Debating humanity.

Towards a
Philosophical sociology
Daniel Chernilo

This is a provisional draft of the Introduction to my new book, which

I will publish with Cambridge University Press.
Ive posted it here to get feedback before I finish it, hopefully in the
next few months.
Feel free to use it for conventional academic purposes but please
dont misuse it. Id be more than happy to receive criticism but am
only interested in those of a constructive kind
Short introductions to the project as a whole are available in various
papers on academia
https://lboro.academia.edu/DanielChernilo
Also, the following links may be of interest:
http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/18039
http://www.thesociologicalreview.com/information/blog/towards-aphilosophical-sociology.html
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-4446.12077/abstract
You can reach me via email [email protected] or twitter
@danielchernilo

ABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1. The humanism debate revisited. Sartre,
Heidegger, Derrida
Chapter 2. Self-transcendence. Hannah Arendt
Chapter 3. Adaptation. Talcott Parsons
Chapter 4. Responsibility. Hans Jonas
Chapter 5. Language. Jrgen Habermas
Chapter 6. Moral goods. Charles Taylor
Chapter 7. Reflexivity. Margaret Archer
Chapter 8. Reproduction of life. Luc Boltanski
Chapter 9. Back to Philosophical Anthropology? Hans
Blumenberg
References

Introduction
This book introduces the idea philosophical sociology as a research
programme that explores the various anthropological dimensions
through which both sociology and philosophy have defined notions
the human, human beings, humanity and indeed human nature
over the past 60 or so years. I contend that these notions have
mostly remained implicit in contemporary debates; at the very least,
that they have not been fully articulated out. The project of a
philosophical sociology is built on three main pillars:
(1) The anthropological features that define us as human beings are
to a large extent independent from, but cannot be realised in full
outside, social life. The core of this book then looks at seven of
these properties (as they have been discussed by a particular writer
over the past 60 or so years): self-transcendence (Hannah Arendt),
adaptation (Talcott Parsons), responsibility (Hans Jonas), language
(Jrgen Habermas), moral goods (Charles Taylor), reflexivity
(Margaret Archer) and the reproduction of life (Luc Boltanski).
(2) Substantively, this matters because our conceptions of the
human ultimately underpin our normative notions in social life.
Normative ideas in society depend on the human capacity to reflect
on what makes us human and mobilise the ways in which we
imagine the kind of beings that we would like to become. Normative
ideas are therefore irreducible to the material or sociocultural
positions that humans occupy in society.
(3) Given that in contemporary societies humans themselves are
ultimate arbiters of what is right and wrong, our shared
anthropological features as members of the human species remain
the best option to justify normative arguments. These
anthropological traits define us as members of the same species not
only create the conditions for social life to unfold but they are also
the basis from which ideas of justice, self, dignity and the good life
emerge. A universalistic principle of humanity is to be preferred over
particularistic conceptions of race, culture, identity, and indeed
class.
Sociology and Philosophy
The notion of philosophical sociology indicates also a preference for
a conception of sociology that cannot be realised without a close
and careful relationship with philosophy. Whilst the early
institutionalisation of sociology was unquestionably driven by an
effort of differentiation from philosophy (Manent 1998), it is wrong
to construe this as sociologys rejection or neglect of philosophy

