Debating humanity. Towards aPhilosophical sociology

Daniel Chernilo

This is a provisional draft of the Introduction to my newbook, which I will publish with Cambridge University

Press.

I’ve posted it here to get feedback before I finish it,hopefully in the next few months.

Feel free to use it for conventional academic purposesbut please don’t misuse it. I’d be more than happy toreceive criticism but am only interested in those of a

constructive kind

Short introductions to the project as a whole are available in various papers on academia

https://lboro.academia.edu/DanielChernilo

Also, the following links may be of interest:

http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/18039

http://www.thesociologicalreview.com/information/blog/towards-a-philosophical-sociology.html

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-4446.12077/abstract

You can reach me via email D.Chernilo@lboro.ac.uk or twitter @danielchernilo

T

ABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1. The humanism debate revisited. Sartre,Heidegger, Derrida

Chapter 2. Self-transcendence. Hannah Arendt

Chapter 3. Adaptation. Talcott Parsons

Chapter 4. Responsibility. Hans Jonas

Chapter 5. Language. Jürgen Habermas

Chapter 6. Moral goods. Charles Taylor

Chapter 7. Reflexivity. Margaret Archer

Chapter 8. Reproduction of life. Luc Boltanski

Chapter 9. Back to Philosophical Anthropology? HansBlumenberg

References

IntroductionThis book introduces the idea philosophical sociology as aresearch programme that explores the variousanthropological dimensions through which both sociologyand philosophy have defined notions ‘the human’, ‘humanbeings, ‘humanity’ and indeed ‘human nature’ over thepast 60 or so years. I contend that these notions havemostly remained implicit in contemporary debates; at thevery least, that they have not been fully articulatedout. The project of a philosophical sociology is built onthree main pillars:

(1) The anthropological features that define us as humanbeings are to a large extent independent from, but cannotbe realised in full outside, social life. The core ofthis book then looks at seven of these properties (asthey have been discussed by a particular writer over thepast 60 or so years): self-transcendence (Hannah Arendt),adaptation (Talcott Parsons), responsibility (Hans Jonas),language (Jürgen Habermas), moral goods (Charles Taylor),reflexivity (Margaret Archer) and the reproduction of life (LucBoltanski).

(2) Substantively, this matters because our conceptionsof the human ultimately underpin our normative notions insocial life. Normative ideas in society depend on thehuman capacity to reflect on what makes us human andmobilise the ways in which we imagine the kind of beingsthat we would like to become. Normative ideas aretherefore irreducible to the material or socioculturalpositions that humans occupy in society.

(3) Given that in contemporary societies humansthemselves are ultimate arbiters of what is right andwrong, our shared anthropological features as members ofthe human species remain the best option to justifynormative arguments. These anthropological traits defineus as members of the same species not only create theconditions for social life to unfold but they are alsothe basis from which ideas of justice, self, dignity and

the good life emerge. A universalistic principle ofhumanity is to be preferred over particularisticconceptions of race, culture, identity, and indeed class.

Sociology and Philosophy

The notion of philosophical sociology indicates also apreference for a conception of sociology that cannot berealised without a close and careful relationship withphilosophy. Whilst the early institutionalisation ofsociology was unquestionably driven by an effort ofdifferentiation from philosophy (Manent 1998), it is wrongto construe this as sociology’s rejection or neglect ofphilosophy (Adorno 2000). We can instead observe at leastthree main ways in which these connections are in factbeing constantly redrawn.1

A first ‘positivist’ path understands the philosophicaltradition as sociology’s pre-scientific heritage, whereas itsfuture belongs to empirical and scientific work. Withinthe classical cannon of sociology, this attitude isarguably best represented by Durkheim as he engagedextensively in philosophical speculation but soughtalways to keep both domains distinctly apart (Durkheim1960, 1982). Durkheim remained interested in philosophyand wrote more than occasional works that are indeedphilosophical but never betrayed his fundamentalintuition that he was to contribute to sociology as aspecialist subject that was to be defined by its owntheories, methodological rules and internal thematicdifferentiation. The key feature of this way of lookingat their interconnections is that, however much can begained from philosophical enquiry, this does notconstitute a sociological task sensu stricto (Luhmann 1994;Merton 1964).

A second trajectory is constituted by explicit attemptsat epistemological self-clarification. An argument that we cantrace back to Weber’s extensive methodological1 I have explored these interconnections in Chernilo (2013). See, inparticular, Chapters 6 and 7.

disquisitions, the focus here is on elucidating the logicsociology’s scientific arguments (Weber 1949). All suchdebates as idealism v materialism, individualism vcollectivism, or realism v constructivism belong in thiscategory, and we may equally include here a wide range ofhistories of sociology that have been written in order toilluminate the wider pool of cognitive commitments thatinform the sociological imagination (Benton 1977; Levine1995; Ritzer 1988). Rather than being excluded fromsociology, philosophy here takes the well-known role ofunder-labourer: philosophical tools may be included inthe sociologist’s kit, but they nonetheless ought toremain a neat separation between epistemologicaldiscussions and substantive empirical work.

