artists -- and against them too.

"Every enhancement of the type called "man" has so far been the work of an aristocratic society--and it will be so again and again--a society of the type that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or other."

F. N., 'Beyond Good and Evil'

With materialism (or scientific naturalism, secularism) where is the room for values?

What?

What level of formal education have you attained?

This is why Nietzsche is loved by artists. They may not explicitly believe in an esthetic hierarchy, but they certainly believe certain artists to be total crap.

I think more study brings more skepticism.
What level of formal education have you attained?

I've attained a BE, but why is that significant? I thought even back when I was in middle school that the nature of man is such that the more knowledge they attain and the closer they think they are to truth the more deluded they probably are. The Tao To Ching puts it like this:
"The wise are not learned; the learned are not wise."

It may be an informed leap of faith based upon study or personal experience but just as believing in any revealed theology requires a leap of faith, so do all other value systems. Humanists prefer to use humanocentric parameters as opposed to supposedly divine texts or traditions.

Beyond Good and Evil's not exactly a key text if you want to use it as the measure of yr understanding of Nietzsche. Also, why Eagleton (shudder)? Don't tell me he's a secret Stalinist?

(even, wierdly, "strategically," enough, wanting to get "secular humanism" recognized as a religion so they can complain that it's being taught with public $$

Geoff seems to be saying above that secular humanism should not be recognized as requiring any leap of faith.

You might as well accuse Kant and Hegel, who were much greater apologists for the nascent Prussian state, which was itself far more responsible for the rise of Nazism than a few autodidacts' misreadings of Nietzsche, via his batshit sister.

What? I'll ignore the 'randomly formed' straw-man because it's merely a child of the larger straw-man - what 'leap'?

I've attained a BE, but why is that significant?

I read you as maintaining that the greater your formal education, the less is your 'faith' (or understanding, at least). You have attained a university degree - has it harmed you? Should I assume also that you have never studied the humanities or social sciences at the university level, at least in any depth, and thus are speaking about topics that a) you understand less than most who have (i.e. most people here) and b) your understanding of which rests in large part upon secondary (or tertiary) sources written by fellow skeptics of 'the world'?

This does not make sense. Just because you want your 'divine' values to triumph does not mean that I accept that they even exist. The entire point of humanism is that, while we know humans from our own experience and can study our history, revealed religion is mediated by prophets who may very well be charlatans, power grabbers or mad.

Also, with regard to the Bible specifically, I'm not sure that any impartial exegesist wouldn't be hard put to state what values the bible expounds. There's a good deal of very specific tribal law in the Old Testament, much of it absolutely barbaric, some vague precepts attributed to Jesus in the New Testament followed by Paul's self important twaddle and John's hallucinatory mysticism in the Apocalypse. Very studious doctors of the faith have come up with widely different interpretations of orthodoxy using well researched arguments.

what 'leap'?

How is it not a leap to say the mind is just a "3-pound computer made of meat" and that humans have moral freedom and dignity?

Here is another quote from Pinker:
"The mechanistic stance allows us to understand what makes us tick and how we fit into the pysical universe ... When those discussions wind down for the day, we go back to talking about each other as free and dignified human beings."

John Searle says that fact and value "are really at war."

a) As I have quoted from an MIT professor who is a leader in the feild of cognative science, and from the Tao Te Ching, and I tend to always base much of my thought from the Bible.
I don't know why my degree of education or understanding is significant. If you can discredit these sources, which are fairly primary, or use them to discredit what I say then do so. I'll listen. But trying to claim I personally came up with these ideas based on my education or understanding so you can say they are weak ideas is not accurate.

b) I have read many "primary" sources (though I'm not sure what you would consider as primary, or what qualifies you for ranking sources as such)

I'm not sure what's so wrong with quoting other's ideas.
Maybe cause I claim the Bible as an authority which others do not, so there is some conflict there.

Some people prefer belief in certain prophets as inspired by God, others prefer belief in a need for certain values as arrived at from looking at human experience and history. Also I think studying human experience and history can lead people to a belief in special and general revelation as from God.

xpost

My bad, gabb. Never mind.

