Humanism and Embodiment

From Cause and Effect to Secularism

Susan E. Babbitt

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781472531926
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Humanism in Philosophy

A live issue in anthropology and development studies, humanism is not typically addressed by analytic philosophers. Arguing for humanism as a view about truths, Humanism and Embodiment insists that disembodied reason, not religion, should be the target of secularists promoting freedom of enquiry and human community. Susan Babbitt's original study presents humanism as a meta-ethical view, paralleling naturalistic realism in recent analytic epistemology and philosophy of science. Considering the nature of knowledge, particularly the radical contingency of knowledge claims upon causal mechanisms, religious thinkers like Thomas Merton and Ivan Illich offer more scientific conceptions of practical deliberation than are offered by some non-religious ethicists. Drawing on philosophical sources such as Marxism, Buddhism and Christianity, this original study considers implications of an embodied conception of reason, revealing philosophical, practical and political implications.

1

Humanism and Embodiment: Three Sources¹

Humanism is sometimes understood in terms of vaguely defined ‘human values’. However, just as there is a question about how we know the physical world, there is a question about how we know, if we do, what is best for human beings generally or for one human being as a human being. Thus, humanism can be understood as the meta-ethical view that there exist discoverable truths about the human condition, that is, about what it means to be human. I am not referring to moral truths but rather to non-moral claims about how to live well as the idiosyncratic people we are. One could think that as long as one believes that one is living the best life for oneself in particular, one cannot be wrong. Yet, social situations sometimes make dehumanizing conditions acceptable and expected, in which case one could believe that one is living well while falling short of one’s human potential.

In this chapter, I consider the nature of understanding, drawing upon recent defences of realism in science. In science, there is a question about how objectivity is possible. This is because beliefs about the world are always conditioned by other beliefs and by the context in which we acquire such beliefs. Indeed, it is now well known that all aspects of scientific practice are profoundly dependent upon social, political, economic and cultural conditions. So how is it possible for scientists to know the world as it is, independent of beliefs and expectations?

One answer, offered over the past half century, has challenged a popular foundationalist picture of the nature of knowledge and justification. For Descartes, the self is the mind which, unlike bodies, is not situated in time and space. Descartes’ appealing characterization of the direct accessibility of thought and his doubts about knowing his body influenced discussions about knowledge and rationality in Europe. His foundationalism – that is, the suggestion that we achieve knowledge when we build beliefs from solid foundations, like building a house – led eventually to the heyday of positivism in the twentieth century, a view that failed.

Although philosophers have argued against Descartes’ dualism and feminists in particular have argued for the significance of the body, I suggest below that three philosophical sources – Karl Marx, Eastern philosophy and Christian scriptures – are particularly helpful in understanding embodiment. Unless it is true, as French philosopher Alain Badiou argues, that Anglo-American philosophy is now merely an ideology (Badiou 2003: 6), we can look outside the tradition, including feminist philosophy. These ignored sources demonstrate the challenge of embodiment as an answer to dualism.

Humanism as a meta-ethical view

Humanism can be understood many ways. However, paralleling realism in the philosophy of science, humanism can express the view that we discover truths about what it means to be human, truths reflecting a mind-independent reality. Humanism in this sense implies that communal beliefs and practices may be wrong about humanness and that, in theory at least, this can be known and demonstrated.

Some will object. But feminism at least presupposes such humanism. Feminists do not usually maintain that believing one is living well means one is living well. This is because oppression, among other things, diminishes expectations. An oppressed person might not expect to live well or even imagine such a possibility. To oppose the dehumanization of women, which is arguably what it means to be a feminist, one has to hold that a more human way of living makes sense, even if it is hard to see what that means and few believe it possible. Dehumanization only makes sense if humanization does.

Certainly, appeals to humanism have a bad history. Frantz Fanon argues that European colonialists were ‘never done talking’ about humanism and yet would ‘murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe’ (Fanon 1963: 311). Fanon knew that ‘human’ did not apply to people like himself, darker people of the South. When the world had 2 billion inhabitants, writes Fanon, 500 million were men and 1,500 million were natives, that is, other than men. The Europeans took some natives and trained them up ‘with the principles of Western culture’. They ‘stuffed their mouths full with high-sounding phrases’, like ‘brotherhood’ and ‘humanism’ (Sartre 1961/63: 7). Thus, dehumanization of some became both reasonable and expected.

Some worry about humanism because the variety of human beings and experiences indicates that there is no human essence. In her influential Inessential Woman, Elizabeth Spelman argues that a subtle form of racism pervades feminist movements in the United States because of essentialism: Feminists refer to women as if ‘women’ is defined by an essence but in practice, ‘women’ refers only to white, heterosexual women (Spelman 1988). The essentialist worry is that generalizations presuppose a fixed set of properties defining who counts, and any such presumption is arbitrary, privileging the more powerful and visible members of the group.

