:Picking up on Jim F's discussion below it seems to me that the structuralist and other objections to "humanism" are objections to "individualism". That is humanism/individualism as a failure to understand Marx's notion that human in individuals are an "ensemble of their social relations". The human individual is a highly social individual. An extreme example of what here is being termed "humanism" would be Margaret Thatcher's claim that "there is no such thing as society". Her implication being that we are just a collection of individuals. Another term for this is "reductionism" as if' human society can be reduced to the interaction of all the individuals who have specific human individual natures or individual natural instincts , self-interests, etc. In bourgeois economics the natural individual is the "rational man" and what Marx criticizes as the "Robinsonade". In bourgeois law it's the "reasonable man". It is a fundamental tenet of the various Social Darwinisms. A fundamental critique of individualism is that it is actually a socially determined' ideology of the bourgeoisie. It is to reduce the social whole to the sum of its parts. The Briitsh Marxist philosopher Christopher Cauldwell has several essays critiquing this very well. Ted Winslow of several lists here calls it "external relations" when 'reality is in the form of "internal relations" He follows Whitehead on this, and his debates with Bertrand 'Russell. This takes it out of the realm of human society to the whole of reality. So, reducing wholes to the sum of their parts in general. Jim Farmelant fOn Sat, 7 Feb 2009 05:30:54 -0800 (PST) Mehmet Cagatay <mehmetcagatayaydin at yahoo.com> writes: > > Mr. Dumain, would you please clarify why you regard Althusserian > anti-humanism as a kind of "epater les bourgeois"?
The whole debate seems peculiarly French to me. In France since the 19th century humanism was seen as something that was closely tied to the bourgeoisie. Even someone like Sartre struggled over whether he was a humanist or not. He eventually decided that his existentialism was a kind of humanism, but one that was different from the kinds of humanism that the bourgeoisie typically embraced. In Sartre's case, I think he identified conventional bourgeois humanism with essentialism. Those humanisms posited a human essence, whereas for Sartre, existence preceded essence. In the French debates over humanism in the 1960s and 1970s, structuralists and poststructuralists like Levi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault attempted to push the critique of humanism much further than Sartre had been willing to go. Sartre's existentialism, as he realized, was still a humanism. He placed free will at the center of his conception of man. People, regardless of the circumstances that they might find themselves in, still retained their freedom, if only the freedom to redefine their situation in alternative ways. The French anti-humanists questioned this view in light of such developments in the human sciences like structural linguistics (which Levi-Strauss to generalize into a complete anthropology), psychoanalysis (i.e. the work of Lacan which enjoyed great currency in this period), and of course, Marxism. Althusser, was of course, a Marxist and long time member of the PCF. Foucault, who had been a student of Althusser, was a member of the PCF for a brief period of time. By the 1950s, he had renounced Marxism in favor of Nietzscheanism, although his work was still very much influenced by Marxism. Levi-Strauss, I believed, identified himself at this time as a Marxist, although his work doesn't strike me as being particularly Marxist. There were certainly differences in viewpoints between these people. Althusser doesn't seem to have been particularly enamored with Levi-Strauss's work, and he didn't like being called a structuralist. However, all these people's work, whether drawing from Saussure, Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, or Heidegger, all had certain themes in common. They all rejected the Sartrean emphasis on human freedom, instead emphasizing the extent to which human behavior is determined by structures of various sorts, whether these be linguistic structures, kinship structures, structures of epistemology (Foucault in this *The Order of Things*), social structures as represented by the mode of production and associated superstructures (i.e. Althusser), and so forth. They all rejected the traditional humanist idea that their exists an unchanging human essence which provides the basis for freedom and equality and human rights. For the French antihumanists, this conception was rejected as being ideological and/or metaphysical, and they drew variously upon Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, in their critiques of humanism. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