Absolute metaphysics, with its Marxian and Nietzschean inversions, belongs to the history of the truth of Being. Whatever stems from it cannot be countered or even cast aside by refutations. It can only be taken up in such a way that its truth is more primordially sheltered in Being itself and removed from the domain of mere human opinion. All refutation in the field of essential thinking is foolish. Strife among thinkers is the "lovers' quarrel" concerning the matter itself. It assists them mutually toward a simple belonging to the Same, from which they find what is fitting for them in the destiny of Being.

Huh?

Geoff seems to be saying above that secular humanism should not be recognized as requiring any leap of faith.

i haven't become miraculously more educated in this stuff between now and starting this thread (tho reading it has been kind of uh enlightening), but since i've been quoted...

nairn, that sentence was a bit of an aside, about current politix. whether "humanism" as such requires any kind of acceptance of some untestable givens is, as far as i can gather, one of the anti-humanist's problems with it. but WHAT I WAS SORT OF ASKING was who these core anti-humanists were (tho they of course are not a cohesive "they") and what the SUBSTANCE AND GROUNDS OF THEIR PROBLEMS were. i wasn't asking for a debate on humanism but more of a book(s) report, but i certainly won't complain abt everyone saying what they need to on the subject, cos it's been pretty interesting.

ANYhoo, back to you: scare-quoted "humanism" is kind of an absent center to this whole hullaballoo--of what is it really composed? the whole corpus of western thought that isn't biblical on one side or marxist on the other?

i mean, i get what it is in sum, i think we all understand each other in terms of definitions, but the sentence of mine that you quoted was a very specific point: the Christian right in this country (i forget the specific figure who said this) posited that ALL of the stuff that gets taught in secondary school: the history, (especially) the literature, (especially especially) the science, IS part of a "faith" called "secular humanism." and so, contitutionally, Xtianity should be shoehorned back in as a "competing faith," no gypsy moths without also Genesis, no civics w/o also Paul.

it's not at all an argument abt humanisms "untestable givens" as it is a disgusting and specious attempt to rechristianize public life in this country.

PoMo is floating around on this thread at a diagonal: most ppl seem be saying it is the thing that is against humanism, but i don't think so. to quote myself again (got a little lost in my scrap w/ Tracer):

well i don't think the antihumanist thought i'm asking about is any friendlier to pomo.

i mean, isn't pomo's (or at least Momus's) "field of interpretation" kinda the same thing as humanism's totalizing flatness, as you've describe it?

ie I asked for the debate "Theory vs. Humanism" and ppl took it up as "Theory = PoMo vs. Humanism" I think PoMo is a variety of Humanism and not at all the Theory i was asking abt!

How is this approach metaphysical and not merely historical?

Is Critical Theory a theory of criticism (i.e., method)? If so, can a theory of criticism be applied to any subject?

re: I asked for the debate "Theory vs. Humanism"

All refutation in the field of essential thinking is foolish. Strife among thinkers is the "lovers' quarrel" concerning the matter itself. It assists them mutually toward a simple belonging to the Same, from which they find what is fitting for them in the destiny of Being.

Does this mean that there is no debate? Is any theory relevant to any other?

as for Heidegger: i think he means that debate is not a matter of discovering some trans-historical truth (even the trans-historical truth of historicism) but a means towards discovering the meaning of "truth" in a particular epoch of Being. in other words: what corresponds best to "now"?

Let us rephrase our question one last time. "What can we say we see?" might mean: Is there one single, accurate description of the world? Encore: Is the/a "correct" description of the world necessary, or necessarily contingent? The law of excluded middle demands an unequivocal answer: "Yes" (necessary) or "No" (contingent). Quine attempts to occupy that excluded middle ground and answers "Yo." But one can see that such an answer "sides," so to speak, with the original "No," for in accepting the relative validity of both positions, it denies the exclusivity demanded by the affirmation of necessity. And yet, though this middle position sides with the negative answer by excluding ultimate exclusion, it is not identical to it. In opting for "ontological relativity" (Quine 1969), one does not simply observe contingency as one might observe objects; rather, one presupposes contingency as an irreducible value. Put another way, if one can entertain competing descriptions of the world as incommensurable but equally valid, one does so not from a position that can see the adequacy of each position but rather from a position that posits the necessity of competing contingent descriptions. In a world where descriptions proliferate and faith in the authority of reason has gone the way of faith in the authority of God, contingency becomes the transcendental placeholder. "Modernity" is the name we have given to this necessarily contingent world.

why not? why is a text by nietzsche not material? which texts *are* material, and what are your criteria?

as for the 'hegel was a much greater defender of the prussian state' thing, and 'prussian supremacy was far more to do with the rise of the nazis than the nietzsche cult'. well, in one sense: yes. nietzsche was not 'behind' the rise of hitler. i'm not an idiot. but on the other: no. the prussian state of 1806 was not the german state of 1870, for starters. and hegel was no more 'behind' its rise than nietzsche was 'behind' the nazis.