The third approach to the relationships between sociologyand philosophy uses the philosophical tradition as sourcefrom which to draw various normative motifs (Ginsberg 1968;Hughes 1974). Classically, Marx’s (XXX) notion of critique ofpolitical economy shows the extent to which the fundamentallyphilosophical motif of critique was to guide hisengagement the ‘scientific’ or empirical procedures ofpolitical economy. Possibly close to ‘social philosophy’,critical social theory is arguably paradigmatic of thiskind of engagement in terms of the reconfiguration ofnormative questions as philosophy’s key contribution toscientific sociology (Adorno 2000; Habermas 1974; Marcuse1973). Yet this kind of engagement is equally availablein ‘nostalgic’ or even ‘conservative’ positions within thesociological canon (Nisbet 1967; MacIntyre 2007).

These three approaches to the relationships betweenphilosophy and sociology may not exhaust all possibleoptions but capture the most salient ones. Neitherdisciplinary arrogance nor parochialism will do herethough: a re-engagement between sociology and philosophymust take the form of a mutual learning process betweenthe different knowledge claims that underpin them both:the empirical vocation of sociology as it grapples withthe complexities of contemporary society and the kind ofunanswerable questions that we still associate with thebest of the philosophical tradition. At stake here is the

fact that as long as sociology continues to raise the bigquestions about life in society – the relative weight ofmaterial and ideal factors in historical explanations,the relationships between individual actions and socialtrends, the relationships between nature and culture orthe dialectics between domination and emancipation –these are all questions that also transcend it: goodsociological questions are always, in the last instance,also philosophical ones.

Philosophical Anthropology

The idea of philosophical sociology achieved some modestnotoriety in Germany at the turn of the twentiethcentury. But in the context of a discipline that wasstill intellectually and institutionally in the making,philosophical sociology was always unlikely to find widesupport; in fact, Simmel and Tonnies saw it as acontribution to the scientific establishment of sociology.Short-lived as it actually was, the project of aphilosophical sociology was already building on previouswork on philosophical anthropology.2

As a nascent intellectual project, philosophicalanthropology looked for a comprehensive answer to thequestion of what is a human being. Its foundationalcohort is primarily associated to the work of Max Schelerand to a lesser extent of Ernst Cassirer, both of whomshared a diagnostic with regards to the need for a newdiscipline that could bring together what we know abouthuman beings. Writing in 1927, Scheler opens The HumanPlace in the Cosmos with a claim that we have since heard manytimes: ‘in no historical era has the human being becomeso much of a problem to himself that as in ours’ (Scheler2009: 5). From medicine to philology, the originalproject of philosophical anthropology was an attempt toreunite scientific and philosophical knowledge about what is

2 See Vierkandt, Simmel, Tonnies. There is not a comprehensiveaccount of philosophical anthropology available in English. Mydepiction below is based on Cassirer (1977, 2000) and Schnädelbach(1984).

a human being. Crucially, this argument for reunificationwas made not only in an epistemological key but also inan ontological one: a dual approach to human beingsresults from, and must be preserved, because of theduality of the human condition itself: humans are partlynatural bodies that are controlled by their urges,emotions and pshysico-chemical adaptation to the worldand partly conscious beings that are defined by theirintellectual, aesthetic and indeed moral insights.

The rise of philosophical anthropology leads also to therealisation that the question ‘what is a human being’ isnot a question for professional intellectuals alone. Itrather emerges out of human experiences of and in theworld; it is the kind of ‘existential’ question that area perennial concern for human beings themselves. As partof the human condition, it is central to religious,mythical and indeed scientific worldviews and is to befound across history and through different cultures: ahuman is a being who asks what is a human being; humans are beings whoask anthropological questions (Blumenberg 2011: 341, 375). Atits best, the early programme of philosophicalanthropology leads to a universalistic principle ofhumanity that entails the following commitments:

(1) Life expresses itself through an upward gradient incomplexity that goes from plants, that have little optionbut to passively adapt to the environment, to animals thatmake use of their instincts, to humans who can reflexivelydecide who they are and what they want to do.

(2) Average members of the human species are all inprinciple similarly endowed with general anthropologicalcapacities that make a key contribution to life insociety. Human beings recognise one another as members ofthe same species because of these shared anthropologicalendowments.

(3) The human body has an ambivalent position for humansthemselves: it is an object in the natural world, it is

the ‘container’ of our anthropological features and it isalso a cultural artefact. (4) Given that human nature is ultimately indeterminatevis-à-vis social and cultural relations, humans have theability of making themselves an explicit issue ofconcern.

