At 10:36 10-4-97 -0500, you wrote:
>Sebastian Gurciullo wrote:
>
>>Humanist Europe produced Nazi Germany
>
>Or, the Europe that produced humanism also produced Nazi Germany. Nazi
>ideology itself was very hostile to all those softhearted doctrines, and in
>their antihumanism and antiuniversalism, denied that Jews and other
>non-Aryans were as fully human as Aryans.
>
>
and then John wrote:
>It's not antihumanist to claim that Jews aren't human. The essential
>category of humanism remains. "We all must be humans; Jews aren't humans;
>thus exterminating them is not an anti-humanist act." You want humanism to
>be a critical criteron, an intellectual guarantor of moral action. But
>humanism won't do that work for you.
I agree with John, that there were a series of humanist ideologies in
Europe, one of which operated in the machinery of Nazi Germany. The
non-Nazi ones were more extreme and destructive but nonetheless contained a
mutant (even if non-explicit) form of humanism. It is truly difficult, if
not impossible, to go beyond humanism. It seems that the louder the claim
to have gone beyond it, the greater the blindness to how you may actually be
repeating, distorting, transforming it in myriad ways. The Nazi ideology
may have stressed some distortion of Nietzsche's beyond-man (ie. the
superman), but arguably they ended up showing the futility of claiming to be
beyond, once and for all, what they saw to be the softhearted, decadent
forms of humanism which tolerated the Jewish presence.
>The question I'm trying to ask, and apparently not doing it well, is how
>one chooses what boundaries are worth transgressing (e.g., various
>restrictive sexual moralities, rules I'm happy to see broken) and those
>which aren't (e.g. random enucleation).
This is a difficult question to answer on a page, in a book, let alone in an
email. How do we know what limits are worth transgressing and which not?
Isn't this one of those things that people spend their whole lives engaged
in negotiating. Not necessarily in the obsessive manner that philosophers
and thinkers do it - the kind of obsession that drives them to ask the
questions, to press for the solutions, to attempt a resolution of some sort
and to publish it so others may benefit of their labour - but in the realm
of the everyday, in the choices constantly being confronted, especially in
that wide spectrum of the grey where the morality we have inherited, the
precedents that already exist, have nothing or little to offer, or offer
only contradictory, unresolvable possibilities for ethical action.
But what of random enucleation? Clear cut? You or I may decide to name a
particular "something" which tells us why one transgresses here but not
there, but is it then impossible to imagine many other ways of negotiating
the problem? Is it a psychological of a superego as Freud believed? Is it
the divine voice of reason, as Kant believed it to be? An aversion to
cruelty, basic compassion, totemic injunction? What is the one thing which
underlies all these forms? Lets try to get at it! But, should one be
attempting answers at all here rather than asking more and more questions to
refine the problem in preparation for the complexities of the real life
situations? Should we be talking about this problem purely in practical
terms, or is it just as worthwhile to speculate, fantasize, laugh about it
all even, poke some fun at the seriousness which this problem seems to
inevitably provoke? Or perhaps prematurely (and irresponsibly?) break off
this interminable dialogue (or is it a monologue) and get out there and live
life with all its imperfections and contradictions? What does all this make
of me: a relativist, a realist or a humanist?
True, we could start up a discussion on how and why you or I, and perhaps
some like-minded others, would think certain limits reasonable,
transgressible no doubt, but not worth doing unless one had some particular
inclination to be a fashionable transgressive criminal. We could start
talking about this and perhaps come to a shared understanding of what is
involved in not wanting to end up as a fashionable transgressive criminal,
why for us it is enough to get through the day without hurting others, how
we respond to this etc.
We could cut the story short and only talk about those limits which we could
imagine never falling - the thou shalt not kill, for example, which seems to
have lasted for a long time and to have been present in a majority of
cultures. We could then speculate as to why this was the case. How many
attempts have there been at arriving at and justifying such a limit? The
biblical commandments which stress the word of God (divine intervention),
the functional or utilitarian analysis which stresses the productivity and
efficiency of such a limit (economic rationalization), the romantic notion
of an expression of some natural inclination, or the humanist claim that
there is a set of basic unalterable tendencies or essences to being truly
human. Has this story ended with humanism? "Is it even a story (of
progress)?", a postmodernist would probably ask.
"But all this speculation is all well and good", one might then say, "but
where does it leave us in the moment when we have to live, this moment now,
when we have to come up with some answers, some idea of how to engage the
problem right now? Lets get down to the nitty gritty and work out exactly
what it is that informs this important question: when to transgress?"
"Who knows? If I could get beyond a preface addressing this problem I
suspect that I would then look back at what I had thought and said, and be
unhappy with it, see it as somehow being inadequate to the problem."