It ends in 'ism'.
-- M. White (deir...), April 14th, 2005.

Damn!! I came here with the precise intention of saying that first. It's true.

Any philosophy which ends in 'ism' is bound to be a net to trap intellectuals sooner or later. 'Isms' are snares for brilliant minds.

because it's his crudest book and is totally misleading if not read within the context of his entire oeuvre. look, if you think nietzsche's conception of 'truth' is as simple as 'he doesn't believe in it' you just don't understand him. if you want to get a handle on the guy you have to envisage a pre-socratic looking at the last two thousand + years of spiritual & intellectual activity and saying 'nigga please'

it's not out of keeping but if you aren't familiar with the rest of his stuff you could end up with a strange idea of what he is doing in it. witness bertie russell.

or, like when you have called his concept of the 'herd' stupid. the main point is not about making Nietzsche feel good about being oh so godless and smart, it's about showing up that Christian belief is not born of the strength and lofty ideals it makes it self out to be: it's born of cruelty, hatred and weakness. He realises that to make a rational argument against faith is to miss the point, so he doesn't, he attacks it on its own level.

The German state of 1870 was dominated by Prussia, would probably not have come to exist without Prussia. Prussian militarist ideals were the backbone of the German army. This was the mentality that led Germany to start the First World War, and the mentality that allowed Hitler's rise to power as the Army thought he would be a useful tool against democracy.

I described Kant and Hegel as apologists for Prussia, and this is perfectly true, particularly in the case of Hegel who contributed to the ideological framework of the State above the Individual. Whatever Nietzsche's politics may have been, he clearly did not believe in the supremacy of the State.

As for Beyond Good and Evil, well, quoting it to describe Nietzsche's position on anything is the same as trying to sum up Hume's philosophy by reference to his History of England.

I described Kant and Hegel as apologists for Prussia, and this is perfectly true, particularly in the case of Hegel who contributed to the ideological framework of the State above the Individual. Whatever Nietzsche's politics may have been, he clearly did not believe in the supremacy of the State.

yeah, a guy who here and there makes extravagant claims in the name of living the fuck out of life is 'on the whole...a proto-fascist', while ppl like Plato and Hegel, for whom a belief in a brutal all-encompassing state where anything that could possibly corrupt it should be supressed was pretty central to their philosophy, should be distanced from it

it has a meaning outside of hegel's particular theoretical constructs, because it comes from greek philosophy; hegel was employing an already-exisiting word for his own purposes. so it's fair game to use it in a non-hegelian sense (or simply to use it without implying assent to whole range of hegelian thought). bordwell mentions this in his essay.

Just want to point out that while all of this is true, Hitler was not particularly liked by Prussians who thought him an uncouth little southern bumpkin.

oddly enuf this reminds me of the debate with cliometricians in historiography.

yes, i said this: prussian expansionism created germany. but i also said: the prussia of 1806 was not the prussia of 1870, implying that hegel's championing of prussia 1806 in no way presupposed his support for germany 1870. in any case the argument that a "mentality" led to war and that the war "allowed" hitler's rise to power (leaving aside the idea that in 1933 it was the army which decided things) is pure idealism.

He realises that to make a rational argument against faith is to miss the point, so he doesn't, he attacks it on its own level.

riight. sorry to be snarky but there can be no rational response to this kind of non-argument. i have to respond on its own non-terms.

