If humanism can be defined as a normative point of departure that prioritizes human concerns, interests and flourishing and focuses on the faculties that separate human beings from other animals, one might expect anti-humanism to be an inversion of all this. But this is not quite true. Many anti-humanists reject anthropocentrism and the “overvaluation of man,” as Nietzsche calls it, but this rejection is largely based on a rejection of the human as such, including the concepts of human nature and the self. For this reason, anti-humanists are unable to accept classical ethics.
Not all anti-humanists follow Nietzsche and others in completely rejecting the notion of ethical phenomena. Some simply reject any thick idea of human nature and, in many accounts of ethics, one must know the nature or structure of human beings before one can decide how they should behave.
Heidegger’s Rejection of Human Nature
Heidegger’s rejection of classical ethics was based on his rejection of human nature.
In his 1927 book, Being and Time, Heidegger asserts that, “The ‘essence’ of Dasein is grounded in its existence.” By “Dasein,” Heidegger means the human being—not in the sense of a biological or rational animal, but as part of a complex network of material objects, social and cultural practices, patterns of signification and so on. Heidegger uses the term Welt (world) to signify the general context of all meaning production: the limit of all our practices, reasonings, projects, etc. Thus, the term Dasein, German for existence (literally, “being there”), draws attention to the way in which human beings are intrinsically bound up with the world and thus cannot be defined without reference to it. But, though human beings are by necessity worldly beings, this does not say much about human nature. Unlike Christian scholars, who define the human being as the imago dei (creature made in the image of God) or Descartes, who saw man as defined by self-consciousness, Heidegger proposes no specific view of human nature. For Heidegger, humans are “thrown” into the world and their relationship to this and many other factors determines the nature that Dasein takes for them. Heidegger does not mean this in a psychological or empirical sense. For him, thrownesss and other accompanying dimensions of being, such as anxiety, are structural features of the relationship between Dasein and the world, capable of illuminating the nature of being as being (which Heidegger understands as temporality).
For Heidegger, all previous attempts to understand human beings were faulty since they presupposed that we can understand being: “Every determination of the essence of man that already presupposes an interpretation of being without asking about the truth of Being, whether knowingly or not, is metaphysical.” Traditionally, human beings were either understood as created beings or in terms of their animality (as most secular humanists have seen them.) But neither approach is correct:
it finally remains to ask whether the essence of man primordially and most decisively lies in the dimension of animalitas at all. Are we really on the right track toward the essence of man as long as we set him off as one living creature among others in contrast to plants, beasts and God … The fact that physiology and physiological chemistry can scientifically investigate man as an organism is no proof that in this “organic” thing, that is, in the body scientifically explained, the essence of man consists. That has as little validity as the notion that the essence of nature has been discovered in atomic energy … Just as little as the essence of man consists in being an animal organism can this insufficient definition of man’s essence be overcome or offset by outfitting man with an immortal soul, the power of reason, or the character of a person.
For Heidegger, if human nature exists at all, it cannot yet be investigated since we have not yet solved the question of not being open to being and until we do the question of ethics cannot be addressed:
Before we attempt to determine more precisely the relationship between ‘ontology’ and ‘ethics,’ we must ask what ‘ontology’ and ‘ethics’ themselves are. It becomes necessary to ponder whether what can be designated by both terms still remains near and proper to what is assigned to thinking, which as such has to think above all the truth of Being.
If we don’t know what being is, we cannot create an ethical system—only a god can save us.
Foucault and the Rejection of the Self
Foucault rejects the idea of the self as a substantial, self-sufficient entity that is the storehouse of various psychological states and faculties. He has a Nietzschean understanding of the self.