For our purses, by far the most consequentialintervention in this early delimitation of philosophicalsociology and philosophical anthropology comes from KarlLöwith’s 1932 book on Max Weber and Karl Marx. Arguably bestknown for his perceptive criticisms of Heidegger, at thattime Löwith still saw himself as working broadly withinHeideggerian influence. Löwith’s contention is that thegreatness of both Weber and Marx lies in that theysuccessfully brought together the two intellectual genresin which we are interested in: the venerable concerns ofphilosophy and the fresh start that is offered by thesocial sciences. The latter was of course the explicitinterest of Weber and Marx: they were equally interested incapitalism and offered radically different interpretationsof its emergence and functioning. But there is also aphilosophical layer to their writings that, in Löwith’sinterpretation, is in fact more significant. There, theirapparent differences are sublated into a fundamentalcommon ground: the core ‘of their investigations is oneand the same (…) what is it that makes man “human” withinthe capitalistic world’ (Löwith 1993: 42–3). Thisanthropological enquiry into what is a human being wassurely not the explicit goal of either writer but thereinlies none the less ‘their original motive’ (Löwith 1993:43). Weber and Marx offer a new kind of intellectualenquiry that is, simultaneously, empirically informed andnormatively oriented, and this is precisely what makesthem ‘philosophical sociologists’ (Löwith 1993: 48). Itis through the combination of scientific andphilosophical approaches that they addressed fundamentalintellectual questions: the interplay of material andideal factors in human life, the immanent andtranscendental condition of historical time, therelationships between social action and human fate, the

disjuncture between existential concerns we all share ashuman beings and our particular socio-historicalcontexts.

For all its strengths, we must also acknowledge thatthere was something tardy about philosophicalanthropology: the owl of Minerva spreads its wings atdusk. For nearly a century, natural scientists hadalready stopped asking for philosophy’s permission whenit came to asking questions about the human condition.Given that science rather than philosophy was makingknowledge about the human to advance at an unprecedentedpace, science was the one setting the new standards (vonUexküll 2010), the philosophical drive of philosophicalanthropological made it inadequate for its task: as aproject that needed to confront the challenges of thecontemporary scientific civilisation, philosophicalanthropology, looked old before it really got going.3

Philosophical anthropology was even looked at withscepticism within professional philosophy itself. ToEdmund Husserl, who at the time was the leading Germanphilosopher, philosophical anthropology seemed second-rate philosophy because the psychological andphysiological limitations of the human mind were nevergoing to live up to the standards of the generalquestions about mind, consciousness and reason in general.4 Amere interest in the human, the more so as it now had toinclude the ‘lower’ biological functions of human life,was never going to replace philosophy’s enduringconcerns.

If we now include also the turbulent historical periodwithin which philosophical emerged, there was perhapssomething inevitable in the rapid rise and demise ofphilosophical anthropology as a field of study. In a

3 This, in effect, remains very much the case – see, for instance,Jurgen Habermas’ (XXX) argument on the relationship between scienceand philosophy in Postmetaphysical Thinking. 4 To that extent, Heidegger’s equally ambivalent relationship tophilosophical anthropology echoes Husserl’s doubt, though in thiscase the general scepticism is based on an irrationalist orhistoricist understanding of being.

context of volatile nationalistic passions, rapidbureaucratisation, urbanisation and technological change,militarisation and colonial wars, hyper-inflation and therise of mass political parties, a concern with the humanin general, and a belief in a unified theory of the humanunder the tutelage of philosophy, could be construed asdramatically out of touch. Was philosophical anthropologyreally the intellectual answer to a world that, for thepast two centuries or so, seemed to have been dominatedby power struggles, capitalism, technological innovationsand particularistic ideas of nation and race? Wholepopulations or collectives were being pushed outside thehuman family (if they were ever permitted to sit in thehigh table in the first place), political democracy wasscoffed by traditional elites and dismissed as merebourgeois democracy by revolutionaries, and theindividual not only could but ought be sacrificed onbehalf of the nation, the party, the revolution andindeed humanity itself. In a modern world that was markedby violence and upheaval, the venerable Kantian idea thathumans be treated as ends and never as mere means rangidealistic at best.

The massacres and crimes of World War II did not makethings easier for philosophical anthropology and yet itwas in its aftermath that philosophical anthropologyexperienced the peak of its influence and publicexposure. Closely associated to the works of ArnoldGehlen (1980) and Helmut Schelsky (XX) – both of whomwere Nazi sympathisers – a second generation ofphilosophical anthropology gave up on the originalhumanistic concerns of Cassirer and Scheler and insteadarticulated such conventional conservative concerns asthe dangers of technology and the erosion of community.The humanist sensibility was not altogether abandoned,however, as apparent in Helmuth Plessner’s (1970)influential work on Crying and Laughter (Plessner was Jewishand had been subject to Nazi persecution). Towards thelast part of the twentieth-century, a third generation ofphilosophical anthropology emerged. Here, it is theontological claims that defined the first generation thatwere now being given up: Odo Marquard’s (1989) homo

compensator and, as we shall in the concluding chapter,Hans Blumenberg’s reflections on the powers of humandelegation, both point to a anti-foundationalist definitionof the human that can hardly be reconciled with previousnotions of human nature.

