In response to the following:
>Doug asked:
>
>> More broadly, I'm also asking how seriously to take this whole
>> anti-humanist line. Without humanism, are all things possible?
>
>Can you explain to me what the term "humanism" means to you? I am
>not picking on you in particular, I have trouble with "humanism" and
>"antihumanism" in general -- I never know what people talk about when
>they throw these terms around. But you seems to have some firm idea
>of what it means, so I'm pouncing on you.
>
>-m
>
>
and later
>But I'm not willing to surrender entirely the
>notion that there's something "essentially" human that we all share and
>which is distorted and abused by repressive - or exploitative, a Marxist
>might rather say - social systems. Why would you object to class
>exploitation or racial, colonial, and sexual discrimination if you didn't
>think there was some denial or disparagement of the subordinate parties'
>humanity?
Forgive me for jumping in here in mid discussion like this but I find this
area of discussion interesting as it involves issues I am working on at the
moment.
Doug's first question regarding anti-humanism as "anything is possible"
does seem me to be an important one regarding Foucault's often stated belief
that we should experiment on ourselves, and more specifically in his late
work on ethics in terms of experimentation of how we constitute ourselves as
ethical agents. The question as I understand it is whether there is
anything in this call to experimentation which prevents itself lending
support to anti-humanist scenarios, such as Doug's extreme example of
experimenting with mass murder? Are there any limits to this kind of
experimentation on the self as ethical agent? Does it necessitate the
"everything is possible" in some sort of apocalyptic scenario (everybody
suddenly deciding to start their own personal genocides)?
It does not seem to me that Foucault intended his call for experimentation
with oneself as an ethical agent to be conducted in some sort of moral
vacuum. Surely he did not believe that all existing moral practices and
codes would suddenly cease to exist or be effective if one started
experimenting in this fashion. The emphasis would be to innovate, to
question, to transgress where it seemed necessary. I would suggest that
this is what a great many of us are doing already. Who is disciplined
enough to follow a religious code to the very letter except maybe a few
saints. Who has not questioned or stretched the bounds of accepted moral
conventions in our secular societies? Who among us has not introduced their
own innovative touches and little experiments into their lifestyle, in their
relationships, even if elsewhere they will tell you they have some sort of
faith in an essential human nature or essential human rights? How did human
rights come about if not through experimentation and innovation? Is there
anybody who would still contend that the notion of essential human rights
were discovered inside us like Cpt Cook discovered Australia rather than
being created like the towns of the goldrush which sprang up along creeks
and rivers which, for a time, flowed over beds of gold? And the injustice
discovered by Marx in forms of social oppression, surely this form of
analysis was an ethical innovation which must have seemed shocking,
dangerous, and threatening to many of his contemporaries (probably for good
reason too if they were engaged in some form of oppressive domination of
others)? To BELIEVE (beliefs change over time, vary over distances) in
someone's humanity is something different to saying what it IS, has been,
will be, for all time and everywhere. To conjur the specter of mass murder
in this kind of innovative and experimental activity seems a little extreme,
that we will somehow cease to believe what we did a minute ago, that our
convictions will be diminished, but I take the point, that is, where do you
draw the line? Do you end up emulating the narrator of Bataille's Story of
the Eye and try to top the characters' transgressive acts after you finish
reading the book and go back outside into the real world or is it more a
matter of giving you a perspective of the contingency of our moral systems?
In response to this question of the limits of transgression and
experimentation I propose some further questions. For instance, is the kind
of experimentation which Foucault is talking about here something entirely
new, or is it something which has gone on in other guises and contexts,
probably without being explicitly thought in the terms Foucault uses? Were
the ancient Greeks and the early Christians also doing the same thing when
they entered in the constitution of ethical agents, when they turned their
attention to figuring out what was to be done, what sorts of considerations
one was to address, which approaches were suitable, or what kind of acts
should be permitted and which not? Furthermore, as regards transgression in
a wider sense (that is, not just in the case of working with transgression
as a form of experimentation, innovation, or invention of ethical practice),
understood as including the kind of profound and disturbing wastefulness of
bloody crusades or genocide, as much as the unharmful flouting of societal
conventions in the ostensibly useless (in the sense of being unproductive)
activity of erotic play, has there ever been a moral code (in western
culture, Christian or humanist) which has been able to successfully
guarantee or prevent transgressions, which has not of itself always included
as part of its operations as a moral code the possibility of its transgression?