When Foucault writes about ethics, he is not using the term in the way Aristotle does. For Foucault, ethics has three parts. First, there is the ethical substance, the substrate upon which the other ethical processes are based. This substance is usually a problem or constellation of problems that serves as the basis for ethical self-formulation or the self’s relationship to itself. We can call this the ontological aspect of ethics. Then there is the mode of subjection, i.e. the way in which “the individual establishes his relation to the rule and recognizes himself as obliged to put it into practice.” For example, a Christian and a humanist might both give money to charity. The Christian does this in order to emulate his god, while the humanist does it to alleviate the suffering of others. Both parties follow the same ethical rule for different reasons. We can call the mode of subjection the normative aspect of ethics. Third, there are the methods and activities used to train oneself to follow these self-imposed norms. Foucault calls this askesis, or practices of the self and views this as constituting the concrete self.
Foucault, then, held a historicized view of ethics and thought the idea of universally applicable ethical principles was nonsensical. For Foucault, though the moral codes and categories that circumscribe or condition our ethical self-creation are given to us via the ethical, religious or social traditions that we happen to be born into, it is up to each individual to take a stance towards these conditions and construct her subjectivity as she sees fit. The self is not something that we are born with, nor is it something that we develop through socialization or acculturation: it is something that we harness for ourselves through a process of creative disidentification. Ethics, for Foucault, has lost its connection to the Greek idea of virtue and the Kantian ideas of duty and practical reason and become an “aesthetics of existence.” The self has been transformed from an abiding entity to a process of aesthetic display. It is up to each of us to fashion our life into a work of art.
Nietzsche on Moral Facts and Power
In The Will to Power, Nietzsche writes: “The time has come when we have to pay for having been Christians for two thousand years: we are losing the centre of gravity by virtue of which we lived; we are lost for a while. Abruptly we plunge into the opposite valuations, with all the energy that such an extreme overvaluation of man has generated in man.” Nietzsche is referring to political and social doctrines that attempt to achieve Christian purposes in this world as opposed to in the next, i.e. to anyone who “still believes in good and evil and experiences the triumph of the good and the annihilation of evil as a task (that is English; typical case: the flathead John Stuart Mill).”
The rejection of moral realism, including the ideas of good and evil, is one of the pillars of Nietzsche’s anti-humanism. For Nietzsche, there are no moral facts: morals are historically contingent. He proposes a genealogy of morals that can help us identify the discontinuities in western moral development: the classical reading of this idea is that both Christian and some Platonic forms of morality and humanistic ethics based on Kantian or utilitarian principles were founded on a slave morality.
Slave morality, he argues, is rooted in naturally weak people’s resentment of the naturally strong. Those able to rule owing to the strength of their own appetites and constitutions extol aristocratic values, such as honour and glory, and have a life-affirming attitude towards existence—Nietzsche calls this “master morality.” The weak, unable to compete with their aristocratic betters, reordered—“transvalued”—the moral hierarchy, touting the moral sentiments they developed in virtue of their lowly position (obedience, humility, compassion) as the highest virtues and so those highest in the social order were said to be lowest in the moral one, as the Bible teaches: “The first will be last, and the last first” (Matthew 20:16).
For Nietzsche, then, the 2,600-year-old tradition of ethics—and the distinction between good and evil that grounds it—was based on the antagonisms of different centres of power and the goal was to break free from this dichotomy so that new, spiritually great individuals could come forward and legislate new moral values. This is not an ethics based on human solidarity or the betterment or happiness of humankind but individual self-transcendence—an ethics of singularity.
Sade and the Aristocracy of Evil
Some anti-humanist thinkers wished to preserve the dichotomy between good and evil, in order to affirm evil. One such thinker was the Marquis de Sade. He, too, rejected classical and modern ethics, because he inverted the traditional standpoint from Plato onwards: that good is better than evil.
Sade’s philosophical positions are not always easily discernible, since he often expresses them through fictional characters. Neither was he a very coherent thinker, since the ethical ideas that he propounds sit uneasily with the mechanistic, Newtonian cosmology with which he aligned himself. Nonetheless, his work provides various insights into how shadowy dimensions of the psyche can achieve universal significance. Or as, De Beauvoir puts it “He made of his sexuality an ethic; he expressed this ethic in works of literature … he erected these tastes into principles, and … he carried them to the point of fanaticism.”