(Adorno 2000). We can instead observe at least three main ways in

which these connections are in fact being constantly redrawn.1
A first positivist path understands the philosophical tradition as
sociologys pre-scientific heritage, whereas its future belongs to
empirical and scientific work. Within the classical cannon of
sociology, this attitude is arguably best represented by Durkheim as
he engaged extensively in philosophical speculation but sought
always to keep both domains distinctly apart (Durkheim 1960,
1982). Durkheim remained interested in philosophy and wrote more
than occasional works that are indeed philosophical but never
betrayed his fundamental intuition that he was to contribute to
sociology as a specialist subject that was to be defined by its own
theories, methodological rules and internal thematic differentiation.
The key feature of this way of looking at their interconnections is
that, however much can be gained from philosophical enquiry, this
does not constitute a sociological task sensu stricto (Luhmann 1994;
Merton 1964).
A second trajectory is constituted by explicit attempts at
epistemological self-clarification. An argument that we can trace
back to Webers extensive methodological disquisitions, the focus
here is on elucidating the logic sociologys scientific arguments
(Weber 1949). All such debates as idealism v materialism,
individualism v collectivism, or realism v constructivism belong in
this category, and we may equally include here a wide range of
histories of sociology that have been written in order to illuminate
the wider pool of cognitive commitments that inform the sociological
imagination (Benton 1977; Levine 1995; Ritzer 1988). Rather than
being excluded from sociology, philosophy here takes the wellknown role of under-labourer: philosophical tools may be included in
the sociologists kit, but they nonetheless ought to remain a neat
separation between epistemological discussions and substantive
empirical work.
The third approach to the relationships between sociology and
philosophy uses the philosophical tradition as source from which to
draw various normative motifs (Ginsberg 1968; Hughes 1974).
Classically, Marxs (XXX) notion of critique of political economy
shows the extent to which the fundamentally philosophical motif of
critique was to guide his engagement the scientific or empirical
procedures of political economy. Possibly close to social philosophy,
critical social theory is arguably paradigmatic of this kind of
engagement in terms of the reconfiguration of normative questions
as philosophys key contribution to scientific sociology (Adorno
2000; Habermas 1974; Marcuse 1973). Yet this kind of engagement
1 I have explored these interconnections in Chernilo (2013). See, in particular,
Chapters 6 and 7.

is equally available in nostalgic or even conservative positions

within the sociological canon (Nisbet 1967; MacIntyre 2007).
These three approaches to the relationships between philosophy
and sociology may not exhaust all possible options but capture the
most salient ones. Neither disciplinary arrogance nor parochialism
will do here though: a re-engagement between sociology and
philosophy must take the form of a mutual learning process
between the different knowledge claims that underpin them both:
the empirical vocation of sociology as it grapples with the
complexities of contemporary society and the kind of unanswerable
questions that we still associate with the best of the philosophical
tradition. At stake here is the fact that as long as sociology
continues to raise the big questions about life in society the
relative weight of material and ideal factors in historical
explanations, the relationships between individual actions and social
trends, the relationships between nature and culture or the
dialectics between domination and emancipation these are all
questions that also transcend it: good sociological questions are
always, in the last instance, also philosophical ones.
Philosophical Anthropology
The idea of philosophical sociology achieved some modest notoriety
in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. But in the context
of a discipline that was still intellectually and institutionally in the
making, philosophical sociology was always unlikely to find wide
support; in fact, Simmel and Tonnies saw it as a contribution to the
scientific establishment of sociology. Short-lived as it actually was,
the project of a philosophical sociology was already building on
previous work on philosophical anthropology.2
As a nascent intellectual project, philosophical anthropology looked
for a comprehensive answer to the question of what is a human
being. Its foundational cohort is primarily associated to the work of
Max Scheler and to a lesser extent of Ernst Cassirer, both of whom
shared a diagnostic with regards to the need for a new discipline
that could bring together what we know about human beings.
Writing in 1927, Scheler opens The Human Place in the Cosmos with
a claim that we have since heard many times: in no historical era
has the human being become so much of a problem to himself that
as in ours (Scheler 2009: 5). From medicine to philology, the
original project of philosophical anthropology was an attempt to
reunite scientific and philosophical knowledge about what is a
human being. Crucially, this argument for reunification was made
2 See Vierkandt, Simmel, Tonnies. There is not a comprehensive account of
philosophical anthropology available in English. My depiction below is based on
Cassirer (1977, 2000) and Schndelbach (1984).

