Philosophical Anthropology
November 26, text commentary on Heidegger, bring physical text. Annotations ok.
Last seminar, Cassirer questions for 30minutes.
Philosophical anthropology is not only a label for a current stream in continental philosophy. But is also a tradition that began in 1900-1930, which brought on the table this notion. This is what the course initially focuses on.
It is about interpreting the relationship between man and animal.
Then we go back to the renaissance, enlightenment, neo-humanism and the Greek ideal of Humanity, and then the neo-humanistic apocalyptic climax of Nazi Germany.
Then there are the post-humanist approaches, which aims to deconstruct the angle of humanity.
Jakob von Uexkull:
biologist who had a massive influence on many philosophers.
There have been many conceptions of the relationship to humans and animals since Aristotle and Plato. The definition of man to animal is nothing simple or unilateral. It is from the start of philosophy a very complex and ambiguous question.
What is humanity?
This is a fundamentally historical question. Every epoche has its own understanding of the human. We are not necessarily talking about the biological combination of human beings, but the philosophical interpretation of humanity. This very interpretation is always at the edge of changing. The history of metaphysics changes, and with it, the notion of man. What we call a human is always tied to philosophical and metaphysical presuppositions, all the core notions of metaphysics has to be kept in mind when asking what the human being is.
We can only ask this question from the background of philosophical cosmology.
This notion is intrinsically related to spritually, nature etc. and the division that these notions imply. Animality is always opposed to humanity. Spirituality is always opposed to the body, nature and culture etc.
Taking one term, means to encompass its contrary too. They dichotomous terms, in all cases. Philosophy values certain parts of the dichotomy more than others. Why?
Being, identity etc has always been problematic to identity itself. Asking who one is, is as complicated as asking what a human is. Human beings define themselves always in the light of their concrete lifework. Their sociopolitical changes, their sciences etc. These material transformations have a feedback that determine how we understand ourselves. Philosophical anthropology therefore is always an answer to what questions our historical situation poses to us.
It is absurd to give a course on the general understanding of what a human is. This concept would be too broad to encompass anything at all.
As soon as you have a certain cosmological understanding, you also encompass an inherent understanding of humanity.
In the history of metaphysics, since Aristotle, we understand man as the zoon logon echon, the animal of reason. It says a lot more than just animal + reason. The definition is based on animality, and reason, two important technical terms. They are the genus and the difference that cuts through the genus. For Aristotle there is a hierarchical structure in which all beings are embedded. This structure is dominated by the highest genera, the greatest classes. Living being is one of those highest classes for him. These classses subdivide and give birth to species. Genera, and species terms, are all universal. They are classes for an open manifold of individuals. We are human beings, and that is an animal, a genus, which is subdivided into a species, the rational part of humans. Logos is not a species of living beings, there are no living species logos, so logos is an attribute of those things that are essentially humans, it is an essential attribute. It decides about whether a being is a human or not. When Aristotle gives this definition, he thereby thinks in these categories of hierarchical structure, until the very bottom of it which is the human species itself. It contains implicity a whole structure and conception of what being, substance, essence, and difference, essential properties. You cannot use these terms as if they were but a manner of speaking. If you agree with this point of Aristotle, you buy into the rest of Aristotle’s system of categories as well.
Even into the 20th century, Aristotle looms in the background.
Regarding people who do not seem rational, there is an unfolding of the essential form of the anthropos in its telos, and a lot of things can go wrong in this unfolding – this is an accidental determination and not a necessary determination. As such, they stay human through their telos. There are some essences that are disconnected from the object’s materiality, but this is quite rare. In living individuals, all essences are always intertwined in the matter from which they are animated, that is, has a soul, anima. If something is living matter, it is always intertwined with accident. As such, essence does never exist without accidental configurations.
In PA, man is most often put into relationship to animality. This is what people call the anthropological difference, the distinctive mark, that says that if x is present, they are essentially different. It is a kind of proprty that is so intrsinsically related to what humans are ontologically, that it defines the core of what human beings are. At the same time, it can never be encountered in non-human species. It defines all humans in their very being, and at the same time is a clear difference. It cannot be gradual.
It is often linked to superiority, and the justification of human beings over all other kinds of species.
Every definition of the human goes through a construction and a deconstruction of its notoric Other, the animal, the female, the child and the mad. These are forms of alterities that are always projected outward in order to guarantee the purity of the class in question.
