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.

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