not only in an epistemological key but also in an ontological one: a

dual approach to human beings results from, and must be
preserved, because of the duality of the human condition itself:
humans are partly natural bodies that are controlled by their urges,
emotions and pshysico-chemical adaptation to the world and partly
conscious beings that are defined by their intellectual, aesthetic and
indeed moral insights.
The rise of philosophical anthropology leads also to the realisation
that the question what is a human being is not a question for
professional intellectuals alone. It rather emerges out of human
experiences of and in the world; it is the kind of existential
question that are a perennial concern for human beings themselves.
As part of the human condition, it is central to religious, mythical
and indeed scientific worldviews and is to be found across history
and through different cultures: a human is a being who asks what is
a human being; humans are beings who ask anthropological
questions (Blumenberg 2011: 341, 375). At its best, the early
programme of philosophical anthropology leads to a universalistic
principle of humanity that entails the following commitments:
(1) Life expresses itself through an upward gradient in complexity
that goes from plants, that have little option but to passively adapt
to the environment, to animals that make use of their instincts, to
humans who can reflexively decide who they are and what they
want to do.
(2) Average members of the human species are all in principle
similarly endowed with general anthropological capacities that make
a key contribution to life in society. Human beings recognise one
another as members of the same species because of these shared
anthropological endowments.
(3) The human body has an ambivalent position for humans
themselves: it is an object in the natural world, it is the container
of our anthropological features and it is also a cultural artefact.
(4) Given that human nature is ultimately indeterminate vis--vis
social and cultural relations, humans have the ability of making
themselves an explicit issue of concern.
For our purses, by far the most consequential intervention in this
early delimitation of philosophical sociology and philosophical
anthropology comes from Karl Lwiths 1932 book on Max Weber
and Karl Marx. Arguably best known for his perceptive criticisms of
Heidegger, at that time Lwith still saw himself as working broadly
within Heideggerian influence. Lwiths contention is that the
greatness of both Weber and Marx lies in that they successfully

brought together the two intellectual genres in which we are

interested in: the venerable concerns of philosophy and the fresh
start that is offered by the social sciences. The latter was of course
the explicit interest of Weber and Marx: they were equally interested
in capitalism and offered radically different interpretations of its
emergence and functioning. But there is also a philosophical layer to
their writings that, in Lwiths interpretation, is in fact more
significant. There, their apparent differences are sublated into a
fundamental common ground: the core of their investigations is one
and the same () what is it that makes man human within the
capitalistic world (Lwith 1993: 423). This anthropological enquiry
into what is a human being was surely not the explicit goal of either
writer but therein lies none the less their original motive (Lwith
1993: 43). Weber and Marx offer a new kind of intellectual enquiry
that is, simultaneously, empirically informed and normatively
oriented, and this is precisely what makes them philosophical
sociologists (Lwith 1993: 48). It is through the combination of
scientific and philosophical approaches that they addressed
fundamental intellectual questions: the interplay of material and
ideal factors in human life, the immanent and transcendental
condition of historical time, the relationships between social action
and human fate, the disjuncture between existential concerns we all
share as human beings and our particular socio-historical contexts.
For all its strengths, we must also acknowledge that there was
something tardy about philosophical anthropology: the owl of
Minerva spreads its wings at dusk. For nearly a century, natural
scientists had already stopped asking for philosophys permission
when it came to asking questions about the human condition. Given
that science rather than philosophy was making knowledge about
the human to advance at an unprecedented pace, science was the
one setting the new standards (von Uexkll 2010), the philosophical
drive of philosophical anthropological made it inadequate for its
task: as a project that needed to confront the challenges of the
contemporary scientific civilisation, philosophical anthropology,
looked old before it really got going.3 Philosophical anthropology was
even looked at with scepticism within professional philosophy itself.
To Edmund Husserl, who at the time was the leading German
philosopher, philosophical anthropology seemed second-rate
philosophy because the psychological and physiological limitations
of the human mind were never going to live up to the standards of
the general questions about mind, consciousness and reason in
general.4 A mere interest in the human, the more so as it now had to
3 This, in effect, remains very much the case see, for instance, Jurgen
Habermas (XXX) argument on the relationship between science and philosophy in
Postmetaphysical Thinking.
4 To that extent, Heideggers equally ambivalent relationship to philosophical
anthropology echoes Husserls doubt, though in this case the general scepticism
is based on an irrationalist or historicist understanding of being.

