Abstract
Humanism: who needs it? These days it might be fashionable to be posthumanist. Humanism, after all, is old, the worst of sins; and it is easily caricatured in the Man-as-God cartoon form of clever poststructuralists. Its profile is blemished by numerous real sins committed in its name, not least against the dispossessed of the earth. Yet the human still warrants our attention, as witness in the widespread enthusiasm for ambit issues of human rights, the only politics, it often seems, that might be left after everything else has collapsed or been subsumed into the commodity form.
These papers, wide-ranging and diverse, open up onto this broad scene. They were organized by the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, under whose auspices they are published. The book offers a remarkable panorama of views, issues and arguments, ranging from the poetic to the scientific, all under the horizon of humanism as a binding curiosity rather than as a compulsory metanarrative.
South Africa is not necessarily the place from which we might reasonably expect a politics of hope to emerge. Yet since the fall of apartheid, and the loss of the sheen on its subsequent prospects, a politics of hope survives there, and even serves to lead and inspire others elsewhere. And this is a place where the ‘ghostly sciences’ claim to take a leading role in this story.
Central to this opening is the African idea of ubuntu, to which I shall return. Ubuntu claims a particular kind of communal logic which stands against, or in contrast to, the western tradition and language of possessive individualism. Those of cold heart, or hard mind, might blench at the idea of a native discourse, revived and reinvented for present usage, open as such to romantic overinterpretation or magicking. Yet in the first instance, as ever, there is virtue in the capacity or willingness to listen, not least when our South African interlocutors have carried such heavy hopes and burdens for such a very long time. For here, in South Africa, we encounter both a new Constitution and Reconciliation process, one of the most expansive Bills of Rights in the world, and ongoing levels of rights abuse and violence, and these two dimensions sit together making contemporary South Africa what it is today. For the present regime, as Mbembe, like Bauman reminds us, is based on the production of superfluous people, wasted and wasting lives.
So how can more humanism help with this? In a famous essay from the 1970s Habermas semantically conjoined the notions of crisis and critique, these stapled together via the medical notion of the critical situation. A theologian, Denise Ackerman, here revisits the conjunction in order to discuss the possibility that we might still become more fully human. Being-in-relationship is necessarily embodied; and race, class and gender are each and together necessarily constituted through the senses. Yet language and naming also matter. As businessman Bobby Godsell observes here, white South Africans are happy to be identified thus, whereas most blacks prefer the term African to South African. But most South Africans do not think of themselves as African. And yet, if this does not fit, on which continent are they living? What Godsell calls ‘continental exceptionalism’ is deep seated. Thus South Africans who travel speak of going into Africa, as though they were elsewhere in the first place. Where, truly, are these people at home? Yet they have made the cities and the landscape their own, even when through the very act of dispossession. The echoes throughout other settler colonial experiences, like those in the antipodes, are powerful, regardless of how significant the differences between these stories of settling and dispossession are.
But all these issues and stories need framing. Some papers here, like German theologian Wolfgang Huber’s, directly take on this challenge. Huber manoeuvres a five-fold frame. He differentiates between Renaissance Humanism, Enlightenment Humanism, Human Rights Humanism, the New Humanism, and Third Culture Humanism, and adds a sixth category: Cosmopolitan Humanism. The approach reminds me of other fine-grained histories of ideas, such as the work of JFC Davis on the typology of utopias, for what is revealed hereby is how extraordinarily diverse these ways of thinking can be. Some varieties of humanism are aggressively atheistic, or individualized; others fall under the category conveyed by Castoriadis in terms of the pursuit of the project of rational mastery. The last category, cosmopolitan humanism, connects to the inspiration of Kwame Appiah.
The Duke-based South African Ebrahim Moosa then introduces another major stream, that of Islamic humanism. Andre du Toit, the country’s premier political philosopher, in turn focuses on the dark side of humanism in South Africa. This is a brilliantly nuanced interpretation of Dr John Phillip, evangelical humanist, and JC Smuts, imperialist humanist, and how all these tensions were held together in the work of men like these. These were, in transnational perspective, colonial liberals, thinkers and actors who worked these tensions in ways that manage to escape both simpleminded congratulation and presentist condemnation. Here the horizons of the classics and the classical empires still loomed large. The key question, for du Toit, concerns the extent to which humanism can also be racist. He finally follows this only apparent paradox into the labyrinth of Smuts’ work on the UN Charter Preamble of 1945.
Drucilla Cornell and Kenneth Panfilio now return to the theme of ubuntu, following the spirit of Walter Benjamin and Rosa Luxemburg. Simply put, capitalism creates an outside to itself that it both needs and destroys at the same time. Yet as historian Achille Mbembe advises, African thinking also has its own shadows, including a weakness for non-reflexivity, for victim politics, and revolutionary dogmatism. The risk, of course, is that of a nativist alternative, where ubuntu becomes positioned as a kind of local grounding point which is beyond the necessity of defence or explanation. In ubuntu human beings are viewed as intertwined in a world of ethical relations and obligations with all other people from the time they are born. The logic is parallel, if not identical, to that of socialism, social liberalism, and classical or organic sociology for which individuals are products or results rather than premises. ‘A person is a person by or through other people.’ The echoes are with communitarianism rather than liberalism, but with all the attendant paradoxes and puzzles: who belongs? What are the boundaries, nation, state, tribe? Cornell and Panfilio get concrete, by taking up a particular issue: that of the tension between the right to private property and the right to adequate housing. As Mbembe puts it, the principle of ubuntu is human mutuality, this in the context of a new violence of property relations which steadily works against mutuality. Capitalism’s new face, in this setting, revives the older motif: it is also a mode of destruction, a regime of waste production. If democracy means anything substantial here, it is the attempt, for Mbembe, to retrieve life and the human from a history of waste. The particular local challenges are universal, but also inflamed. They involve issues of unemployment and disposability, survival and subsistence, vulnerability and precarity. In order to address this, as Mbembe recognizes, something more than humanism will be necessary.
Ubuntu becomes a guiding thread here, through further illuminations provided by sociologist Deborah Posel and philosopher Thaddeus Metz, among others. The philosopher takes on a constructivist approach, where the issue is less the authenticity than the utility of unbuntu as a heuristic. Posel insists on the definition of sociality as the human condition. For ubuntu also seeks personhood, or the genuinely human way of life. It points towards values like love, friendship, dignity and care for the other. Poverty, in this way of thinking, is troublesome less immediately for its effect on me than that it renders me unable to give to others. Metz concurs, but in discussion presents the clincher: South Africans, he suggests, spend too much time trying to define ubuntu when they should be talking about how to live.
So much the ‘ghostly sciences’, the social sciences or sciences of the spirit leave us: a sense of good spirit, generosity, worldliness, scepticism tempered by hope. Listening to our South African and African friends will be a valuable part of this process. For these voices combine insight and balance with the advantage of the acute sensitivity born of the experience of living on the edge.