Antihumanism 2343714 217335087 2008-06-05T16:09:30Z SmackBot 433328 Date the maintenance tags or general fixes {{Nofootnotes|article|date=July 2007}} {{Humanism}} '''Antihumanism''' is a term applied to a number of thinkers critical of [[Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment]]-era values. Central to antihumanism are the notions that talk of [[human nature]] or of "man" or "humanity" in the abstract should be rejected as historically relative, or as [[Metaphysics|metaphysical]], as well as the rejection of the view of humans as autonomous [[Subject (philosophy)|subjects]]. ==Origins== In the late [[eighteenth-century]] and early [[nineteenth-century]], the philosophy of [[humanism]] was a cornerstone of [[the Enlightenment]]. Because it was believed there was a universal moral core to humanity, it followed that all persons could be said to be inherently free and equal. For [[liberal humanism|liberal humanists]] such as [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau|Rousseau]] or [[Immanuel Kant|Kant]], the universal law of [[reason]] guided the way towards total emancipation from any kind of tyranny. Such ideas did not go unchallenged. The [[young Marx|young Karl Marx]] criticised the project of political emancipation (embodied in the form of [[human rights]]), asserting it to be symptomatic of the very dehumanisation it is supposed to oppose. Marx argued that because, under [[capitalism]], egoistic individuals are constantly in conflict with one another, rights are needed to protect them from each other. True emancipation can only come through the establishment of [[communism]], which abolishes all private property. While the mature Marx may have retained a belief in the inevitability of progress, he also became more forceful in his criticism of the concept of human rights as [[idealist]] or [[utopian]]. For the mature Marx, "humanity" is an unreal abstraction: because rights themselves are abstract, the justice and equality they protect is also abstract, permitting extreme inequalities in reality. For [[Friedrich Nietzsche]], humanism was nothing more than a secular version of [[theism]]. In his ''[[Genealogy of Morals]],'' he argues that human rights exist as a means for the weak to collectively constrain the strong. On this view, such rights do not facilitate emancipation of life, but rather deny it. In the [[twentieth-century]], the notion that human beings are rationally autonomous was challenged by [[Sigmund Freud]], who believed humans to be driven by unconscious irrational desires. [[Martin Heidegger]] criticised humanism on a number of grounds. Heidegger believed humanism to be a [[metaphysical]] philosophy, in that it ascribes to humanity a universal [[essence]], privileging it above all other forms of existence. For Heidegger, humanism takes [[consciousness]] as the paradigm of philosophy, leading it to a [[subjectivism]] and [[idealism]] that must be avoided. What is more, Heidegger (like [[Hegel]] before him) rejected the Kantian notion of [[autonomy]], claiming humans to be social and historical beings. Heidegger also rejected Kant's notion of a constituting consciousness, that constructs the world around it. In spite of this, Heidegger was claimed as a forebear to the ostensibly humanist movement of [[existentialism]], leading him to distance himself from humanism in his 1947 "Letter on Humanism." ==Structuralism, Post-structuralism and Post-modernism== The development of [[structuralism]] was initially greeted as a means of overcoming the problematic concept of "man". Much as modern empirical science had replaced philosophical speculation about the nature of "matter", so would abstract philosophical speculation be superseded by concrete sciences such as [[linguistics]] ([[Ferdinand de Saussure|Saussure]]) or [[anthropology]] ([[Claude Levi-Strauss|Lévi-Strauss]]). When [[Marxist philosophy|Marxist philosopher]] [[Louis Althusser]] coined the term "antihumanism," it was directed against [[Marxist humanists]], which he considered a [[Marxist revisionism|revisionist]] movement. It meant a radical opposition to the philosophy of the [[subject (philosophy)|subject]], which Althusser considered was the form of "[[ideology|ideological]] thought" in force in the [[Western world]] for several centuries. This "[[structural Marxism]]" was a philosophy, based on [[Marx]]'s thought, which considers "social relations" to be primary over individual [[consciousness]]. For example, Althusser opposed himself to [[John Lewis (philosopher)|John Lewis]], stating that it was not "[[Marx's theory of human nature|man]]" who made history, but the "masses", that is, the [[proletariat]]. Antihumanism thus is a term meant to signify Althusser's opposition to [[individualism]], which is qualified as an [[ideology]]. Closely related to Althusser's antihumanism were the philosophies of [[post-structuralist]]s, such as [[Michel Foucault]] and [[Jacques Derrida]]. While their philosophies are quite different, they both problematize the subject. A common neologism for this is "the decentered subject", which implicates the absence of [[human agency]]. For instance, Jacques Derrida argued that the fundamentally ambiguous nature of language makes intention unknowable and leaves language to structure and govern thoughts and actions. Michel Foucault, in ''[[The Order of Things]]'', argued that there is a basis for knowledge in every epoch, what he called [[episteme]]. He argued that this contemporary time is the "Age of Man" and he envisioned and supported a time where thought finally moves beyond the human as the object of inquiry. The semiological work of [[Roland Barthes]] (1977) decried the cult of the author and indeed proclaimed his death, whilst other social scientists advocated that in postmodern terms, the humanism model in literary texts created a problematic condition. Classic realism narratives cannot maintain the chaos of a dysfunctional content as the [[subject]] struggles in opposition against dominant cultural principles. ==Criticism== {{Expand-section|date=June 2008}} Critics of antihumanism, most notably [[Jürgen Habermas]], claim that while antihumanists may highlight humanism's failure to fulfill its emancipatory ideal, they do not offer an alternate emancipatory project of their own. While Habermas accepts some criticisms leveled at traditional humanism, he believes that humanism must be rethought and revised rather than simply abandoned. ==See also== *[[Humanism]] *[[Modernism]] *[[Postmodernism]] *[[Post-structuralism]] *[[Structuralism]] *[[Structural Marxism]] *[[Marx's theory of human nature]] ==References== *Roland Barthes, ''Image: Music: Text'' (1977) *Michel Foucault, ''The Order of Things'' (1966) *Michel Foucault, ''Discipline and Punish'' (1977) *Martin Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism" (1947) reprinted in ''Basic Writings'' *Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question" (1843) reprinted in ''Early Writings'' *Friedrich Nietzsche, ''On the Genealogy of Morals'' (1887) <references/> [[Category:Humanism]] [[Category:Postmodernism]] [[Category:Structuralism]] [[de:Antihumanismus]]