include the lower biological functions of human life, was never

going to replace philosophys enduring concerns.
If we now include also the turbulent historical period within which
philosophical emerged, there was perhaps something inevitable in
the rapid rise and demise of philosophical anthropology as a field of
study. In a context of volatile nationalistic passions, rapid
bureaucratisation,
urbanisation
and
technological
change,
militarisation and colonial wars, hyper-inflation and the rise of mass
political parties, a concern with the human in general, and a belief in
a unified theory of the human under the tutelage of philosophy,
could be construed as dramatically out of touch. Was philosophical
anthropology really the intellectual answer to a world that, for the
past two centuries or so, seemed to have been dominated by power
struggles, capitalism, technological innovations and particularistic
ideas of nation and race? Whole populations or collectives were
being pushed outside the human family (if they were ever permitted
to sit in the high table in the first place), political democracy was
scoffed by traditional elites and dismissed as mere bourgeois
democracy by revolutionaries, and the individual not only could but
ought be sacrificed on behalf of the nation, the party, the revolution
and indeed humanity itself. In a modern world that was marked by
violence and upheaval, the venerable Kantian idea that humans be
treated as ends and never as mere means rang idealistic at best.
The massacres and crimes of World War II did not make things
easier for philosophical anthropology and yet it was in its aftermath
that philosophical anthropology experienced the peak of its
influence and public exposure. Closely associated to the works of
Arnold Gehlen (1980) and Helmut Schelsky (XX) both of whom
were Nazi sympathisers a second generation of philosophical
anthropology gave up on the original humanistic concerns of
Cassirer and Scheler and instead articulated such conventional
conservative concerns as the dangers of technology and the erosion
of community. The humanist sensibility was not altogether
abandoned, however, as apparent in Helmuth Plessners (1970)
influential work on Crying and Laughter (Plessner was Jewish and
had been subject to Nazi persecution). Towards the last part of the
twentieth-century, a third generation of philosophical anthropology
emerged. Here, it is the ontological claims that defined the first
generation that were now being given up: Odo Marquards (1989)
homo compensator and, as we shall in the concluding chapter, Hans
Blumenbergs reflections on the powers of human delegation, both
point to a anti-foundationalist definition of the human that can
hardly be reconciled with previous notions of human nature.
Homo Sociologicus

Given that this book is about philosophical sociology, let me now

look more closely at some sociological instantiations of these
general reflections about the human. Ralf Dahrendorf wrote two
pieces that deal directly with the questions that concern us here:
Homo Sociologicus in 1957 and a follow-up essay on Sociology and
Human Nature in 1962. Dahrendorf uses the term philosophical
sociology only in passing and in order to emphasise the inability of
European sociology to differentiate between philosophical/normative
concerns, on the one hand, and strictly empirical/scientific ones, on
the other (Dahrendorf 1973: 78). As sociologys maturity depends
on a strict separation between these two domains, Dahrendorf
praises American social science for having made the idea of the
social role central to the demarcation of that distinction. Homo
sociologicus is thus introduced as the disciplinary equivalent of
homo oeconomicus in modern economics and psychological man in
twentieth-century scientific psychology: where the former is
interested only in the calculation of possibilities for personal gain,
the latters behaviour is always underpinned by unconscious motifs
that can never become fully clear to the individual herself. It is now
sociologys turn to clearly delimit the one aspect of human
behaviour that constitutes sociologys genuine subject matter: To a
sociologist the individual is his social roles (Dahrendorf 1973: 7).
Homo oeconomicus, homo psychologicus and homo sociologicus
share two important features. First, they all seek to capture that
particular point at which the individual and society intersect:
individual preferences/objective conditions for homo oeconomicus,
unconscious drives/social norms for homo psychologicus, personal
capabilities/social performance for homo sociologicus. Secondly,
none offers a comprehensive theory of human nature but are
instead construed as ideal-types; they offer the unilateral
exaggeration of one particular anthropological feature that has
proved particularly useful from one, equally particular, point of view.
In defining homo sociologicus as stable and predictable roleconforming behaviour, Dahrendorf contends, sociology explicitly
renounces a sociological image of man: it proclaims the intention of
finding powerful explanatory theories of social action rather than
describing the nature of man accurately and realistically
(Dahrendorf 1973: 76, my italics).
From a scientific standpoint, this is a win-win situation because the
net increment in the predictive ability of sociology leads also to a
realisation of the futility of metaphysical speculation. But given that
social-scientific concepts belong also in social and political
discourse, that is, because they are also used outside expert circles,
the wider philosophical underpinnings of homo sociologicus react
back on their strictly scientific use. Dahrendorf (1973: 59) then
contends that [s]ociology has paid for the exactness of its
propositions with the humanity of its intentions, and has become a

thoroughly inhuman, amoral science. He elaborates on this issue as

follows:
If the assumption of role conformity has proved extraordinarily
fruitful in scientific terms, in moral terms the assumption of a
permanent protest against the demands of society is much
more fruitful. This is why an image of man may be developed
that stresses mans inexhaustible capacity for overcoming all
the forces for alienation that are inherent in the conception
and reality of society (Dahrendorf 1973: 84, my italics)
One implication of this discussion is that, to the extent that we
engage with both ideas of the human and conceptions of the social,
we can never fully separate out descriptive and normative concerns.
They must be distinguished analytically, and we ought to be able to
discuss them separately, but the question is always about exploring
their iterations. More substantively, this also shows that, to the
extent that we base our reflections on the human on reductionist
anthropological accounts, these reductions are also felt in, and have
dramatic conceptions for, our conceptions of the social. The problem
does not lie in any specific shortcoming of homo oeconomicus,
homo psychologicus or homo sociologicus but in the fact that, as
they are by definition reductionist, even their alleged scientific
success cancels itself out. The study of social life requires instead of
a universalistic principle of humanity that offers a richer account of
our defining anthropological features. In particular, see Dahrendorfs
reference to an inexhaustible capacity for overcoming forces of
conformity and alienation: nothing short of the human ability for
self-renewal is at stake here.

Sadly, however, mainstream contemporary sociology does not seem

to have learnt the right lessons on this issue. 5 Committed as he is to
political causes, Pierre Bourdieu engages constantly with normative
questions. But Bourdieu does not conceptualise normativity
sociologically; normative ideas are not included as an actual
dimension of the social world because conflict and power-struggles
are deemed enough for a full shape ontology of the social: [t]he
particularity of sociology is that it takes as its object fields of
struggle not the field of class struggle but the field of scientific
struggles itself. And the sociologist occupies a position in these
struggles (Bourdieu 1994: 10). The normative motif of his militant
sociology is that the interests of less powerful actors ought to be
favoured against those of more powerful ones, so the role of the
sociologist is to help subordinate actors get their interest advanced
wherever and whenever this is needed. The problem is not at all
5 As of early August 2015, Pierre Bourdieu carries more Google Scholar citations
than Weber and Marx combined.

with Bourdieus political options but with the shallow anthropology

that underpins it. Indeed, Bourdieu readily accepts that sociology
inevitably appeals to anthropological theories () it can make real
progress only on condition that it makes explicit these theories that
researchers always bring in () and which are generally no more
than the transfigured projection of their relation to the social world
(Bourdieu 1994: 19, my italics).
Knowingly or otherwise, Bourdieu follows Dahrendorf here: we ought
to take our anthropological presuppositions seriously and make
them explicit because they are a transfigured projection of our own
relations to the social world. If we now see how Bourdieus own
arguments fare on these questions, we obtain a reductionist notion
of self-interests that is then coupled by an equally reductionist
conception of constant struggle. These eventually come together in
an irrationalist conception of the social:
There is a form of interest or function that lies behind every
institution or practice () the specifically social magic of an
institution can constitute almost anything as an interest and
as a realistic interest, i.e. as an investment (both in the
economic and the psychoanalytic senses), that is objectively
rewarded, in the more or less long term, by an economy
(Bourdieu 1994: 18)
Because interests lie behind every institution and practice,
Bourdieus sociology predicts a world of winners and losers and
anticipates on which side our normative loyalties should be. We may
then account for structural features of various social contexts but
are unable to grasp what is normatively at sake because irreducible
normative ideas are not part of his version of homo sociologicus. In
fact, the irrationalist conception of human nature offered by
Bourdieu mirrors those offered by equally one-sided, arguments on,
say, primordial authenticity (Connell 2007). This normative-less
depiction of social life is sociologys very own self-fulfilling dystopia:
we do not take normative factors into account as part of what we
have to explain sociologically because our ontologies of the social
allow for no concept of the normative.
A Post-Human World?
The references I have briefly discussed up to now remain relatively
conventional not only in terms of their disciplinary reference point
but also in the sense that they all speak to a kind of being that they
more or less explicitly and confidently describe as human. But
whether this is in fact an adequate presupposition to make is
precisely the kind of question that seems most pressing nowadays.
Under the general banner of posthumanism, we find artificial

