Talk:Antihumanism
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Uhm, does this even exist? I've googled the term but this particular meaning doesn't seem to show up. Perhaps this article is a joke. Alienus 05:59, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
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[edit] Dead serious-
Recently came across a current description for a Comparative Culture seminar in Autumn 2006 at Columbia called <European Anithumanism> [CLME G4003]. So far, anyway, it does not appear the course has any registrants. I can not quote the entire description here, of course, but it includes references to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Edward Said. I ran a search and came up with an eponymous URL (copyright 2005,maybe later than the previous comment). The page text is basically a rant that includes phrases like 'thinning the herd,' 'breeding better humans,' and an insert [which links to a Foucault page] noting a purported assertion by Nietzche that Antihumanism was the true humanism. It (antihumanism) may (or may not) be an historical artifact, but it was/is no joke.
- Don't know about the Columbia course, but the eponymous URL, http://www.antihumanism.com/, is a 3-page web site that may well be someone's personal web site. I don't know that there is any evidence of a real organization. It doesn't seem to be a reliable reference. And the "anti-humanism" it describes doesn't at all match the description of anti-humanism in the Wikipedia article anyway. -Rhwentworth 04:19, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Antihumanism or Anti-humanism?
I think there's a need for clarification: the author of this article seems to take one specific doctrine of certain 'scientific' approaches to humanism, whereas I am familiar with a kind of anti-humanism that instead deconstructs the 'universalism's of humanism (eg certain conceptions of personal identity, ideas of anachronistic human qualities), and often positions itself in opposition to the post-enlightenment theory that the article's subject seems to embody itself. We need to clarify the terms- and also that of 'humanism', which itself changes significance in a variety of contexts (my experience of humanism has been primarily mediated through knowledge of literary movements such as liberal humanism and the ideas of A.C. Bradley.
I have deleted the ideas and origins sections of this article as they bear no relationship to those who would calls themselves anti-humanists such as Heidegger, Althusser, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze.
[edit] References needed
Wikipedia requires that articles be verifiable. This article has no references to anti-humanism. Unless references can be supplied, material in this article should be considered for deletion. -Rhwentworth 15:52, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
I find a few references to "antihumanism":
- http://www.rebelion.org/harnecker/althusser251102.pdf
- http://www.crimsonbird.com/cgi-bin/a.cgi?j=0870236954
- http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-15071
So, the word exists. But it is not clear that it is used in any coherent way. It might just be a recurrent neologism? -Rhwentworth 04:36, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
Errol Morris claims to be "secular anti-humanist".
[edit] Never heard of this
I'm a secular humanist, and I've never heard of this whatsoever. (unsigned)
- Agreed. This article needs deletion. Alienus 02:00, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
Right. If you've never heard of it, then it doesn't exist.