-sebastian
>Sebastian Gurciullo wrote:
>
>>Humanist Europe produced Nazi Germany
>
>Or, the Europe that produced humanism also produced Nazi Germany. Nazi
>ideology itself was very hostile to all those softhearted doctrines, and in
>their antihumanism and antiuniversalism, denied that Jews and other
>non-Aryans were as fully human as Aryans.
>
>
and then John wrote:
>It's not antihumanist to claim that Jews aren't human. The essential
>category of humanism remains. "We all must be humans; Jews aren't humans;
>thus exterminating them is not an anti-humanist act." You want humanism to
>be a critical criteron, an intellectual guarantor of moral action. But
>humanism won't do that work for you.
I agree with John, that there were a series of humanist ideologies in
Europe, one of which operated in the machinery of Nazi Germany. The
non-Nazi ones were more extreme and destructive but nonetheless contained a
mutant (even if non-explicit) form of humanism. It is truly difficult, if
not impossible, to go beyond humanism. It seems that the louder the claim
to have gone beyond it, the greater the blindness to how you may actually be
repeating, distorting, transforming it in myriad ways. The Nazi ideology
may have stressed some distortion of Nietzsche's beyond-man (ie. the
superman), but arguably they ended up showing the futility of claiming to be
beyond, once and for all, what they saw to be the softhearted, decadent
forms of humanism which tolerated the Jewish presence.
>The question I'm trying to ask, and apparently not doing it well, is how
>one chooses what boundaries are worth transgressing (e.g., various
>restrictive sexual moralities, rules I'm happy to see broken) and those
>which aren't (e.g. random enucleation).
This is a difficult question to answer on a page, in a book, let alone in an
email. How do we know what limits are worth transgressing and which not?
Isn't this one of those things that people spend their whole lives engaged
in negotiating. Not necessarily in the obsessive manner that philosophers
and thinkers do it - the kind of obsession that drives them to ask the
questions, to press for the solutions, to attempt a resolution of some sort
and to publish it so others may benefit of their labour - but in the realm
of the everyday, in the choices constantly being confronted, especially in
that wide spectrum of the grey where the morality we have inherited, the
precedents that already exist, have nothing or little to offer, or offer
only contradictory, unresolvable possibilities for ethical action.
But what of random enucleation? Clear cut? You or I may decide to name a
particular "something" which tells us why one transgresses here but not
there, but is it then impossible to imagine many other ways of negotiating
the problem? Is it a psychological of a superego as Freud believed? Is it
the divine voice of reason, as Kant believed it to be? An aversion to
cruelty, basic compassion, totemic injunction? What is the one thing which
underlies all these forms? Lets try to get at it! But, should one be
attempting answers at all here rather than asking more and more questions to
refine the problem in preparation for the complexities of the real life
situations? Should we be talking about this problem purely in practical
terms, or is it just as worthwhile to speculate, fantasize, laugh about it
all even, poke some fun at the seriousness which this problem seems to
inevitably provoke? Or perhaps prematurely (and irresponsibly?) break off
this interminable dialogue (or is it a monologue) and get out there and live
life with all its imperfections and contradictions? What does all this make
of me: a relativist, a realist or a humanist?
True, we could start up a discussion on how and why you or I, and perhaps
some like-minded others, would think certain limits reasonable,
transgressible no doubt, but not worth doing unless one had some particular
inclination to be a fashionable transgressive criminal. We could start
talking about this and perhaps come to a shared understanding of what is
involved in not wanting to end up as a fashionable transgressive criminal,
why for us it is enough to get through the day without hurting others, how
we respond to this etc.
We could cut the story short and only talk about those limits which we could
imagine never falling - the thou shalt not kill, for example, which seems to
have lasted for a long time and to have been present in a majority of
cultures. We could then speculate as to why this was the case. How many
attempts have there been at arriving at and justifying such a limit? The
biblical commandments which stress the word of God (divine intervention),
the functional or utilitarian analysis which stresses the productivity and
efficiency of such a limit (economic rationalization), the romantic notion
of an expression of some natural inclination, or the humanist claim that
there is a set of basic unalterable tendencies or essences to being truly
human. Has this story ended with humanism? "Is it even a story (of
progress)?", a postmodernist would probably ask.
"But all this speculation is all well and good", one might then say, "but
where does it leave us in the moment when we have to live, this moment now,
when we have to come up with some answers, some idea of how to engage the
problem right now? Lets get down to the nitty gritty and work out exactly
what it is that informs this important question: when to transgress?"
"Who knows? If I could get beyond a preface addressing this problem I
suspect that I would then look back at what I had thought and said, and be
unhappy with it, see it as somehow being inadequate to the problem."
-sebastian