intelligence and cognitive science experts who discuss the

uniqueness of the biological makeup of the human species, science
and technology experts who redraw the contours of the human
through its interactions with various other domains of reality, global
warming and animal rights activists who challenge the destructive
and indeed self-destructive features of modern anthropocentrism,
and postcolonial and gender scholars who highlight the whole range
of violent exclusions that have been justified by anything but
benevolent Western ideas of humanity. These positions come all
from different angles and have their own targets of critique, but
they can group together if we consider that they are all interested in
wrong presuppositions and negative implications modern
anthropocentrism and, by implication, humanism.6
I have of course written this book within this intellectual climate but
will not be directly engaging with these arguments. Ideas of
humanity are of course socially construed, change historically and
are full of highly problematic assumptions at cognitive, theological
and normative levels (Foucault 1970). But nowadays it takes too
little effort to challenge so-called traditional ideas of the human
and humanity and then make an additional that they are not only
fading away but are ultimately to blame for all of modernitys sins.
As I reject the substantive implication of this last claim, I think we
can use it as an invitation to step back and interrogate again the
status of our conceptions of the human. But as my goal is to explore
the status of various ideas of the human, then to do so on the basis
of claims to novelty seems to me the wrong approach. This is not
only to do with the fact nothing is less original than claims to
originality. More importantly, this fallacy of presentism misses the
key insight that this very quest is paradigmatic of the all too human
frustration with the irritating inevitability of the question what is to
be human. When the post-humanist literature now rejects the
foundationalism that underpins traditional humanist ideas, all
their key motifs (growing knowledge of human biology, the
challenges and opportunities of technology, the aporias of
anthropocentrism) are also those that, under different names, had
been for well over 200 years. It is impossible for me to survey the
various bodies of literature that have touched on these issues over
the past few decades. But I can further illustrate my argument by
using three paradigmatic references in three different fields.
Bruno Latour hardly needs introduction to a social scientific
audience and his work is indeed well known for having claims about
6 Badmingtons (2000a) collection is illustrative because, under the loose banner
of posthumanism, it brings together Fanons critique of Western imperialism,
Donna Haraways work on cyborgs, Roland Barthers semiological work and
Althussers virulent anti-humanism. See Kieran Durkins (2014: 129-43) excellent
discussion of early incarnations of anti-humanism from a view that is compatible
with the argument I am offering here.

the definitive need for a whole new ontology that, as it offers a

radical redescription of concepts of the social, culture and nature, it
seeks also to do without the distinction between humans and
nonhumans (Latour 1993). In his recent Anthropology of the
Moderns, for instance, Latour specifies further the idea of networks
that he had been using for a long time. He speaks now of 'series of
associations', series of instauration and 'chains of references
which, as they are a form of becoming, now allow him to contend
that stability resides in change, solidity in flexibility, necessity in
contingency, universality in particularity, etc. (Latour 2013: 33, 15462). He also touches on sociologys conventional depiction of law,
politics, the economy, etc. as differentiated systems, fields, or value
spheres and, again, inverts conventional knowledge. Rather than
concentrating on the autonomy of each of these domains, it is truly
their heteronomy what we ought to be interested in: non-legal
elements create law, non-political ones create politics, noneconomic ones create the economy, etc. (Latour 2013: 29-35, 130149).
As methodological or indeed conceptual propositions, these claims
are all suggestive and, to Latours credit, they have proven highly
valuable in several empirical domains. Methodologically, humans
are not only as agents and technologies are never fully passive;
conceptually, some conceptions of nature, society and culture are in
need of redefinition. But neither claim requires nor justifies an
ontological dissolution of the human; even less so when as this is a
theory that, quite rightly, makes apparent its normative motifs. But
as a new ontology the stake are indeed different, and the arguments
appear far more problematic. The first problem has to do with
whether nature, society, and culture actually exist but they have
badly misunderstood by the moderns they are hybrids rather than
self-contained domains or whether they do not exist and the real
constituents are in fact hybrids themselves. See, for instance,
even though we construct Society through and through, it
lasts, it surpasses us, it dominates us, it has its own laws, it is
as transcendent as Nature () The critical power of the
modern lies in this double language: they can mobilize nature
at the heart of social relationships, even as they leave Nature
infinitely remote from human beings; they are free to make
and unmake their society, even as they render its laws
ineluctable, necessary and absolute (1993: 36-7)
It is really not clear which way we should go: if the problem is that of
how to conceptualise nature and society, the problem is not at all an
ontological one but theoretical or even methodological one. But if
Latour is really going for a new ontology, then this is not all richer
than the conventional one; instead, we now have a cosmos has now
completed flattened and is populated by networks alone: only