”At each stage of its history, the figure of man has only been able to appear against the background of what it excludes. The truth of man is constituted through the rejection of what he is not: madness, unreason, animality.” - Foucault :(.
Since Nietzsche, Bergson and Heidegger: there is an emergence of anti-humanist & post-humanist thinking. They are trying to show how intrinsically linked these notions are to the history of metaphysics. Nietzsche and Heidegger are probably the first thinkers who can be called anti-humanist. They are explicity trying to overcome the human being, and finding a new definition of it and its metaphysics. Nietzsche’s notion of the ubermensch is an attempt to overcome the human as it was understood to him.
The vitalism of Bergson is related to the overcoming of the notion of the human being as understood for him, and to overcome the frank seperation between other organisms, and material things to the human being. The same force vitale goes through all of the cosmos. He is a staunch defender of the exceptional status of the evolved human however. He is often quoted now a days
In post-modernity the otherness between man and machine becomes relevant. The opposition between machine reason and human reason becomes imperative.
Certain tensions that motivate us to go through this interrogation: animal production, ecocide, and global warming. It seems necessary to rethink the relationship between man and nature. We need a critical perspective on humanity and man. It needs to appropriate these concepts in a probably more critical way. Perhaps in a deconstructive way. We should show that the positive terms are related to their negatives.
Most categories are understood as abstracta. This is the kind of entity that the humanist tradition thinks of. It is an identical and repeatable identity that can be instantiated in a multiplicity of individuals, that more or less are this ideal form. This is a kind of platonic way to think of essences, which is essentially bound to the history of metaphysics. It comes from a certain reappropriation of mathematics and Euclids Elements, through the modern period.
We will see how these notions are related to a set of other notions.
Jacques Derrida criticises the metaphysical tradition by grossly identifying the compounds of man and animals that is universal. This way of conceiving humanity pre-determines how we understand animals. It means we understand animals as if it would be a generally identical category. Realising that there is no super category of all animals:
”I would like to have the plural of animals in the singular. There is no animal in the general singular, separated from man by a single indivisible limit. We have to envisage the existence of ’living creatues’ whose plurality cannot be assembled within the single figure of an animality that is simply opposed to humanity.”
For the humanist tradition, there is no difference in the notion of humanity. This understanding of humanity, as a super category of identicals, there seems to be little difference between. The same goes for animals, which are vastly different.
The ancients construe multiple relations between humans and multiple species of humans. Today we oppose the supercategories of man-animal, which has us loose the chance to a broad understanding of either.
What remains of the human essence if this essence is reduced to a simple code? This code can be altered, recomposed and changed – so how can it be us?
Maybe these critiques and deconstructions are also part and parcel of the philosophical anthropology. Critiquing the tradition may be the tradition itself. Anti- and posthumanism are still the same as they were before, and as such have turned into their opposite.
PA is just philosophy.
Anthropology/ethnology is also a scientific discipline, unrelated to philosophy. Since the 19th century, this discipline focuses on the evolutionary becoming of the human being as a biological species. They are also defining the human being, but witho other means. They are looking at the species biologically. Anthropology is not related to the determination of the concept of the human being. It is linked further with field work, trying to understand their culture and how they define animality, if they do.
PA does not rest on purely descriptive statements of empirical facts. De Castro combines empirical research with philosophical intrepretations. Probably one of the best in his field right now.
PA was a specific discipline in early Germany. They understood the urgency with coming up with a new philosophical paradigm. Scheler, Uexkull, Cassirer, Plessner, Gehlen.
In the 19th century the sciences become plentiful compared to before. New sciences emerge and constitue themselves by cutting themselves off of philosophy, and gaining a certain autonomy as a new paradigm. Darwin’s theory of natural evolution is developed. All these new sciences and understandings urge people to come up with a new identification of what the human being is. What is left undefined however in these developments, or on the back, are human beings.
Human beings are the guiding principle of the sciences, especially the human sciences, but they never speak of what the human being is. What are we really studying?
”At no time in history has man becomes so problematic to himself as in the present” -Max Scheler.
PA is the sensitivity to the problem of the human being.
It aims at a new metaphysics of man.
Human relationship to animals in ancient times:
The way that the Greeks understood human beings is not at all unilateral. There are multiple ways of approaching this topic. The very boring and sterile result we inherited from this time is not quite what they actually had.
The frame opposition between man and animal was not always in place. Maybe we should go back.