The reign of Christianity was always capable of producing transgressive acts
like crusades, inquisitions, wars, persecutions of all sorts, even while it
upheld itself as a universal moral code. Quite often it was capable of even
justifying certain types of transgressions (just wars, crusades,
witch-hunts) in terms of its moral code, in order to guarantee against more
threatening transgressive possibilities (the erosion of papal power, the
spread of islam and the heresy it represented, black-magic). An example of
this in our century was the events surrounding the group of students who
survived an air crash in the Andes and were forced to consume the flesh of
their dead companions. These students were Catholics and the church was
placed in a difficult situation, because eating the flesh of another is a
pretty serious sin in Catholicism. Condemn or excuse? It chose the latter
by bending the rules a bit, actually a lot, in a very complicated and
innovative interpretation of the moral code, which arguably could also be
seen as something of trick to keep everybody happy.
Humanist Europe produced Nazi Germany, and in more recent times
Bosnia-Herzogovina. As distasteful as it must seem, in both of these
instances, it is possible to find an embodiment of a form of humanism, a
form of humanism which we may wish to console ourselves against by calling
it a mutant form of humanism, or even an anti-humanism. True that in the
case of Bosnia there were a whole series of competing religious-MORAL
systems there as well which were used as justifications for mapping
differences and for targetting candidates for genocide. The same could be
said for the kind of Maoist mix of marx, structuralism, and heads on sticks,
that it was a form of humanism, which in Pol Pot's Cambodia gave rise to the
bizarre and deplorable moral universe of the year 0. This is no doubt
stretching the accepted understanding of humanism, the one which humanism
would like to present to itself which embodies a whole series of moral aims,
intentions and institutions, and for some, a whole narrative of betterment
and improvement. But it is also to question the kind of
anti-humanist/post-humanist rhetoric which some use to try to distance
themselves from what they see to be the taint of humanism traditionally
configured, even if in doing so they end up justifying something just as
bad. At best, anti-humanism/post-humanism gives certain vantage points from
which to criticise traditional humanism and move beyond its petrified
configurations.
Is it possible to have any moral code, religious or humanist, which rules
out, once and for all, the possibility of transgression? Is it even
possible to maintain the belief that even if this prospect is unforseeable
for the moment, that we should nonetheless maintain the pretence of working
toward it? If not, what is the scare in Foucault's proposition, and what is
the alternative? Which is not to specify transgression as the foundation of
a new moral code in some sort of recommendation that we should all be more
transgressive, but that like it or not, transgression is always around, is
always being used and abused, justified and vilified, at once associated
with terrible acts and on the other hand laudable innovations and humane
interventions. To speak of transgression, to consider its possibilities, to
experiment with limits, has nothing to do with recommending a life without
limits at all, nor has it anything to do with sweeping away overnight the
whole moral code that surrounds us and will surely continue to surround us
whether or not we take up the task of experimenting on ourselves as ethical
agents (which I think is something most people do in some small way even if
they dont realise it). From my perspective as a citizen of a secular
country living at the end of the twentieth century, it seems that there is
no religion, no sacred book, no set of human rights, which can tell us or
guarantee what we can or ought to do in every current, forseeable or future
situation. That will always be the realm of the lived experience of
ethical/transgressive action, and the line which separates the two is always
shifting, mutating, fluctuating, even if in some places it is more constant,
regular etc.
This was far too long and probably repetitive, for which I apologize,
Sebastian
>Doug asked:
>
>> More broadly, I'm also asking how seriously to take this whole
>> anti-humanist line. Without humanism, are all things possible?
>
>Can you explain to me what the term "humanism" means to you? I am
>not picking on you in particular, I have trouble with "humanism" and
>"antihumanism" in general -- I never know what people talk about when
>they throw these terms around. But you seems to have some firm idea
>of what it means, so I'm pouncing on you.
>
>-m
>
>
and later
>But I'm not willing to surrender entirely the
>notion that there's something "essentially" human that we all share and
>which is distorted and abused by repressive - or exploitative, a Marxist
>might rather say - social systems. Why would you object to class
>exploitation or racial, colonial, and sexual discrimination if you didn't
>think there was some denial or disparagement of the subordinate parties'
>humanity?
Forgive me for jumping in here in mid discussion like this but I find this
area of discussion interesting as it involves issues I am working on at the
moment.
Doug's first question regarding anti-humanism as "anything is possible"
does seem me to be an important one regarding Foucault's often stated belief
that we should experiment on ourselves, and more specifically in his late
work on ethics in terms of experimentation of how we constitute ourselves as
ethical agents. The question as I understand it is whether there is
anything in this call to experimentation which prevents itself lending
support to anti-humanist scenarios, such as Doug's extreme example of
experimenting with mass murder? Are there any limits to this kind of
experimentation on the self as ethical agent? Does it necessitate the
"everything is possible" in some sort of apocalyptic scenario (everybody
suddenly deciding to start their own personal genocides)?
It does not seem to me that Foucault intended his call for experimentation
with oneself as an ethical agent to be conducted in some sort of moral
vacuum. Surely he did not believe that all existing moral practices and
codes would suddenly cease to exist or be effective if one started
experimenting in this fashion. The emphasis would be to innovate, to
question, to transgress where it seemed necessary. I would suggest that
this is what a great many of us are doing already. Who is disciplined
enough to follow a religious code to the very letter except maybe a few
saints. Who has not questioned or stretched the bounds of accepted moral
conventions in our secular societies? Who among us has not introduced their
own innovative touches and little experiments into their lifestyle, in their
relationships, even if elsewhere they will tell you they have some sort of
faith in an essential human nature or essential human rights? How did human
rights come about if not through experimentation and innovation? Is there
anybody who would still contend that the notion of essential human rights
were discovered inside us like Cpt Cook discovered Australia rather than
being created like the towns of the goldrush which sprang up along creeks
and rivers which, for a time, flowed over beds of gold? And the injustice
discovered by Marx in forms of social oppression, surely this form of
analysis was an ethical innovation which must have seemed shocking,
dangerous, and threatening to many of his contemporaries (probably for good
reason too if they were engaged in some form of oppressive domination of
others)? To BELIEVE (beliefs change over time, vary over distances) in
someone's humanity is something different to saying what it IS, has been,
will be, for all time and everywhere. To conjur the specter of mass murder
in this kind of innovative and experimental activity seems a little extreme,
that we will somehow cease to believe what we did a minute ago, that our
convictions will be diminished, but I take the point, that is, where do you
draw the line? Do you end up emulating the narrator of Bataille's Story of
the Eye and try to top the characters' transgressive acts after you finish
reading the book and go back outside into the real world or is it more a
matter of giving you a perspective of the contingency of our moral systems?
In response to this question of the limits of transgression and
experimentation I propose some further questions. For instance, is the kind
of experimentation which Foucault is talking about here something entirely
new, or is it something which has gone on in other guises and contexts,
probably without being explicitly thought in the terms Foucault uses? Were
the ancient Greeks and the early Christians also doing the same thing when
they entered in the constitution of ethical agents, when they turned their
attention to figuring out what was to be done, what sorts of considerations
one was to address, which approaches were suitable, or what kind of acts
should be permitted and which not? Furthermore, as regards transgression in
a wider sense (that is, not just in the case of working with transgression
as a form of experimentation, innovation, or invention of ethical practice),
understood as including the kind of profound and disturbing wastefulness of
bloody crusades or genocide, as much as the unharmful flouting of societal
conventions in the ostensibly useless (in the sense of being unproductive)
activity of erotic play, has there ever been a moral code (in western
culture, Christian or humanist) which has been able to successfully
guarantee or prevent transgressions, which has not of itself always included
as part of its operations as a moral code the possibility of its transgression?
