ABSTRACT
Aword with a variety of meanings. Usually, a viewpoint which advocates the supreme value of human beings: ‘man the measure of all things’. During the period of Renaissance Europe, those who studied the classics (i.e. Ancient Greek and Roman texts) were deemed humanists. They espoused an optimism about human possibilities and achievements. During the twentieth century, being a humanist commonly implies an attitude antithetical to religious beliefs and institutions. In the post-war period debates have been waged between aca-
demics over the term humanism in a variety of contexts (e.g. politics, ethics, philosophy of language). In this context, a humanist has come to signify (amongst other things) someone who advocates a view of human nature which stresses the autonomy of individual agency with regard to such matters as moral or political choice, or one who adheres to the view that human subjectivity is the source of meaning in language use. A humanist, on this view, is someone who presupposes that there are essential properties (e.g. autonomy, freedom, intentionality, the ability to use language for the purpose of producing meaningful propositions, rationality) which define what it is to be human. Such a conception of subjectivity has been criticised by way of an invocation of theories of meaning derived from structuralism and post-structuralism. Following on from such thinkers as Nietzsche, writers within these schools have argued that the production of meaning, and therefore subjectivity, is a matter of relations of discourses of power (Foucault) or processes of semantic slippage within language (Derrida) rather than a matter of an extralinguistic subject existing ‘outside’ the domain of language and subsequently ‘uses’ language to express their intentions. Such views have been taken up by advocates of postmodernism, who have claimed, for example, that the politics that purportedly accompanies humanism is susceptible to being undermined by these forms of analysis. Such a view depends upon whether or not one is inclined to accept the claim that the advocacy of a particular ontology of the subject commits one to a particular kind of politics. Certainly, many facets of liberalism are not so easily swept away by advocating an antihumanism. For example, the anti-humanism implicit in philosopher Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard’s conventionalist account of language in The Differend: Phrases in Dispute does not circumvent certain key principles of liberal thought as elaborated by J.S. Mill in On Liberty, but might rather be said to be compatible with them (see Sedgwick 1998).
