Talk:Antihumanism

message: Uhm, does this even exist?  I've googled the term but this particular meaning doesn't seem to show up.  Perhaps this article is a joke.  Alienus 05:59, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Apparently this comment made before and illustrative of why the article has its current slant. 72.228.189.184 (talk) 17:32, 23 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: untitled

message: Recently came across a current description for a Comparative Culture seminar in Autumn 2006 at Columbia called <European Anithumanism> [CLME G4003]. So far, anyway, it does not appear the course has any registrants. I can not quote the entire description here, of course, but it includes references to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Edward Said. I ran a search and came up with an eponymous URL (copyright 2005,maybe later than the previous comment). The page text is basically a rant that includes phrases like 'thinning the herd,' 'breeding better humans,' and an insert [which links to a Foucault page] noting a purported assertion by Nietzche that Antihumanism was the true humanism. It (antihumanism) may (or may not) be an historical artifact, but it was/is no joke.
:Don't know about the Columbia course, but the eponymous URL, http://www.antihumanism.com/, is a 3-page web site that may well be someone's personal web site. I don't know that there is any evidence of a real organization. It doesn't seem to be a reliable reference. And the "anti-humanism" it describes doesn't at all match the description of anti-humanism in the Wikipedia article anyway. -Rhwentworth 04:19, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dead serious- 

message: Wikipedia requires that articles be verifiable. This article has no references to anti-humanism. Unless references can be supplied, material in this article should be considered for deletion. -Rhwentworth 15:52, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: References needed

message: I'm a secular humanist, and I've never heard of this whatsoever. (unsigned)
:Agreed.  This article needs deletion. Alienus 02:00, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Antihumanism was of course revendicated by Louis Althusser as in attack not on the Enlightenment, as some have misinterpretated his theory, but on the liberal ideology of individualism, i.e. "humanism". From a Marxist perspective, there is nothing sacred about "Humanity" (see Stirner's critique of Feuerbach), and Marx criticized the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen on the grounds that they were not universal as they claimed to be, but relative to the bourgeois who proclaimed it. Thus, antihumanism as used by Althusser was not a pejorative term: in Marxist circles, it was rather to be "humanist" that was considered pejorative. Michel Foucault's famous description of the evanescence of the "figure of man" like "figures in the sand" in the end of Words and Things also gave interest to this neologism, which has since been used by critics of structuralism to claim that these theories — and the alleged postmodernist theories that succeeded to them — were "anti-humanists", that is "against-human", in other words fascists. This is of course a gross (purposeful?) misinterpretation of the original sense of the term. Santa Sangre 12:14, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Not surprisingly, the google search above gave an Althusser text... Santa Sangre 12:16, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: PS: Although I do not know that Martin Heidegger explicitly used the term, it is clear that his "Letter on humanism" or "Existentialism is not an humanism" is far from being an apology of humanism, and may be considered as foundator in many senses of "antihumanism". I would argue that Althusser's declared "antihumanism" may easily be said to be influenced by Heidegger's displacement of the question of the subject to the Dasein (not to be mistaken with a psychological - or universal, for that matter - subject; i.e. it is not consciousness); as for Foucault, Dreyfus & Rabinow have shown in their famous book in which ways Heidegger had influenced his thought. Santa Sangre 12:19, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Never heard of this 

message: Some needs to clean up this article. Some of the stuff in there about evolution, etc. have nothing to do with the subject. Car54 00:03, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Clean up

message: I am a student at UC Berkeley, and I am taking a rigerous course of training in rhetoric and getting into post-structuralism. I think that it should be organized in the way that the last writer spoke of: 1) Heidegger , 2)Althusser , 3)Foucault and Derrida . The problem is, is there any way to categorize all of their ideas together? Who's ambitious enough to take on this feat? Navidnak 02:23, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: For students of cultural studies, rhetoric, discourse analysis, and post-structuralism

message: An interesting article by any means. However, if you are going to drop names like Marx, Heidegger, and Althusser please include some references. If not particular passages then at least specific works. I am generally familiar with the writings of all three of these authors and agree that they belong in this article, but it would be nice to see some solid quotes and refernece so the idea can be more firmly established.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Urbinsanity (talk • contribs) 07:47, 28 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. And since the concept is problematic on its own, it doesn't help to have a completely unsourced article. I deleted the "In fiction"-section since it doesn't mention any works of fiction, only various more or less fictionally concepts that has no direct link to the subject of this article. I am also considering nominating this for deletion, although a stubification could also be a way forward. --Saddhiyama (talk) 16:33, 6 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Citations Please! 

message: I'm a relative newbie and interested in working on this and related pages (e.g. Posthumanism and the ones that link out from there, including this one). Antihumanism came up for me in a course I taught this past semester for first-year grad students in language, literature, and culture at the University of South Carolina. We read Edward Said's Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Said uses the term "antihumanist" apropos of people who were frustrated with the state of humanism and the humanities in the US in recent decades, in the wake of French theory in the 1960s and 70s and identity politics in the 1980s and 90s. That's one reason why I think it would be nice if this article started out with a broader and simpler definition that could then be elaborated in different ways. Here's what I propose:
:Antihumanism is a set of ideas, beliefs, and practices responding critically to traditional humanism or to traditional ideas about humanity and the human condition.
Given how actively this page is being edited by some very committed members, I did not want to make a change like this without putting it up for discussion first. Mhbroder (talk) 15:25, 10 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Intro sentence? 

message: There are two citations for a source referenced as Halliwell, but I can't find it. Google Books has one by a Halliwell that mentions Derrida, but it has zero mentions of Foucault. Everything else listed by this guy on GB or Amazon is about Classical stuff, and I may not know much philosophy, but I DO know that Derrida came after the Roman Empire.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by JasCollins (talk • contribs) 08:25, 16 April 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I too have been unable to find this alledged source and so I am removing it. Morgan Leigh | Talk 22:36, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Citations Lost 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: the article states, "The young Karl Marx is sometimes considered a humanist". should it say antihumanist? I don't know enough to correct it, but it seems to read inappropriately for the article. Cliff (talk) 16:29, 24 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Karl Marx 

message: Ideas about language are thrown in here, with no obvious link to anti-humanism other than the fact that Derrida and Saussure were French.
Saussure and Derrida oppose the view of humans as subjects whose conscious intentions control language. Human thought is instead subordinated to the code in which it functions. This is in fact mentioned in the article if you read it more carefully. Hanshans23 (talk) 21:12, 30 July 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I've read carefully and it's far from clear JQ (talk) 19:49, 31 July 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  How do Derrida, Saussure fit in here? 

message: How does Auguste Comte's positivism even fit here? There's a section which claims Comte's positivism lead to deterministic views of humanity, but doesn't mention what that premise entails for antihumanism. For people that actually know who Comte is, you'd be aware that his version of positivism is hardly anti-humanist, quite the contrary, it's humanistic to levels of mystic worship. 186.20.200.114 (talk) 02:44, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Positivism and Antihumanism