The reign of Christianity was always capable of producing transgressive acts
like crusades, inquisitions, wars, persecutions of all sorts, even while it
upheld itself as a universal moral code. Quite often it was capable of even
justifying certain types of transgressions (just wars, crusades,
witch-hunts) in terms of its moral code, in order to guarantee against more
threatening transgressive possibilities (the erosion of papal power, the
spread of islam and the heresy it represented, black-magic). An example of
this in our century was the events surrounding the group of students who
survived an air crash in the Andes and were forced to consume the flesh of
their dead companions. These students were Catholics and the church was
placed in a difficult situation, because eating the flesh of another is a
pretty serious sin in Catholicism. Condemn or excuse? It chose the latter
by bending the rules a bit, actually a lot, in a very complicated and
innovative interpretation of the moral code, which arguably could also be
seen as something of trick to keep everybody happy.
Humanist Europe produced Nazi Germany, and in more recent times
Bosnia-Herzogovina. As distasteful as it must seem, in both of these
instances, it is possible to find an embodiment of a form of humanism, a
form of humanism which we may wish to console ourselves against by calling
it a mutant form of humanism, or even an anti-humanism. True that in the
case of Bosnia there were a whole series of competing religious-MORAL
systems there as well which were used as justifications for mapping
differences and for targetting candidates for genocide. The same could be
said for the kind of Maoist mix of marx, structuralism, and heads on sticks,
that it was a form of humanism, which in Pol Pot's Cambodia gave rise to the
bizarre and deplorable moral universe of the year 0. This is no doubt
stretching the accepted understanding of humanism, the one which humanism
would like to present to itself which embodies a whole series of moral aims,
intentions and institutions, and for some, a whole narrative of betterment
and improvement. But it is also to question the kind of
anti-humanist/post-humanist rhetoric which some use to try to distance
themselves from what they see to be the taint of humanism traditionally
configured, even if in doing so they end up justifying something just as
bad. At best, anti-humanism/post-humanism gives certain vantage points from
which to criticise traditional humanism and move beyond its petrified
configurations.
Is it possible to have any moral code, religious or humanist, which rules
out, once and for all, the possibility of transgression? Is it even
possible to maintain the belief that even if this prospect is unforseeable
for the moment, that we should nonetheless maintain the pretence of working
toward it? If not, what is the scare in Foucault's proposition, and what is
the alternative? Which is not to specify transgression as the foundation of
a new moral code in some sort of recommendation that we should all be more
transgressive, but that like it or not, transgression is always around, is
always being used and abused, justified and vilified, at once associated
with terrible acts and on the other hand laudable innovations and humane
interventions. To speak of transgression, to consider its possibilities, to
experiment with limits, has nothing to do with recommending a life without
limits at all, nor has it anything to do with sweeping away overnight the
whole moral code that surrounds us and will surely continue to surround us
whether or not we take up the task of experimenting on ourselves as ethical
agents (which I think is something most people do in some small way even if
they dont realise it). From my perspective as a citizen of a secular
country living at the end of the twentieth century, it seems that there is
no religion, no sacred book, no set of human rights, which can tell us or
guarantee what we can or ought to do in every current, forseeable or future
situation. That will always be the realm of the lived experience of
ethical/transgressive action, and the line which separates the two is always
shifting, mutating, fluctuating, even if in some places it is more constant,
regular etc.
This was far too long and probably repetitive, for which I apologize,
Sebastian