Let us consider the essentialist worry first and then return to Fanon. I draw upon analytic realism in this book because, as mentioned, it provides philosophical resources, not just for knowledge but also reference and rationality. Of particular significance is the question of general terms. The nature and employment of general terms is crucial to humanism because ‘human’ is presupposed in humanism. Some take ‘human’ to be a descriptive term unlike ‘person’ which is normative. For instance, one might recognize someone as a human being and then fail to treat her or him as a person, which implies possession of rights and moral status. Sue Campbell refers to the ‘ideology of personhood’ which defines some people as non-persons (2003: 31). I take ‘human’ to be a normative concept because dehumanization occurs to human beings, suggesting that some human beings, while biologically human, are nonetheless not subjects of humanism.

The question of natural categories goes back hundreds of years. In 1837, Linnaeus introduced clear and simple rules for biological classifications that led to an ‘unprecedented flowering of taxonomic research in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’ (Mayr 1982: 173 cited in Ereshefsky 1999: 285). One feature of such research concerns us here: The project of logical empiricists, identifying natural kinds as exceptionless, ahistorical and eternal, was based upon a naïvely idealized conception of the precision of physics. Positivist empiricists, whose profound influence continues today, maintained that natural kinds must possess definitional essences in terms of necessary and sufficient, intrinsic, unchanging properties. Much of the resistance to real essences in recent times, both within and outside biology, has targeted this conception. Yet even within physics, definitional essences do not have such characteristics (Boyd 1999a: 151–2; Wilson 1999a).

In modern times, serious scholars do not admit to being positivists. Yet a thoroughgoing rejection of positivism requires radical reconceptualizing of the nature of knowledge. Positivism was inspired by Hume’s foundationalism, motivating attempts to account for explanation, causation and definitions through reduction to statements about observation. What rejections of such verificationist strategies have had in common, over the past half century, is recognition of the contingent and a posteriori nature of philosophical questions previously assumed to be a priori.

One of these issues is kinds. On the positivist view, a general term is real, or natural, or objective because it meets conditions defined in advance. Rejecting foundationalism means that such conditions cannot reliably be defined in advance. Not only this, they need not be. Some have rejected foundationalism by rejecting objectivity, rationality and general terms altogether. But as Mannheim argued, such a strategy, in effect, endorses foundationalism (Mannheim 1936: ch. 2): The idea is that objectivity and rationality are impossible because standards cannot be defined a priori, applicable to all contexts at all times. But such an argument presumes that ahistorical, eternal standards, defined a priori are necessary for objectivity and rationality, which is foundationalism. To fully reject foundationalism is to reject the idea, not that foundations are possible but that they are necessary. And if they are not necessary, their absence does not undermine knowledge. This means judgements about knowledge, rationality and general terms can be contingent upon circumstances and conditions, even, as we discuss further below, radically so.

One purpose of this book is to examine the implications of such contingency as a general characteristic of knowledge, including the nature of generalizations and general terms. If generalizations about nature do not require fixed, eternal essences, specifiable a priori, neither do generalizations about people. It would be counter-intuitive to expect of the social sciences and humanities greater exactitude than is expected of the natural sciences. Whereas positivism looked for definitions that were unchanging and applicable to all contexts at all times, a rejection of positivist foundationalism acknowledges that definitional essences, for science and for everyday deliberations, are inexact, relational (not just involving intrinsic properties), historically specific and non-eternal (Boyd 1999a: 152–7). This does not make them arbitrary because of the causal connection between the application of general terms and the real world to which they refer.

A further point about the essentialism debate in feminism is that in arguing against false generalizations about women, feminists assume just such inexact, relational, historically specific essences. For, distinguishing between a category’s real and supposed reference, as criticism of social convention does, implies realism; it implies that the meaning of the category being employed is not dictated by convention but that it acquires content as a result of empirical facts. The suggestion is that although it is believed by many that ‘women’ refers to white, middle-class, heterosexual women, this is mistaken because, as a matter of empirical fact, other women are also human beings. The idea is that what is believed about ‘women’ is not really true of women, which implies realism.

Reliance upon general terms is intricately involved in understanding of any sort. We not only refer to things, events and beings in the world, but also make generalizations about knowledge, rationality and goodness. Now, some take human and social kinds, or ways of sorting people and behaviour, to be different from natural kinds, being more rooted in social conventions and values. But others take categories of race, ethnicity and even moral goodness to be kinds similar to natural kinds. What makes them natural is the contribution their employment makes to specific demands for understanding within a field of enquiry. Richard Boyd refers to ‘epistemic access’: A term is natural, real or objective to the extent that a systematic, causally sustained tendency to employ the term within a disciplinary research programme results in approximately true theoretical results (Boyd 1999a: 149). Alain Badiou refers to a term ‘indexing the real’, as we see below. Although Badiou does not refer specifically to a causally constrained process, he accounts for the non-arbitrariness of a generalization, not in terms of standards defined a priori but instead of relationship to contingent circumstances and conditions.

