An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. Stefanos Geroulanos

And now we have fully engaged de-humanized thought!

Excerpt From

An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. “…in the famous article “Encyclopédie,” Diderot writes, “Why do we not introduce man into our work the way he is placed in the universe? Why do we not make him a common center? Is there some point in infinite space from which we can to greater advantage draw the immense lines we propose to stretch to all other points? What a lively and sweet reaction it would create from all beings to man and from man to all meanings.” What changes with the advent of negative anthropology is that this kind of definition becomes not just problematic but irrelevant. Qualities attributed to man in Diderot’s definition no longer really belong to him: man is no longer to be talked about as the frame for thought, or as the masculine singular of a sensing, reflecting, thinking being, or as “the common center.” He can no longer claim to be capable of scientifically understanding the entire world. To the extent that man may still be a sensing, reflecting, thinking being, negative anthropology would counter that these are not properties that simply belong to, or are at play with the fact of his humanity—which is, after all, what is in question here.

A second significant contrast is to Kant who, in his Logic, famously founded the three core questions guiding his critical project—What do I know? What may I hope for? “ought I do?—on a fourth, What is man? 30 Kant thus situated the problem of man at the base of his entire philosophy, and retroactively re-interpreted the three Critiques as aiming to address and offer a path toward answering the basic anthropological question. This stance is bolstered further when read together with the opening of the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, where Kant declared man (in words that would later motivate and be echoed by Feuerbach and the early Marx) as his own ultimate end. Humanism could then be defined as the mobilization of a foundationalist concept of man. The thinkers considered here treated the concept of man by voiding it of foundationalism, arguing in this way against Kant, against the Platonic-Christian idea that man possesses an eternal soul, against the tradition of identifying man with a certain feature, aspect, or property that embodies or expresses his nature, against the Feuerbachian-Marxist approach that sees Man as his own goal, and above all against the idea of a human nature that is given, foundational, single, or readily available.

======From my notes, not certain of my source=========

The Renaissance rediscovered natural man and antiquity, witnessed the clash of pagan and Christian principles, and saw their partial reconciliation in the great symbolic art of the age. The Reformation affirmed man's freedom from ecclesiastical compulsion, but it debased man by denying his primal freedom before God. The Enlightenment affirmed man's self-sufficient reason, but in denying any mystery it debased man's ability to know. The French Revolution affirmed man's ability to change history but ended in denying all human rights. Romanticism affirmed man's spiritual resources but denied his ultimate destiny. Industrialism affirmed man's liberation from nature but denied his integrity and dignity. Modern history by a fatal dialectic sees humanism paradoxically be coming inhumanism; the denial of God tending to the denial of man. Berdyaev sees the present as the beginning of a new barbarism the inhumanity of which is manifest in the total war system where human lives are regarded as mere means; in capitalism under which man is enslaved and oppressed by property; in collectivism where the organization becomes the end and man, the instrument; in a morality of bestialism which permits the use of man in any way to attain inhuman or anti-human ends; in cultural manifestations in literature, science, philosophy, and theology which interpret integral man in terms of a part; in politics with sham democracy's concern with only abstract, formal political freedom and the totalitarian's rejection of all freedom; in the dictator led masses in which all individuality is ruthlessly obliterated; in the intensification of racialism and nationalism which find the existential center in entities other than human personality; in the tyranny of Caesars who rule by appeal to instinct and emotion; and in a Christianity that largely conforms to the world.

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