Humanists who read magazines such as this one might be puzzled by the existence of something called “posthumanism,” sometimes called “critical posthumanism,” and by its hostility toward what posthumanists call “humanism.” So, why do posthumanists have a beef with whatever they understand humanism to be?
Posthumanism is grounded in traditions of continental philosophy that have diverged over the past one or two centuries from Anglophone philosophy, with its empiricist and analytical leanings. For that reason, at least, posthumanists understand humanism as something rather different from what it usually conveys within the contemporary Anglosphere. (That said, many Anglophone scholars work in areas of the humanities that are strongly influenced by continental philosophy, and they are often trained in a “continental” understanding of humanism.)
There is a long history of individuals who were called humanists in one sense or another. This dates back to the Renaissance umanisti in fifteenth-century Italy: scholars who sought to revive Greek and Roman learning and who advocated rigorous philological study to understand the Christian scriptures and other ancient texts. Their influence soon extended beyond Italy to include such exemplary figures as the Dutch theologian and philosopher Desiderius Erasmus and the English theologian and statesman Sir Thomas More.
Since then, understandings of humanism have evolved and speciated. Nineteenth-century humanism became increasingly associated with disbelief in traditional Christian doctrines, partly in response to biblical scholarship that questioned the provenance—and undermined the authority—of the sacred texts. This influenced numerous freethinkers throughout the English-speaking world and across Europe. Some thinkers developed comprehensive alternatives to Christianity, most prominently the atheistic “religion of humanity” advocated by the French philosopher and pioneer of sociology Auguste Comte, who was himself influential far beyond his own country.
As it has developed in English-speaking countries, however, contemporary humanism has more modest ambitions than we find in Comte’s work. Today, as Stephen Law explains in his 2011 book Humanism: A Very Short Introduction, it is a nonreligious system of thought whose moral and political content is based on rational inquiry, individual autonomy, and values relating to science, education, and democratic institutions. As Law points out, humanism in this sense does not insist that only humans matter or that the welfare of other species is morally unimportant; however, it does tend to focus on human happiness in the observable, natural world. Law acknowledges that the term humanism has had other meanings but adds that this has been its main meaning across the world for at least the past seventy (now eighty) years.
Posthumanists view themselves as going beyond what they understand as humanism, in that they reject not only any idea of an afterlife or supernatural world but also anything that they regard as anthropocentrism or human exceptionalism. They aim to develop a post-anthropocentric worldview, including a post-anthropocentric morality. They would doubtless perceive me, for example—or the editors of this magazine—as burdened by a residual anthropocentrism; indeed, they sometimes discover anthropocentric lapses even in other posthumanist or posthumanism-adjacent thinkers. Their larger targets, however, are certain European thinkers and their followers. These especially include Immanuel Kant, with his moral system based on human dignity, and the aforementioned Comte.
Thus, at least one respected moral thinker with posthumanist tendencies, the Italian philosopher Paola Cavalieri, is able to write of how Kant “invented humanism”—though Kant would not count as a humanist at all by Stephen Law’s definition! (Among other things, Kant argued that we must postulate the existence of God and an afterlife with rewards and punishments.)
While some posthumanists highlight scientific studies that seem to narrow the gap between the respective cognitive abilities of human beings and certain nonhuman animals, other posthumanists often take a more radical approach, questioning whether distinctively human abilities such as language, rational thought, complex emotions, and self-reflection are morally significant. Some posthumanists have expressed skepticism about extending protections and legal rights specifically and solely to the great apes, based on the apes’ possession, to an extent, of abilities that we value in ourselves. Even that idea can be seen as anthropocentric.
Accordingly, posthumanists tend to be hostile to the rival intellectual and cultural movement called “transhumanism.” [For more on posthumanism (in another sense of the word) and transhumanism (in exactly the sense used here), see Paul Fidalgo, “Post-Humans on a Sterile Promontory” in this issue. —Eds.] The terms posthumanism and transhumanism are often used interchangeably by people who are confused about the distinction, but posthumanists typically despise transhumanism as a technoscientific extension of anthropocentric values. While transhumanists hope to employ technology to raise distinctively human cognitive (as well as physical) abilities to unprecedented “posthuman” levels, posthumanists do not aspire to any greater-than-human levels of ability. Instead, they offer something that allegedly supersedes humanism.
Most humanists would not be thrilled at being accused of embracing human exceptionalism, anthropocentric thinking, and, in the ultimate, even a kind of human imperialism over the nonhuman world. In their defense, humanism of the kind exemplified by Free Inquiry does not deny that our species, Homo sapiens, is part of nature. Humanism does not assign us a special rank in a cosmic order, and in that sense, it is not an anthropocentric worldview. And yet, I wonder whether any viable human moral system can avoid being anthropocentric in a certain sense and to a certain extent.
One critique of posthumanist thought might be that it fails to understand our moral systems as themselves a part of nature. These systems are created by human beings—one particular social species—to serve various human ends, such as solving coordination problems within, and increasingly among, human societies. Human moral systems, therefore, inevitably reflect human values and attitudes, including our inherent responsiveness to each other, and there is no transcendent and binding set of standards by which this element of human bias toward other humans is “wrong.” I cannot settle such a deep issue here, but we might even wonder whether posthumanists smuggle in a kind of moral supernaturalism.
Come to think of it, many humanists might be troubled by the thought that our moral systems are, in essence, useful inventions by our particular species. It appears, however, inescapable that such disconcerting issues will arise in ongoing posthumanist and humanist critiques and counter-critiques.