So, as regards essentialism, neither ‘human’ nor ‘person’, whether descriptive or normative, presupposes fixed sets of properties defining all members of the group for all times. The positivist idea was that a general term has meaning to the extent that its content can be reduced to statements about observations, and whatever cannot be traced to such statements is meaningless. Ethical and aesthetic judgements, for example, were meaningless. But if we reject that view, general terms like ‘human’ can possess content as a result of empirical, cause and effect, engagement. If this were not so, not even the general terms employed in science could be non-arbitrary.

Let us return to Fanon. When Fanon denies that European colonialists are acting for humanity, he (implicitly) assumes essentialism. Fanon maintains that although Europeans strongly believe they act for humanity in general, they are mistaken. Moreover, there is evidence. For example, European values are inconsistent: ‘You are making us into monstrosities; your humanism claims that we are at one with the rest of humanity but your racist methods set us apart’ (Fanon cited in Sartre 1961/63: 8). Of course, such evidence can be explained away by colonialists who respond, for instance, that natives are hot-headed or that they ‘have it in for’ the Europeans.

But Sartre argues that Fanon explains this very phenomenon, namely, the ‘dialectic which liberal hypocrisy hides from [the Europeans] and is as much responsible for [Europeans’] existence as for [Fanon’s]’ (Sartre 1961/63: 14). Europeans can claim consistently to act for humanity while colonizing ‘the natives’ because ‘the natives’ are not people: they are ‘superior monkeys’. But Fanon also points out that eventually, ‘this imperious being, crazed by his absolute power and the fear of losing it, no longer remembers clearly that he was once a man’ (Sartre 1961/63: 16).

In other words, Fanon shows that there is a reality – beyond what is believed – that refutes the logic making Europeans’ beliefs consistent (for them). Of course, the reality need not enter in and can also be explained away – for a long time. But it can enter in and it does, according to Sartre. Europeans forget that although the colonized may be reclassified as ‘superior monkeys’, they are not, just because of this classification, converted to non-human. That is, although the concepts applied to the world are socially constructed, in this case by imperialism, reality is not, after all, causally affected by such concepts: However persuasive we may be in describing the world, the causal structures of the world do not change as a result (e.g. Boyd 2010).

Fanon’s argument that the Europeans are mistaken about humanism does not require a fixed, eternal essence defining all human beings for all times. It requires evidence showing that some applications of the term ‘human’ are better supported than others, as Fanon shows. Some applications of the term provide ‘epistemic access’ in that they result in approximately true generalizations, where the approximate truth results both from knowledge already possessed and from engagement with the reality under investigation. Fanon argues, in effect, that since the colonized are actually human beings, treating them as ‘superior monkeys’ will eventually fail in explanatory capacity. Colonized people, because they are human beings, will, according to Fanon and Sartre, eventually respond like human beings, no matter what they are called. They may even take up arms to resist dehumanization.

Humanism’s bad history does not show that humanism is false. The opposite is true. That ‘humanism’ often involves cruelty, stupidity and indifference shows that humanism in the sense suggested here is defensible. It is presupposed when such examples are criticized. Fanon and Sartre argued that Europeans’ ‘humanism’ was unjustified. Today their views are considered correct. Yet the idea of error requires the idea of correctness. In order to condemn misunderstanding, there must be proper understanding.

Humanism is at least intuitively plausible, being assumed by feminist and anti-racist philosophers who criticize systemic oppression. It is presupposed in discussions of global development, as I discuss in Chapter 2. Since the development era began after the World War II, some have wondered whether the drive to help people in the South is another form of imperialism (e.g. Sachs 1992). Now that the division between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ routinely informs descriptions of the world’s inhabitants, those committed to human development must commit to humanism. For human development must be discovered. It cannot be taken for granted. However, to remove the question of humanism from such political grounds for now, let us consider the philosophy of science.

Projectibility

‘Projectibility’ refers to judgements about plausibility in scientific investigation (Goodman 1973). It expresses the widely recognized fact (by philosophers and psychologists) that investigators seek answers from a ‘small handful’ of options commended by the framework or tradition within which they operate.² They consider options that are projectible or plausible answers to the question at hand. For example, most people will not investigate the possibility that aliens from outer space extinguished the lights. It is not plausible given normal expectations. Anyone who pursues implausible options, given the context, falls short of expectations for rationality.

One consequence of projectibility is that it is not enough to have the right answer (e.g. Boyd 2010). The correct answer offered by an unknown, unfunded and unpublished researcher will not advance understanding. A proposed answer must also be plausible, given current conditions. Otherwise, it won’t be considered. This means that science advances not when scientists discover approxim...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Humanism and Embodiment: Th ree Sources
• 2 Humanism and Global Development Ethics
• 3 Alienation and Authenticity
• 4 Mystics, Anti-imperialists and Fear of Contingency
• 5 Secularism, Ethics, Philosophy: Against Philosophical Liberalism
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright