Date: Thu, 10 Apr 1997 14:36:10 -0400 (EDT)
From: Nathan Strait <nstrait-AT-grfn.org>
Subject: Humanism and Antihumanism



Allow me to recommend a wonderful little book on this topic: _Humanism_,
by Tony Davies (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). It's concise,
elegant, and I dig it. Allow me to quote his citation of Althusser and
his elaboration on it:

   "Marx broke radically with every theory that based history and 
   politics on an essence of man ... This rupture with every
   *philosophical* anthropology or humanism is no secondary detail;
   it is Marx's scientific discovery ... The earlier idealist ('bour-
   geois') 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) ... By rejecting the
   essence of man as his theoretical basis, Marx rejected the whole
   of this organic system of postulates." (Althusser 1969:227)

   The "break" identified by Althusser in Marx's early writings,
   and fiercely disputed by his critics, is, he insists, theoretical
   and philosophical, not ethical or practical. It is perfectly
   consistent for a "theoretical antihumanist" to be a practical
   "humanist" -- to be fond of children, subscribe to Oxfam and Amnesty
   and help old ladies across the road. Indeed, he argues, a certain
   pragmatic humanism of rights an values, however ideological and
   theoretically unsound, may be a necessary fiction in the mucky
   business of political organization and struggle.

He also notes that, as with Nietzsche, philosophical antihumanism has very
"humanistic" aims. Antihumanism is not a rejection of the ethical. If
anything, it redirects our discourse from the subject of 'man' and
frees it for the ethical.

Nathan