Sade’s ethic is based on four principles: the superiority of evil over good; the idea that intensity, transgression and pleasure are the mainstays of a practical ethical life; the idea that individuals with an exceptional capacity for hedonism should be able to flout social mores; and the principle of stoic apathy, the psychological precondition for the most transcendent forms of cruelty and pleasure. Sade has one of his characters proclaim:
Not only did he never so much as dream of a single virtue, he beheld them all with horror, and he was frequently heard to say that to be truly happy in this world a man ought not merely to fling himself into every vice, but should never permit himself one virtue, and that it was not simply a matter of always doing evil, but also and above all of never doing good.
Still, for Sade, like Plato, for evil to fully exist, it needed goodness as a contrast. Many writers have noted that Sade socialized eroticism and transgression: his depictions of profligacy are group affairs—orgies with bodies tumbling over each other. But few critics have examined how elitist this view of sexuality is. Sade’s implicit assumption is that only a privileged few can transform themselves into pure incarnations of evil: everyone else is just material for the forces of evil to unleash their wrath upon. This is an aristocracy of evil.
Sade sometimes depicts evil as a metaphysical force inherent in the cosmos itself. But sometimes he depicts evil as simply anything transgression against conventional social morality.
To have any psychological impact, transgression requires social, cultural or religious taboos. The greater the taboo, the greater the transgression and the more intense the resulting experience. The ideal, then, would be a transgressive act that reverberated across existence in perpetuity. As one of Sade’s characters says:
I would like to find a crime which, even when I had left off doing it, would go on having perpetual effect, in such a way that so long as I lived … it would be constantly the cause of a particular disorder, and that this disorder might broaden to the point where it brought about a corruption so universal or a disturbance so formal that even after my life was over I would survive in the everlasting continuation of my wickedness.
Counterintuitively perhaps, Sade incorporates the stoic idea of apathy (impassibility) into his system. Sade did not think that malevolent pleasure was adequately fulfilled simply by committing evil acts in the throes of passion. On the contrary, as Maurice Blanchot rightly notes:
Sade is adamant: in order to convert passion into energy, it must be compressed and mediatized by passing through a necessary moment of insensibility, after which it will attain its apogee … Crime matters more than lust, and the coldblooded, the premeditated crime is greater than the crime committed in the heat of passion. But most important is the sombre, secret crime ‘committed by a conscious hardening of sensitivity, because it is the act of a soul which, having destroyed everything within itself, has accumulated an immense strength which will completely identify itself with the act of total destruction which it prepares.’
Far from dis-identifying, we are now always talking about identity, and we are so enmeshed in moralism that few think of going beyond good and evil. De Sade’s many esoteric sexual fetishes probably have niche internet websites devoted to them: as taboos have weakened, so has the possibility of transgression—for the barrier to transgression is only as powerful as the taboo that it flouts. Some aspects of contemporary culture seem to believe completely in the self, and are very confident in their ideas of good and evil. The one real place where the anti-humanist argument has taken hold somewhat is with regard to human nature. This, I think, has more to do with our increasing capacity to intervene in our own biology than with any argument that Heidegger made. When we can edit our genes or alter our physiques, human nature begins to seem provisional. It is simply what we have yet to change about ourselves. Nonetheless, despite its counterintuitive theses and its strained relationship to morality, anti-humanist thinking will always find an audience with artistic and religious visionaries and outcasts. Politically, these ideas are the weapons of choice for those who find the status quo boring, decadent or uninspiring compared with religious ecstasy or diabolical evil. In fact, I believe that anti-humanist sentiments—though not ideas—lie at the heart of many current arguments against liberalism. Some feel that liberalism works only too well, that it has made life too easy. There is something all too human about this form of anti-humanism.