Homo Sociologicus

Given that this book is about philosophical sociology, letme now look more closely at some sociologicalinstantiations of these general reflections about thehuman. Ralf Dahrendorf wrote two pieces that dealdirectly with the questions that concern us here: HomoSociologicus in 1957 and a follow-up essay on Sociology andHuman Nature in 1962. Dahrendorf uses the termphilosophical sociology only in passing and in order toemphasise the inability of European sociology todifferentiate between philosophical/normative concerns,on the one hand, and strictly empirical/scientific ones,on the other (Dahrendorf 1973: 78). As sociology’smaturity depends on a strict separation between these twodomains, Dahrendorf praises American social science forhaving made the idea of the ‘social role’ central to thedemarcation of that distinction. Homo sociologicus is thusintroduced as the disciplinary equivalent of homooeconomicus in modern economics and ‘psychological man’ intwentieth-century scientific psychology: where the formeris interested only in the calculation of possibilitiesfor personal gain, the latter’s behaviour is alwaysunderpinned by unconscious motifs that can never becomefully clear to the individual herself. It is nowsociology’s turn to clearly delimit the one aspect of humanbehaviour that constitutes sociology’s genuine subject matter: ‘To asociologist the individual is his social roles’(Dahrendorf 1973: 7).

Homo oeconomicus, homo psychologicus and homo sociologicus sharetwo important features. First, they all seek to capturethat particular point at which the individual and societyintersect: individual preferences/objective conditionsfor homo oeconomicus, unconscious drives/social norms for

homo psychologicus, personal capabilities/social performancefor homo sociologicus. Secondly, none offers a comprehensivetheory of human nature but are instead construed asideal-types; they offer the unilateral exaggeration ofone particular anthropological feature that has provedparticularly useful from one, equally particular, pointof view. In defining homo sociologicus as stable andpredictable role-conforming behaviour, Dahrendorfcontends, sociology ‘explicitly renounces a sociological image ofman: it proclaims the intention of finding powerfulexplanatory theories of social action rather thandescribing the nature of man accurately andrealistically’ (Dahrendorf 1973: 76, my italics).

From a scientific standpoint, this is a win-win situationbecause the net increment in the predictive ability ofsociology leads also to a realisation of the futility ofmetaphysical speculation. But given that social-scientific concepts belong also in social and politicaldiscourse, that is, because they are also used outsideexpert circles, the wider philosophical underpinnings ofhomo sociologicus react back on their strictly scientificuse. Dahrendorf (1973: 59) then contends that‘[s]ociology has paid for the exactness of itspropositions with the humanity of its intentions, and hasbecome a thoroughly inhuman, amoral science’. He elaborates onthis issue as follows:

If the assumption of role conformity has provedextraordinarily fruitful in scientific terms, in moralterms the assumption of a permanent protest against thedemands of society is much more fruitful. This is why an imageof man may be developed that stresses man’sinexhaustible capacity for overcoming all the forces foralienation that are inherent in the conception andreality of society (Dahrendorf 1973: 84, my italics)

One implication of this discussion is that, to the extentthat we engage with both ideas of the human andconceptions of the social, we can never fully separate outdescriptive and normative concerns. They must be

distinguished analytically, and we ought to be able todiscuss them separately, but the question is always aboutexploring their iterations. More substantively, this alsoshows that, to the extent that we base our reflections onthe human on reductionist anthropological accounts, thesereductions are also felt in, and have dramaticconceptions for, our conceptions of the social. Theproblem does not lie in any specific shortcoming of homooeconomicus, homo psychologicus or homo sociologicus but in thefact that, as they are by definition reductionist, eventheir alleged scientific success cancels itself out. Thestudy of social life requires instead of a universalisticprinciple of humanity that offers a richer account of ourdefining anthropological features. In particular, seeDahrendorf’s reference to an ‘inexhaustible capacity forovercoming’ forces of conformity and alienation: nothingshort of the human ability for self-renewal is at stakehere.

Sadly, however, mainstream contemporary sociology doesnot seem to have learnt the right lessons on this issue.5

Committed as he is to political causes, Pierre Bourdieuengages constantly with normative questions. But Bourdieudoes not conceptualise normativity sociologically; normativeideas are not included as an actual dimension of thesocial world because conflict and power-struggles aredeemed enough for a full shape ontology of the social:‘[t]he particularity of sociology is that it takes as itsobject fields of struggle – not the field of classstruggle but the field of scientific struggles itself.And the sociologist occupies a position in thesestruggles’ (Bourdieu 1994: 10). The normative motif ofhis militant sociology is that the interests of lesspowerful actors ought to be favoured against those ofmore powerful ones, so the role of the sociologist is tohelp subordinate actors get their interest advancedwherever and whenever this is needed. The problem is notat all with Bourdieu’s political options but with theshallow anthropology that underpins it. Indeed, Bourdieu5 As of early August 2015, Pierre Bourdieu carries more GoogleScholar citations than Weber and Marx combined.

readily accepts that sociology ‘inevitably appeals toanthropological theories (…) it can make real progressonly on condition that it makes explicit these theories that researchersalways bring in (…) and which are generally no more than thetransfigured projection of their relation to the socialworld’ (Bourdieu 1994: 19, my italics).

