SPECIAL SECTION TOWARD A NEW HUMANISM INTRODUCTION Toward a new humanism An approach from philosophical anthropology Thomas Schwarz WENTZER , Aarhus University Cheryl M ATTINGLY , University of Southern California In this introduction to the special section, we revisit the case of humanism, including some challenges to its outworn and prob- lematic metaphysical assumptions. We suggest that a new kind of humanism is demanded despite the many calls that humanism, of any form, should be jettisoned. The new humanism we propose rests on an ethnographically based philosophical anthropology which keeps in mind its reference to humankind while acknowledging the indeterminacy or inherent transcendence of human life in its sociocultural and ecological situatedness. We believe that there are ontological, epistemological, and ethical reasons to pur- sue the idea of a timely humanism, without which the social sciences and the humanities are at risk of losing orientations to their own domains as well as their political bearings. Keywords: humanism, philosophical anthropology, ethnography, phenomenology Twentieth-century philosophy and social theory had its prominent victims. The death of God announced by Nietzsche was followed by the death of the subject (Lévi-Strauss) and the death of the author (Barthes). It was only a question of time when this fate would strike the category of the human as such. “Man is an invention of recent date,” Foucault famously wrote, “and one perhaps nearing its end” (1994: 387). Execut- ing Foucault’s conjecture, Derrida (1982) declared the end of man in his “Finis homini,” following up on Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism and the anthropocen- tric deconstruction of Western metaphysics. The dis- course on humanism, which had powered the history of European thought from the ancient “Know thyself,” through its Renaissance renewal in Pico della Miran- dola and Marsilio Ficino, into Enlightenment philosophy by Rousseau and Kant, up to early twentieth-century Neo-Kantianism and existentialism, was exposed as lead- ing to a dead end. Once its religious and metaphysical foundations had become questionable, traditional humanism proved to be in a fragile position on a dubious and oppressive mis- sion. Consequently, by the end of the twentieth century, “the human” had become an outdated category. Its sup- porters were obviously out of tune with the theoretical affordances of the time, as manifested in postcolonial- ism, feminist theory, biopolitics, material studies, and adjacent discourses. Stuck in their “tired old human- ism,” those advocates had not understood the lesson of the century, expressed in “countless obituaries of the im- age of the human being that animated our philosophies and our ethics for so long: the universal subject, stable, unified, totalized, individualized, interiorized” (Rose 1998: 169). It is precisely due to those attributes that the cate- gory of the human and traditional humanism had proven to be unable to do justice to the variety of human and nonhuman life forms (Agamben 2004; Bennett 2010; Frost 2016). Humanism was declared dead. The human as analytical category as well as collective singular de- scription capturing the subject matter of the humanities was correspondingly buried. Recent decades have seen an increasing dehumanization of social sciences in the HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Volume 8, number 1/2. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/698361 © The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. 2575-1433/2018/0812-0018$10.00 2018FHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (1/2): 144–157 This content downloaded from 107.173.089.234 on April 25, 2019 08:33:24 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).