Hitler would not have been in a position to gain the Chancellorship in 1933 without the material help/blind-eye turning/support he'd received from senior figures in the Army since 1920. His appointment ultimately was decided by von Hindenberg. Oops, guess which caste he belonged to? You seem to want to attribute peculiar non-material causes to the Nazis' rise to government. That strikes me as more "idealist" than anything I've said.

nietzsche was a proto-fascist because "nietzschean views" (some of the may have been poor readings, i suppose) like those of oswald spengler were massively influential among the german middle class in the 1920s. the idea of "no progress" keyed into their mindset during the collapse of capitalism (which, needless to say, had nothing to do with the lunatic theories of spengler). spengler provided an irrationalist pseudo-explanation for germans of why everything was going to shit. it goes without saying that spengler is not nietzsche -- neither was heidegger or deleuze. the point is, nietzsche's dodgy views on 'herd mentality' and so on were, you know, quite fascist.

riight. sorry to be snarky but there can be no rational response to this kind of non-argument. i have to respond on its own non-terms.

(answers this against better judgement)

where is the non-argument? if you think all that sounds far-fetched you might want to remember that N. was the son of a minister and was intensely religious when younger

take something like the title Beyond Good and Evil: an attempt to move beyond dualistic thinking in some respects. yet even this attempt becomes ensnared in dualism because to assert the need for abandoning dualistic thinking only makes sense by positing a new dualism: dualistic/non-dualistic. nietzsche was very attentive to these problems (way ahead of his time in this respect, along with perhaps Emerson).

i don't understand your point. several of the articles in that book indeed take issue with psychoanaltyic theory, and proceed by mounting arguments against it. zizek hardly mounts a counterargument; he simply makes snide asides and poses nonsequitirs.

i didn't say it was a bit of fun, i said you totally missed his intentions. the concept is a polemic against things like fervent belief in nation, religion, thinking politics is important, etc. as stated, it is a herd of the spirit.

you have accused a thinker whose motto was 'great ideas want to be criticised not idolised', and who constantly criticised his earlier works in a way few philosophers have as having 'tenaciously held views' when you came to your conclusions about him without having read so much as a page of him

you have accussed him of reaching 'basically fascist conclusions' because he believes that you should try flourish as an individual even if it impedes the flourishing of others. that is not compatible with the Nazi view of life as being all about duty, service and sacrifice at all

you have adopted the 'i am defending reason and Enlightenment against this relativistic irrationalist nonsense' when your arguments largely come down to 'i don't like him because he uses nasty imagery to make his point, which makes what he says right-wing and thus untrue'

calling him 'irrationalist' is massively reductive as well, the basic point is that the question of 'knowing' should be secondary to other questions, which feeds into Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, usw.

as regards 'no progress', 'laws of history' was never exactly the most tightly argued notion going.

if you want to know why left-Nietzscheans don't spend a lot of time refuting the fascist reading of him it's because it's widely recognised as being crass, reductive and uninformed. just like evolutionary biologists don't spend a lot of time refuting 'Social Darwinsism'. oh look, you've thrown a shitfit about evolutionary biology as well

if you want to know why left-Nietzscheans don't spend a lot of time refuting the fascist reading of him it's because it's widely recognised as being crass, reductive and uninformed.

yes that is one very convenient reason why they don't engage in those arguments. of course some non-crass left-wing thinkers have been less than keen on nietzsche, but what the fuck, right? impeccable leftists like, um, foucault dig him.

you have accussed him of reaching 'basically fascist conclusions' because he believes that you should try flourish as an individual even if it impedes the flourishing of others. that is not compatible with the Nazi view of life as being all about duty, service and sacrifice at all

of course the nazis' reading of nietzsche is not yours. but how do you account for his popularity with spengler, who wasn't a nazi, but was a major player in the nazification of german culture? it was all a big misreading?

as regards 'no progress', 'laws of history' was never exactly the most tightly argued notion going.

woah there. i'm not writing off "laws of history" that easily. they aren't laws like natural laws. but you'll note i tended to use the word 'process', not progress, and a problem w. nietzsche is the abandonment of that concept. it's not so much laws as history itself that goes out the window. this is all arguable, natch, but on a rational footing -- ie based on some knowledge of history, as you won' find in nietzsche.

the point is, i don't find your replies very nietzschean. saying that arguments against FN on political grounds are "crass" is hilarious, because it implies a cosy view of philosophy that i don't think yer man friedrich would have had much truck with.

apart from a suspiciously vitalist and somewhat windy notion of "life" which he stands up for, you still haven't said anything positive in his defense.

