"humanism"

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Mon Mar 20 06:29:00 PST 2000


Jim D.:


>what if we refuse to use the word "humanism" without some qualifier? so we
>can talk about "bourgeois humanism" (bad!) and "socialist humanism"
>(potentially good) but not humanism _per se_.

I don't necessarily object to it, if, say, you think you are "socialist humanist." There are lots of good people who might think they are "socialist humanist": Norman Geras, Sean Sayers, etc.


>The rejection of all humanism reminds me of those followers of Althusser
>who saw people's consciousness as simply results of social structures,
>emphasizing the way in which society makes people at the expense of the way
>in which people create society.

Althusser: We are effects of structures.

Carrol & Me: We are our histories (and history is contingent, not the "essence" of "human nature" unfolding in a teleological fashion). (Society doesn't stand outside people to make us. Maybe the word "society" is a tad misleading, too. The word tends to lead us to posit "individuals versus society" understood as an external relation. Then we are back to liberalism of some kind.) In a possible future world in which no one is oppressed, "humanism" (like religion) will become irrelevant in practice, not just in theory (but we may never get there).

Yoshie



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