Beginning with Hesiod and Homer of the archaic period, we find that no superiority is claimed for the human being over animals. Human beings are not yet these self-confident agents that they later evolved into. They are not necessarily valued higher than animals. It’s rather quite nuanced, and there is no super category of ’animal’. Rather there are multiple animals. What remains rather is a shared inferiority of all living beings to the gods. Cognition and knowledge is something given by the gods to their creations, the living beings. Culture and civilisation are direct gifts from the gods. As such, culture and civilisation are not yet conceived as markers of a distinction between man and animal.
In Homer, in the funeral game for Patroclus (book 23 of Illiad), they give speeches to the horses that will encourage them to run faster. The fact that they do not answer, does not mean that they have language/rationality – logos. There are constant comparisons between humans and other species. There are no superiority claimed to the human that is not given to animals too. The likeness of the achievements of man are rather compared to the achievements of animals. Like the building-capacity of bees or spiders, and of us. Plato describes ants, bees and wasps as state-forming animals, that belong to the political genus. Aristotle also emphasises that man is only to a greater extent political than other animals. Aristotle considers some animals as political, but in Aristotle there is only a parallel, whilst the human being is that but a bit more.
Everything changes with the sophists. In sophism, a new human self-awareness is developed. This self-awareness is of a very special position of humans in the cosmos. The sophists also started critiquing religious dependence, and goes away from Homer and Hesod.
Humans develop craft and technology (techne), and regulate their coexistence with fellow humans through legal systems and state order – but most importantly they have language. People today still think that animals lack language. There is no definition of language that defines language as such a thing that this definition does not hold for some other species than humans. None of them produce a framed difference between us and other creatures.
With the sophists emerges an increased feeling of superiority, and animals don’t have culture, and are rather a prehistoric phase of prehistoric man. They are in a sense, the first humanists. They believe in the power of human reason compared to other creatures. The non-greeks that don’t speak Greek are also animals. Something that does not speak Greek lacks Logos. These accounts do not really withstand scientific enquiry, but we see in dialogues and writing that the old comparisons of Hesiod are not repeated. It is really only the outcome of the Christian tradition however, that develops on top of this hellenic framework, that completes this seperation with humans as the sons of God, due to many of the splitting between the two not withstanding scientific observation.
The Greek philosophers still had a huge esteem for the Egyptians, which further undermines the pejorative use of Barbarian.
In the high enlightenment, people saw that reason was not just a general faculty that was lacked by the others, it was an ontological faculty of the world that reaches further and further power. The sophists already witnesses the huge powerful machine of reason.
Logos encompasses languages, and animals do not speak, so they are ta aloga zoa. Who are illogical.
Logos becomes reason as a psychological faculty that is bound to the biological species that the human being is. And since birds are non-humans, they are not speaking like humans, that is as Greeks.
Man as a deficient being (Protagoras). ”Animals are endowed with life-serving and species-serving physical characterisations (weapons, natural protection). And only man lacks all these physical privileges that animals have. But this lack is a blessing because these physical disadvantages are compensated by mental advantages, of having reason.”
Humans are to engage in rationality in order to compensate our inferoirty, which instead leads to our superiority.
An important theme for Plato is that people become fully human through education. In principle every human soul is capable of the cognition of Ideas. But the majority of people remain on a purely sensual level. Not all uses reason. Reason fulfills its true purpose only in very few people: for the knowledge of Ideas, the ontological building principle. The end of man is only revealed in the philosophers.
In the Cratylus man defers from animals because they can reflect on sensual perceptions. In the Theaitetos, humans are only capable of such reflection at a late stage and after long training. It means to elevate the thought beyond the merely felt. Given this, man can develop into 2 different directions: to sink lower than animals or to develop towards the gods. In democracy, Plato argues that we become brutish and violent in order to get our will through: we become lower than animals by killing others of the same species.
The question about whether moral goodness can be educated, is a problem for Plato in the very first dialogues. The answer that Plato comes up with in the Meno is that there is no education that can confer goodness, they can only be motivated into the pathway of self-reflection. However, the problem remains unresolved for him. Everyone has to discover for themselves the Ideas, and cannot be handed over to someone else, and still in Kant’s text of enlightenment, it is not because we pay someone else to give us a good life, but rather the good life depends on our own critical engagement with reason – but nonetheless we cannot have the good life without helping each other out, education being a relevant part in this.
In Plato there is a dual soul: one part that is base and evil and one part that is divine. In the Pheadrus, the soul is comapred to being a carriage pulled by two horses, which both make out the evil or the good part.