Knowingly or otherwise, Bourdieu follows Dahrendorf here:we ought to take our anthropological presuppositionsseriously and make them explicit because they are atransfigured projection of our own relations to the socialworld. If we now see how Bourdieu’s own arguments fare onthese questions, we obtain a reductionist notion of self-interests that is then coupled by an equally reductionistconception of constant struggle. These eventually cometogether in an irrationalist conception of the social:

There is a form of interest or function that liesbehind every institution or practice (…) thespecifically social magic of an institution canconstitute almost anything as an interest and as arealistic interest, i.e. as an investment (both in theeconomic and the psychoanalytic senses), that isobjectively rewarded, in the more or less long term,by an economy (Bourdieu 1994: 18)

Because interests lie behind every institution and practice, Bourdieu’ssociology predicts a world of winners and losers andanticipates on which side our normative loyalties shouldbe. We may then account for structural features ofvarious social contexts but are unable to grasp what isnormatively at sake because irreducible normative ideasare not part of his version of homo sociologicus. In fact,the irrationalist conception of human nature offered byBourdieu mirrors those offered by equally one-sided,arguments on, say, primordial authenticity (Connell2007). This ‘normative-less’ depiction of social life issociology’s very own self-fulfilling dystopia: we do nottake normative factors into account as part of what wehave to explain sociologically because our ontologies ofthe social allow for no concept of the normative.

A Post-Human World?

The references I have briefly discussed up to now remainrelatively conventional not only in terms of theirdisciplinary reference point but also in the sense thatthey all speak to a kind of being that they more or lessexplicitly and confidently describe as ‘human’. Butwhether this is in fact an adequate presupposition tomake is precisely the kind of question that seems mostpressing nowadays. Under the general banner ofposthumanism, we find artificial intelligence andcognitive science experts who discuss the uniqueness ofthe biological makeup of the human species, science andtechnology experts who redraw the contours of the humanthrough its interactions with various other domains ofreality, global warming and animal rights activists whochallenge the destructive and indeed self-destructivefeatures of modern anthropocentrism, and postcolonial andgender scholars who highlight the whole range of violentexclusions that have been justified by anything butbenevolent Western ideas of humanity. These positionscome all from different angles and have their own targetsof critique, but they can group together if we considerthat they are all interested in wrong presuppositions andnegative implications modern anthropocentrism and, byimplication, humanism.6

I have of course written this book within thisintellectual climate but will not be directly engagingwith these arguments. Ideas of humanity are of coursesocially construed, change historically and are full ofhighly problematic assumptions at cognitive, theologicaland normative levels (Foucault 1970). But nowadays ittakes too little effort to challenge so-called

6 Badmington’s (2000a) collection is illustrative because, under theloose banner of posthumanism, it brings together Fanon’s critique ofWestern imperialism, Donna Haraway’s work on cyborgs, RolandBarther’s semiological work and Althusser’s virulent anti-humanism.See Kieran Durkin’s (2014: 129-43) excellent discussion of earlyincarnations of anti-humanism from a view that is compatible with theargument I am offering here.

‘traditional’ ideas of the human and humanity and thenmake an additional that they are not only fading away butare ultimately to blame for all of modernity’s sins. As I reject the substantive implication of this lastclaim, I think we can use it as an invitation to step backand interrogate again the status of our conceptions ofthe human. But as my goal is to explore the status ofvarious ideas of the human, then to do so on the basis ofclaims to novelty seems to me the wrong approach. This isnot only to do with the fact nothing is less original thanclaims to originality. More importantly, this fallacy ofpresentism misses the key insight that this very quest isparadigmatic of the all too human frustration with theirritating inevitability of the question what is to behuman. When the post-humanist literature now rejects the‘foundationalism’ that underpins traditional ‘humanist’ideas, all their key motifs (growing knowledge of humanbiology, the challenges and opportunities of technology,the aporias of anthropocentrism) are also those that,under different names, had been for well over 200 years.It is impossible for me to survey the various bodies ofliterature that have touched on these issues over thepast few decades. But I can further illustrate myargument by using three paradigmatic references in threedifferent fields.

Bruno Latour hardly needs introduction to a socialscientific audience and his work is indeed well known forhaving claims about the definitive need for a whole newontology that, as it offers a radical redescription ofconcepts of the social, culture and nature, it seeks alsoto do without the distinction between humans andnonhumans (Latour 1993). In his recent Anthropology of theModerns, for instance, Latour specifies further the ideaof networks that he had been using for a long time. Hespeaks now of 'series of associations', ‘series ofinstauration’ and 'chains of references’ which, as theyare a form of becoming, now allow him to contend thatstability resides in change, solidity in flexibility,necessity in contingency, universality in particularity,etc. (Latour 2013: 33, 154-62). He also touches onsociology’s conventional depiction of law, politics, the

economy, etc. as differentiated systems, fields, or valuespheres and, again, inverts conventional knowledge.Rather than concentrating on the autonomy of each ofthese domains, it is truly their heteronomy what we oughtto be interested in: non-legal elements create law, non-political ones create politics, non-economic ones createthe economy, etc. (Latour 2013: 29-35, 130-149).

As methodological or indeed conceptual propositions,these claims are all suggestive and, to Latour’s credit,they have proven highly valuable in several empiricaldomains. Methodologically, humans are not only as agentsand technologies are never fully passive; conceptually,some conceptions of nature, society and culture are inneed of redefinition. But neither claim requires norjustifies an ontological dissolution of the human; evenless so when as this is a theory that, quite rightly,makes apparent its normative motifs. But as a newontology the stake are indeed different, and thearguments appear far more problematic. The first problemhas to do with whether ‘nature’, ‘society’, and ‘culture’actually exist but they have badly misunderstood by themoderns – they are hybrids rather than self-containeddomains – or whether they do not exist and the realconstituents are in fact hybrids themselves. See, forinstance,

even though we construct Society through andthrough, it lasts, it surpasses us, it dominates us,it has its own laws, it is as transcendent as Nature(…) The critical power of the modern lies in thisdouble language: they can mobilize nature at theheart of social relationships, even as they leaveNature infinitely remote from human beings; they arefree to make and unmake their society, even as theyrender its laws ineluctable, necessary and absolute(1993: 36-7)

It is really not clear which way we should go: if theproblem is that of how to conceptualise nature and society,the problem is not at all an ontological one buttheoretical or even methodological one. But if Latour is

really going for a new ontology, then this is not allricher than the conventional one; instead, we now have acosmos has now completed flattened and is populated bynetworks alone: only networks are real because they arewell constructed, only networks are viable because theyspeak various languages, only networks allow unstablecomponents to become ‘scientific’, ‘artistic’, or‘economic’. A genuine ontological plurality fails toemerge because all is now subordinated to an endless flowof networks; all we can learn and experience we learn andexperience because it has successfully become real as anetwork: ‘As collectives, we are all brothers’ (1993: 114) The second issue refers directly to the question of thestatus of the human in Latour’s work. The problem herecan be introduced in the same way as above: either do humanexist but we have never understood them (in a milderform: modern Western metaphysics has fundamentallymisconstrued them) or they don’t exist and are indeedcentral to the difficulties we have in understanding theworld. Similar to what happens to the argument on thedifferentiation of various domains, one is also remindedhere of Niklas Luhmann’s (2012) argument that individualsare external to society. But what for Luhmann countedabove all as a requirement of methodological consistency(and even in that softer case it remained always aconstant source of epistemological and normativeheadaches), Latour has again pushed as question ofontology. But it is one thing to accept that thetraditional volitional, dispositional, affective andindeed moral connotations of the human are in need ofpermanent redefinition – a perfectly reasonable claimthat I fully endorse – and quite another to uphold thefull reversibility that Latour favours: humans arevisible only if and when they are part of a network. Mypoint is simple – banal even – and suggests that the veryterms with which Latour himself justifies his intellectualenquiry do require a strong and in fact highlyconventional conception of the human. In We Have Never BeenHumans, for instance, he is concerned with such questionsas global warming and the atomic bomb (Latour 1993) andin An Anthropology of the Moderns he speaks at length about the

revival of fundamentalism, poverty, misogyny andcolonialism as well as ubiquitous ecological dangers(Latour 2013: 142-56, 268-91).

But because these are only understandable as normativemotifs he has to affirm in practice what rhetoricallydenies: there ‘wes’ and ‘theys’ that ultimately care forthese problems are, of course, human beings.7 Can there beanything more modern that Latour’s dissatisfaction withmodernity’s own self-descriptions? His work belongs tothe decidedly modern genre in which modernity is inpermanent need of full reconsideration: it is athoroughly modern attempt to account for the moderndissatisfaction with the modern experience of unfulfilledpromises that come out of modernity’s own successes andfailures. Above all, it is the view that modernity canonly be described adequately if we do so on the basis ofthe same claim to originality of which moderns are sofond of: this is time, we shall succeed.

My second example comes from Rosi Briadotti’s (2013)recent book on posthumanism and a first thing to note isthat this genre is constituted by its own rules: what forLatour is substantiated by some form of first-handempirical research, it is here introduced through acombination of speculative, philosophical and scientificarguments that are then fleshed out through examplescoming from popular culture and political criticism.Modernity is then defined by two fundamental processes:the constant obsession for technological innovations andits general trend towards the transvaluation of values.Whilst both are fundamentally ambivalent processesbecause that offer challenges and opportunities, thecritical standpoint is sustained in the fact that whatemerges with promises of emancipation for all has, on thecontrary, been built on the systematic exclusion of themany. Briadotti builds on a line of critique of humanismthat has become mainstream at least since Heidegger’s7 There is, even, a humanist plea that humans have not counted enoughthroughout human history: ‘humans have always counted less than thevast population of divinities and lesser transcendental entities thatgive us life’ (Latour 2004: 456).

Letter on Humanism in the mid-1940s: the modern belief inhumanity is a pernicious illusion and ‘Humanism’ (withcapital H) is nothing but the violent and exclusionarymaster-ideology of the West that encapsulates all that iswrong with modernity (Braidotti 2013: 13-30). She alsofollows Heidegger in the fact that this is a form ofanti-humanist in anything but name. This remains thecentral tenet of the posthumanist literature. Humanism asrepresentative of the contemporary sensibility is nolonger because it is already dead (Davies 1997).8

The inability to commit fully to an anti-humanistperspective is however dependent on the fact that, bothcognitively and normatively, she cannot do without asense of subjectivity who cares about the world and isworth caring for Braidotti. Subjectivity remains a keytheoretical cornerstone of her posthumanist projectbecause only there can to anchor any possible sense ofagency as the locus of critique (2013: 50-4). Full-blownanti-humanism becomes ultimately untenable on groundsthat are similar to Latour’s: first, because as a formcritique, Briadotti’s discourse requires normative motifsthat, despite the rhetoric, can only introduced as a humanconcerns for dignity, justice, solidarity and freedom.Secondly, humans beings matter because they are the onesthat mobilise normative ideas in society, at stake hereare creative capacities of human action itself. As shedeconstructs the inconsistencies of humanist discourses –anthropocentrism, androgenism, racism – Braidotti willhave no difficulty in ubiquitously appealing totraditional humanist values for her own justifications:justice, dignity and solidarity. The explorations intothe limits, exceptions and contradictions of Westernhumanism are potentially illuminating, but theHeideggerian influence is again apparent in the elitismthat ensues.9 On the one hand, her whole normative project

8 Briadotti’s key intellectual and biographical references areDeleuze and Guattari and in Chapter 1 we will explore in detailHeidegger’s French connection and its fundamental irrationalism andelitism. 9 The thrust of the argument has been well captured by Gillian Rose(1995: 117): ‘Previously, modern philosophical irrationalism was seen

depends on the need to speak ‘on behalf’ of those whocannot do so themselves and, whether we like it or not,this is a quintessentially modern political issue. On theother hand, Briadotti does not really know what to dowith the values and institutions of the modern world: sheloathes them as merely ideological and yet never reflectson the fact that she can do so because she can take themfor granted: people die every die for the right to work,basic human decency, equality before the law.10

Let me finally turn to the fields of cognitive scienceand artificial intelligence, where I would like to focuson the work of Edinburgh philosopher Andy Clark. Theoriginal proponent of the so-called ‘extended mind’thesis (Clark and Chalmers 2008 [1998]), he argues thatthe way in which we understand cognitive processes cannotbe reduced as a self-contained occurrence inside our‘skin and skull’. Rather, he suggests that we can onlyexplain cognitive processes if we allow in all sorts ofexternal factors – buildings and iphones, pens and books.This is interpreted as a posthumanist sensibility becauseit points towards the softening – if not downright dissolution –of a self-contained idea of the human being and itsagential powers. He then rejects the idea that ‘thecognitive’ can be defined unproblematically and indeedmakes his reflections on the cognitive processes centralto the comparison between the main ‘creatures’ he isinterested in: humans and robots (Clark 2008: 86). Forour purposes, there are three main tenets of thisargument that are particularly relevant:

retrospectively by philosophers and historians as the source of theracist and totalitarian movements of the twentieth century. Now,philosophical reason itself is seen by postmodern philosophers as thegeneral scourge of Western history. To reason’s division of the realinto the rational and the irrational, is attributed the fatalManichaeism and imperialism of the West’10 There is also a parallel literature on trans-humanism that acceptsthe more conventional ‘humanist’ position that our species holds a pride of place in the cosmos and favour an active engagement in the redefinition of what it means to be human (Fuller 2011, Fuller and Lipinska 2014).

(1) Humans are defined by the constant interplay betweenmind, body and world, so they are anything but ‘locked-inagents’ (2008: 30). Rather that looking at the differencesbetween internal process that allegedly occur ‘inside’our body/mind and external ones that take place in theworld, he contends that all cognitive operations trulyoccur in their interface. Whilst robots are of courseunlike humans in several regards, in relation to mind,body and world, their cognitive stance is in its outcomes,potentially indistinguishable from that of humans.11

(2) The design of robots as increasingly intelligent andindeed mobile creatures is a major resource in helping usbetter understand cognitive and indeed wider mechanicalmechanism of human beings themselves. In fact, this is anargument that resembles traditional etiological andsocio-biological notions that humans do learn aboutthemselves as they compare their own ways of doing thingswith those of others creatures: ‘The human agent’, saysClark, ‘is nature’s expert at becoming expert’ (2008: 75)

(3) Whilst technological innovations have been a constantthroughout human history, we now witness a new phase inwe move from ‘mere embodiment’ to ‘basic’ and then‘profound embodiment’ of technologies. Similar toScheler’s tripartite classification of plants, animalsand humans, Clark’s also depends on the incrementaldegree of openness in the reactions to external stimuli.The current generation of humans are ‘natural-borncyborgs’ because we have grown predisposed to permanentlyinnovate: ‘A profoundly embodied creature or robot isthus one that is highly engineered to be able to learn tomake maximal problem-simplifying use of an open-ended

11 The common reference point here is Alan Turing’s (2005 [1950])famous imitation game that is devised in order to answer the question‘can machines think?’ In a game whose goal is to find out whetheryour interlocutor is male or female, there is a third participantthat will offer the clues. If a machine is able to play this thirdrole as well as a human would do, then Turing contends that for allpractical purposes we can say that the machine can think. See,classically, John Searle’s (2005 [1980]) critique of Turing’s thoughtexperiment and Margaret Boden’s (2005 [1988]) critique of Searle.

variety of internal, bodily, or external sources oforder’ (2008: 43)

We can see that all three propositions point in theposthumanist direction. Not only do they favour alevelling out between humans and robots but reject theconventional notions that humans are self-contained andeven discard ideas of human supremacy and exceptionalism:here, humans are creatures but so are animals, plants,robots and cyborgs so that the artificial can teach thenatural (2008: 54). In contradistinction to Latour orBriadotti, however, Clark does not ultimately make thefinal posthumanist move of dissolving the human. Ratherthe opposite, he emphasises that there is an ultimateorganic reference to humans:

[i]n rejecting the vision of human cognitiveprocessing as organism bound, we should not feelforced to deny that is (in most, perhaps all, real-world cases) organism centered. It is indeed primarily(though not solely) the biological organism that,courtesy especially of its potent neural apparatus,spins and maintains (or more minimally selects andexploits) the webs of additional structure that thenform parts of the machinery that accomplishes itsown cognizing (…) Individual cognizing, then, isorganism centered even if it is not organism bound (2008: 123)

This argument that cognitive expansion depends on an organiccore is one that I would like to retain. Clarke cancompare different forms of creatures and possibly contendthe autonomy and even superiority of machines withregards to a growing range of cognitive skills andprocesses. What matter to us, however, is that there isalso a fundamental ontological irreversibility built intohis claims: there is always, ultimately, a problem ofdesign. On the material side, there is the human skill ofbuilding robots and technologies which can do stuff. Moreimportantly, on the ideational side, the whole bodyliterature depends on the design of all kinds of thoughtexperiments that allow for the testing various argumentsand counter-arguments. It is the refreshingly ludic side

of this literature that makes my point: colleagues seemto really be having fun at outwitting one another. 12

Structure of the book

Chapter 1 looks closely at a discussion on humanism thattook place right at the end of World War II between Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger. In Existentialism is aHumanism, Sartre offered a defence of traditionalhumanist values – freedom and autonomy for all – on thetraditional grounds of anthropocentrism – ‘man’ is themeasure of all things – and constructivism – the world weinhabit is of human making. In Letter on Humanism, Heideggerresponded by making three fundamental counter-claims:through its egalitarianism and constructivism, humanismwas itself to blame for the war and its atrocities, ‘man’cannot be made a source of value so we ought to worshiphigher forms of ‘being’, and through their masterfulcommand of language, a new elite of poets and thinkerswere to restore human dignity by becoming self-appointed‘shepherds of being’. I then look at Jacques Derrida’sintervention in the 1960s in order to construe more fullythe anti-humanist environment within which later debateshave taken place.

After reassessing this twentieth-century debate onhumanism, the book looks closely at several writers withthe help of which I try to unpack some of the keyanthropological dimensions that will allow us to construea universalistic principle of humanity. Thisanthropological question is arguably not the centralconcern for any of these writers; their substantivecontributions lie elsewhere and include of course anumber of very different areas: from general epistemologyto totalitarianism via ethical naturalism and economic12 My claim this does not change even if machines get much betterthan humans and playing chess, if machines create new games that arevery much like chess or even if machines create machines whosepurpose is to create new games. What is uniquely human is theoriginal impulse that leads humans to play games at all: having fun,socialising, creating and improving on rules, getting better at them,etc.

sociology. Yet all writers felt at some stage the need toarticulate out the conceptions of the human with whichthey had been operating, more or less implicitly, up tothat point.

The order of the chapters is chronological but theirfocus is on one particular dimension of the human:Chapter 2 focuses on Hannah Arendt’s idea of self-transcendence as the human capacity for looking at othersand themselves as if from an external position, Chapter 3looks at Talcott Parsons’ idea of adaptation as the organicvortex through connects the various layers of human lifeto the natural environment, Chapter 4 discusses HansJonas’ understanding of responsibility as human relation thatcreates a normative obligation on the ground of powerdifferentials, Chapter 5 reconstructs Jurgen Habermas’idea of language as the quintessentially social aspect ofhuman life that however is never altogether detached fromits individual instantiation, Chapter 6 explores CharlesTaylor’s idea of moral goods as those objects of concernwith help of which people organise the usuallyconflictive normative priorities that they experiencetheir lives, Chapter 7 assesses Margaret Archer’s notionof reflexivity as the key agential power through which peopletalk to themselves as they decide their future courses ofaction and Chapter 8 reflects on Luc Boltanski’s work onreproduction and abortion in order to assess the dualnatural and social dimensions of the reproduction of life. Thebook ends with a text that lies somewhere in between anindividual chapter and a general conclusion. There, Irevisit Hans Blumenberg’s posthumous work that reassessesthe main contributions of the early tradition ofphilosophical anthropology as a general enquiry into thequestion what is a human being. In order to remain trueto the general orientation of philosophical sociology,the book then includes four philosophers (Arendt,Blumenberg, Jonas and Taylor), three sociologists(Parsons, Archer and Boltanski) and one writer who can beseen as either (Habermas).

An enormous and usually extremely interesting debatesurrounds the interpretation of every one of the

individual writers I have discussed here and I have notbeen able to give justice to their interpretative wealth.My goal is to offer neither a comprehensive nor a whollyoriginal account of their work; instead, for each chapterI have focused on one or two texts where I think theysucceed in making apparent a key dimension in theirconception of the human. Some of my interpretations belowwill be controversial, but I nonetheless expect eachindividual chapter to stand both as a general argument ona specific anthropological dimension and as an essay onthe writer in question.