you didn't ask me to give a fecking critical account of where he stands in the pantheon of post-Enlightenment philosophy, you asked me to explain why he is not a proto-fascist; as regards spengler, who i am not intricately familiar with, i would imagine it was down to the fact that nietzsche cast major aspersions on the relentless march of reason in a much more profound manner than anyone before him

if you had asked me to sum up my views on him, i would say he's like Plato in that even though he can come to pretty strange and extreme conclusions -(which a] is down to the fact that he did not see moderation as appropriate to good philosophy and b] does not mean that accepting what he says uncritically would inevitably entail thinking Nazism is the bestest thing ever) - but the last 100 years of philosophy is still massively indebted to him

but then again, given that you're taken with Karl Marx you probably don't really see that as important

Hello, I was just wandering past and when I read this I laughed so hard I pissed my kidneys inside out.

Occasionally in the comments page of the Israeli paper Haaretz, I see "humanist" views mocked, or more accurately I see moderate or tolerant views mocked as "humanist." I can't help but think that the failure (and I am really starting to see it as a failure) of Israel is a triumph of us-ism or tribalism over humanism -- or at least that enough people have preferred the tribalist mentality in order to block progress (it doesn't even need to be a majority in a parliamentary system). I guess there are different messages you can take from the holocaust - some take a cautionary, tolerant message, and others take the message of "no one is going to protect you but you," which, to be fair, is a legitimate message to take away from such experience as long as it's not taken too far.

Anyway, the whole state of affairs makes me long for naive humanism.

the generally admirable Tracer Hand way upthread says 'it's no longer true that "the sky is blue"', so truth changes, so humanism might have been true once and no longer

I am still hoping to find someone to show me why this kind of argument is trivial and not a worthy response to big debates about epistemology or value.

read a work of intellectual history recently w/ the rather unappealing title An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought that did a good job of explaining some of the nuances at play here (e.g. don't forget that at the same time as Sartre's "existentialism is a humanism", there is still the very strong influence of Mounier's "personalism" [pre-Vatican II, but only just])
[/tryingnottotalkoutofmyasscompletely]

Worth saying I think that the term "humanism" means a bunch of different things -- what it meant when it emerged in the renaissance in some ways almost the opposite of what it's come to mean. For some critical theorists, "anti-humanism" pretty boils down to "i hate and fear fiction/drama/art/music etc, because i don't understand them and they make me uncomfy" -- and some a few, you can add "people" to that list. But it's bad intellectual practice to reduce a line of argument to its stupidest manifestation, so probably we should hunt around for the critical theorists this isn't true of.

criticizing humanism basically means criticizing religion (imho)

humanism began (in the renaissance) as a counter to religion -- a lot of modern radical philosophy is a reinsertion of religion in other terms, all the guff about grounding and etc

anyway: will run and run

xpost (I am including the 'civic religion' of positivism/scientism/progressivism—the secular humanist faith)

mark: nono I know about the history, talking more about the modern use as critique. like marx could accuse feuerbach of "humanism" (and the latter might not dispute it)

also, for impt historical context, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1964/marxism-humanism.htm

we are all human - so in a sense it might intuitively all behove us to be humanist, or not anti-humanist

OTOH I feel like humanism can have an excessive grandeur, ie: why celebrate this thing that you happen to be? why imagine this contingent animal to be so noble and a site of value?

but anti-humanism, from a human being, generally seems worse to me.

would be better to be neither, than to be anti-.

Althusser, arguing that Marx "drove the philosophical categories" of humanism "from all the domains in which they had been supreme":

Marx rejected the problematic of the earlier philosophy and adopted a new problematic in one and the same act. The earlier idealist (‘bourgeois’) philosophy depended in all its domains and arguments (its ‘theory of knowledge’, its conception of history, its political economy, its ethics, its aesthetics, etc.) on a problematic of human nature (or the essence of man). For centuries, this problematic had been transparency itself, and no one had thought of questioning it even in its internal modifications.

This problematic was neither vague nor loose; on the contrary, it was constituted by a coherent system of precise concepts tightly articulated together. When Marx confronted it, it implied the two complementary postulates he defined in the Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach:

(1) that there is a universal essence of man;

(2) that this essence is the attribute of ‘each single individual’ who is its real subject.

These two postulates are complementary and indissociable. But their existence and their unity presuppose a whole empiricist-idealist world outlook. If the essence of man is to be a universal attribute, it is essential that concrete subjects exist as absolute givens; this implies an empiricism of the subject. If these empirical individuals are to be men, it is essential that each carries in himself the whole human essence, if not in fact, at least in principle; this implies an idealism of the essence. So empiricism of the subject implies idealism of the essence and vice versa. This relation can be inverted into its ‘opposite’ – empiricism of the concept/idealism of the subject. But the inversion respects the basic structure of the problematic, which remains fixed.

In this type-structure it is possible to recognize not only the principle of theories of society (from Hobbes to Rousseau), of political economy (from Petty to Ricardo), of ethics (from Descartes to Kant), but also the very principle of the (pre-Marxist) idealist and materialist ‘theory of knowledge’ (from Locke to Feuerbach, via Kant). The content of the human essence or of the empirical subjects may vary (as can be seen from Descartes to Feuerbach); the subject may change from empiricism to idealism (as can be seen from Locke to Kant): the terms presented and their relations only vary within the invariant type-structure which constitutes this very problematic: an empiricism of the subject always corresponds to an idealism of the essence (or an empiricism of the essence to an idealism of the subject).

haha but marx's materialist hostility to philosophy and idealism -- and his commitment to the labour theory of value, actually -- is fiercely human-centred and anti-religious

(so yes, it does come down to what's being meant by humanism)

(definitions, eh? fuck em)

xp yeah that would be althusser the catholic stalinist -- cf e.p.thompson's epic takedown "the poverty of theory"; thompson, as a historian of working class struggle, is an intensely human-centred (actual real) marxist; basically theorists following this line are conservatives unable to distinguish empiricism from the empirical... facts are something to be overridden or suppressed, by reaching back to pre-established dogma

actually "theorists following this line" <-- s/b "too many theorists (tenured pseudo-radical academics, rarely actual workers) following the althusser line"

history is another thing that some critical theorists don't understand and hence dislike and want to discipline and control

"If these empirical individuals are to be men, it is essential that each carries in himself the whole human essence, if not in fact, at least in principle" <-- this is nonsense on stilts of course. No wonder he strangled his wife: the idea that people can be human and actually different, that "humanism" could provisionally be emerging from the clash and combination of different sensibilities, experience, actual living bodies (aka class struggle, among other things) -- totally over his head.

haha sorry bernard, i'm a bit allergic to althusser (and to philosophers and theorists acting as confession-taking pseudo-priests) -- you're absolutely right that this is a root of modern "anti-humanism", and i don't by any means imagine every aspect of the critique is absurd or unwarranted

read this thread with interest today. way up there people claimed that humanism means the belief that we are more the same than different and i like this pithy description. it was said that humanism has the effect of minimizing differences in ways that justify hegemonic narratives at the expense of marginalized narratives. notions like human rights -- insofar as they are predicated on this idea of people being the same -- are not good at all; they are hegemonic metanarratives. kant is bad and nietzsche is good because kant was obsessed with grounding things (knowledge, ethics) whereas nietzsche discarded metaphysics, and asserted that ideas live or die based on how useful they are to those in charge and we shouldn't delude ourselves that this isn't true. nietzsche's position in this sense is more emancipatory than kant's, whose notion that human beings should never be treated as means but only ever ends, while it sounds good to "liberals", is predicated on arrogant assertions, such as that "human beings" exist and that they have "fundamental dignity" that should be respected. progressive/humane politics can get along without these notions, apparently. they are imperialist even though they seem anti-imperialist, have in fact historically been the basis for anti-colonial movements, feminist movements, etc. even though marx is cited as anti-humanist, i feel that he must believe in the categorical imperative in some sense, otherwise why on earth would it be an affront for people to sell their labor power and become "instruments"? surely, the degradations of the proletariat are only legible if we compare them to

anyway, this was all familiar to me from college and i thought i was a sort of antihumanist deconstructionist back then but now i am looking at these arguments again and finding them lacking. specifically, why is it better to insist on the differences between people rather than the similarities? or more precisely, why are these things necessarily in tension? in order to ground the idea that people with different experiences have different perspectives, why does one have to discard the idea that everyone -- despite their experiences, their operative paradigms, their values -- fall under the same category of "human being" and that this is, ya know, important? also this folds into a related question, which is how does this notion of the absolute specificity, or irreducibility, of individual experience square with the "death of the subject" and especially the "death of the author"? why is it progressive to tell people that their thinking can't push beyond the horizon of a metaphysics that binds us all to hierarchical, binary logic? seems discouraging, and needlessly so. i think it's possible to tell people to be self-critical of the notions they've picked up from the zeitgeist without fullblown asserting that the subject is dead and there can be no autonomy.