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- Antihumanism was of course revendicated by Louis Althusser as in attack not on the Enlightenment, as some have misinterpretated his theory, but on the liberal ideology of individualism, i.e. "humanism". From a Marxist perspective, there is nothing sacred about "Humanity" (see Stirner's critique of Feuerbach), and Marx criticized the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen on the grounds that they were not universal as they claimed to be, but relative to the bourgeois who proclaimed it. Thus, antihumanism as used by Althusser was not a pejorative term: in Marxist circles, it was rather to be "humanist" that was considered pejorative. Michel Foucault's famous description of the evanescence of the "figure of man" like "figures in the sand" in the end of Words and Things also gave interest to this neologism, which has since been used by critics of structuralism to claim that these theories — and the alleged postmodernist theories that succeeded to them — were "anti-humanists", that is "against-human", in other words fascists. This is of course a gross (purposeful?) misinterpretation of the original sense of the term. Santa Sangre 12:14, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
- Not surprisingly, the google search above gave an Althusser text... Santa Sangre 12:16, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
- PS: Although I do not know that Martin Heidegger explicitly used the term, it is clear that his "Letter on humanism" or "Existentialism is not an humanism" is far from being an apology of humanism, and may be considered as foundator in many senses of "antihumanism". I would argue that Althusser's declared "antihumanism" may easily be said to be influenced by Heidegger's displacement of the question of the subject to the Dasein (not to be mistaken with a psychological - or universal, for that matter - subject; i.e. it is not consciousness); as for Foucault, Dreyfus & Rabinow have shown in their famous book in which ways Heidegger had influenced his thought. Santa Sangre 12:19, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
- Not surprisingly, the google search above gave an Althusser text... Santa Sangre 12:16, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
- Antihumanism was of course revendicated by Louis Althusser as in attack not on the Enlightenment, as some have misinterpretated his theory, but on the liberal ideology of individualism, i.e. "humanism". From a Marxist perspective, there is nothing sacred about "Humanity" (see Stirner's critique of Feuerbach), and Marx criticized the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen on the grounds that they were not universal as they claimed to be, but relative to the bourgeois who proclaimed it. Thus, antihumanism as used by Althusser was not a pejorative term: in Marxist circles, it was rather to be "humanist" that was considered pejorative. Michel Foucault's famous description of the evanescence of the "figure of man" like "figures in the sand" in the end of Words and Things also gave interest to this neologism, which has since been used by critics of structuralism to claim that these theories — and the alleged postmodernist theories that succeeded to them — were "anti-humanists", that is "against-human", in other words fascists. This is of course a gross (purposeful?) misinterpretation of the original sense of the term. Santa Sangre 12:14, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] This Does Exist
Althusser developed his theory of anti-humanism in a portion of his book "For Marx" titled "The Humanist Controversy". Other antihumanist (or ahumanist) authors followed. I don't recall specifically, but there are at least two collections of essays I remember seeing, "What Comes After the Subject?", and a sort of dry bit written by a famous female theorist which I beleive was simply called "Antihumanism".
Althusser's personal take on the matter is sometimes called "theoretical antihumanism", which highlights the fact that the theory is not misanthropic, but only theoretically opposed to the /category/ of human, and also refers to his "theory of theories", which Althusser thought would necessarily be anti-humanist.
[edit] Outsider's Opinion
As someone who knows nothing about this theory, I cannot figure out what it is. A good entry should leave me with a clear definition at the minimum, and this article does not do that. I would recommend a re-do of the first paragraph to more clearly state what antihumanism is.Minidoxigirli 01:45, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
- It is one term of a Marxist argument. Without an understanding of the general theory it will be hard to understand a segement of it. Car54 00:03, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Clean up
Some needs to clean up this article. Some of the stuff in there about evolution, etc. have nothing to do with the subject. Car54 00:03, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
This article needs significant work, especially the second on "Ideas". The claims put forward here have nothing to do with any anti-humanist position I've ever come across. I would suggest that this section be erased entire. There should be an opening paragraph that briefly describes the central claims of humanism and links to the Wiki article on humanism. Following this, there should be a discussion of anti-humanism as it was first put forward implicitly in Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" and then explicitly as theorized by Althusser. Then the remainder of the article should discuss how this concept developed in later figures such as Foucault. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 70.129.137.2 (talk) .
I'm not sure that the humanism sidebar is appropriate for this article at all. It seems like the marxism sidebar would be more appropriate (maybe both if the article was long enough...) as this appears to be of little interest to humanists and of great interest to marxists. — Coelacan | talk 00:42, 27 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] For students of cultural studies, rhetoric, discourse analysis, and post-structuralism
I am a student at UC Berkeley, and I am taking a rigerous course of training in rhetoric and getting into post-structuralism. I think that it should be organized in the way that the last writer spoke of: 1) Heidegger , 2)Althusser , 3)Foucault and Derrida . The problem is, is there any way to categorize all of their ideas together? Who's ambitious enough to take on this feat? Navidnak 02:23, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
