Anti-Humanism: A Radical Humanist Defense

Abstract

Taken as a whole, Fromm’s writings amount to the development of an extended manifesto for human unfolding; in particular, for the unfolding of our capacities for love over hate, rationality over irra- tionality, productiveness over destructiveness, and authenticity over confor- mity. It is a vision that is built on the basis of a restated and radicalized humanism that sees itself as the completion (in inverted form) of classi- cal Judaeo-Christian humanism and, as this, the realization of messianic socialism. Transposed, as it is, into revised psychoanalytic terrain, it is a philosophy that posits the self as at once its radical goal and means and that is grounded on a qualified essentialist account of the human being based on an evolutionary account of human genesis. But this is a vision that is under threat today from an anti-humanism that directly challenges its very ten- ability. A product of various disparate thinkers lodged in certain sectors of the social sciences and humanities, this anti-humanism centrally reduces to an attack on the axiomatic precepts of humanism namely, the idea of “man,” of “the subject,” of “the self,” and of history as the realm in which human perfectibility (or flourishing) can manifest itself. The popularity of struc- turalist and poststructuralist thinkers (and those grouped as such, despite the various disavowals), and the loose body of thought generally described as “postmodernism,” is instrumental in this attack, which is as potent as it is restrictive.