anyway, if you've read this far, thanks.

the voice of reasonable hegemony, ladies and gentlemen

i finally finished "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern". it was very much in the canon of Western Civilization/Latin supremism. an Italian humanist named Poggio was a pre-Renaissance book hunter who lusted after Latin books and nostalgia for the Roman philosophy. alongside his fellow humanists he fetishized Latin and devoted themselves to re-creating Roman garden superiority parties, dialogues where their servants or slaves provide wine and food while they discussed the superiority of their philosophy and way of life. they go on about the virtue of pleasure and that the Latin language is the only one that is not barbaric.

when not reclining in the garden most of the humanists work as secretaries and scribes for the Pope. Poggio himself worked closely with 8 Popes, including one that was declared the Antichrist, and for decades wrote the legal justifications used during the Catholic church's most corrupt and violent period. Poggio and other humanists used their Latin skills to write official bulls for the Inquisition, condemning many to execution or torture, including some people he idolized in Romantic Latin verses (only the ones that spoke Latin of course).

the Antipope later deposed, he become unemployed and traveled the world living off the money from his humanist friends. they were all quite wealthy, collecting Roman statues and rare books, from their work with the Catholic church. the irony is very thick. he become bitter and cynical. to reconcile all of this, and retreats to the fantasy of his Latin fetish as a pure and righteous philosophy. he retired and left a wife and 4 children to travel and search for Latin books. funded by his rich humanist friends he went to Germany to find a lost collection of brilliant Latin philosophy in an Epicurus/Lucretius book "On the Nature of Things".

he ordered the book copied by his servant and managed to live in Germany for 3 years without bothering to learn the language. all languages other than Latin were barbaric to him. he transcribed the then-revolutionary book himself yet distanced himself from the content, accusing a friend who had made their own translation of subversion and heresy. in his 50s he married an 18 year old who was in a wealthy Venetian family and moved to Italy where he became part of the humanist-Venitian Conspiracy if you are into that sort of thing. he got a statue of himself and lived a tax-free life of leisure in his final years.

ultimately the humanists seemed to have influenced better people. as people themselves they were elitists that did not respect or bother with folk culture or educating the common person. the illiterate and non-Latin are beneath them. they sit in gardens reading poems about looking down on other people. they carry an air of superiority and scorn on people for only doing things for themselves, yet the humanists seem to only help other humanists. personally i am less than impressed. yes the philosophical implications (atomic universe, God does not care what we do, there is no afterlife, bodily death is the end of your soul) are very forward-thinking for the 1400s. humanists were ahead of the time. but as people, they were useful idiots for the corrupt system they served.

this poem by Lucretius perfectly demonstrates and in some cases literalizes what is most frustrating about humanity, that unbearable smugness:

Pleasant it is, when over the great sea the winds shake the waters,
To gaze down from shore on the trials of others;
Not because seeing other people struggle is sweet to us,
But because the fact that we ourselves are free from such ills strikes us as pleasant.
Pleasant it is also to behold great armies battling on a plain,
When we ourselves have no part in their peril.
But nothing is sweeter than to occupy a lofty sanctuary of the mind,
Well fortified with the teachings of the wise,
Where we may look down on others as they stumble along,
Vainly searching for the true path of life. . . .

humanity humanists

Relieved to find that I still tend to agree with my answer from 6 years ago.

This thread and Mr Ando Of The Woods have a special link in my head. See the fish at 2.33. Hopefully this fish will enter your head every time you see the word (I'm not really for or against humanism because I don't remember what it is).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubX_aqXctRk

why is there sex spam _in_ the description? did the original poster just get their account hacked?

I never noticed that.

lmao