networks are real because they are well constructed, only networks
are viable because they speak various languages, only networks
allow unstable components to become scientific, artistic, or
economic. A genuine ontological plurality fails to emerge because
all is now subordinated to an endless flow of networks; all we can
learn and experience we learn and experience because it has
successfully become real as a network: As collectives, we are all
brothers (1993: 114)
The second issue refers directly to the question of the status of the
human in Latours work. The problem here can be introduced in the
same way as above: either do human exist but we have never
understood them (in a milder form: modern Western metaphysics
has fundamentally misconstrued them) or they dont exist and are
indeed central to the difficulties we have in understanding the
world. Similar to what happens to the argument on the
differentiation of various domains, one is also reminded here of
Niklas Luhmanns (2012) argument that individuals are external to
society. But what for Luhmann counted above all as a requirement
of methodological consistency (and even in that softer case it
remained always a constant source of epistemological and
normative headaches), Latour has again pushed as question of
ontology. But it is one thing to accept that the traditional volitional,
dispositional, affective and indeed moral connotations of the human
are in need of permanent redefinition a perfectly reasonable claim
that I fully endorse and quite another to uphold the full
reversibility that Latour favours: humans are visible only if and when
they are part of a network. My point is simple banal even and
suggests that the very terms with which Latour himself justifies his
intellectual enquiry do require a strong and in fact highly
conventional conception of the human. In We Have Never Been
Humans, for instance, he is concerned with such questions as global
warming and the atomic bomb (Latour 1993) and in An
Anthropology of the Moderns he speaks at length about the revival
of fundamentalism, poverty, misogyny and colonialism as well as
ubiquitous ecological dangers (Latour 2013: 142-56, 268-91).
But because these are only understandable as normative motifs he
has to affirm in practice what rhetorically denies: there wes and
theys that ultimately care for these problems are, of course,
human beings.7 Can there be anything more modern that Latours
dissatisfaction with modernitys own self-descriptions? His work
belongs to the decidedly modern genre in which modernity is in
permanent need of full reconsideration: it is a thoroughly modern
attempt to account for the modern dissatisfaction with the modern
7 There is, even, a humanist plea that humans have not counted enough
throughout human history: humans have always counted less than the vast
population of divinities and lesser transcendental entities that give us life (Latour
2004: 456).

experience of unfulfilled promises that come out of modernitys own

successes and failures. Above all, it is the view that modernity can
only be described adequately if we do so on the basis of the same
claim to originality of which moderns are so fond of: this is time, we
shall succeed.
My second example comes from Rosi Briadottis (2013) recent book
on posthumanism and a first thing to note is that this genre is
constituted by its own rules: what for Latour is substantiated by
some form of first-hand empirical research, it is here introduced
through a combination of speculative, philosophical and scientific
arguments that are then fleshed out through examples coming from
popular culture and political criticism. Modernity is then defined by
two fundamental processes: the constant obsession for
technological innovations and its general trend towards the
transvaluation of values. Whilst both are fundamentally ambivalent
processes because that offer challenges and opportunities, the
critical standpoint is sustained in the fact that what emerges with
promises of emancipation for all has, on the contrary, been built on
the systematic exclusion of the many. Briadotti builds on a line of
critique of humanism that has become mainstream at least since
Heideggers Letter on Humanism in the mid-1940s: the modern
belief in humanity is a pernicious illusion and Humanism (with
capital H) is nothing but the violent and exclusionary masterideology of the West that encapsulates all that is wrong with
modernity (Braidotti 2013: 13-30). She also follows Heidegger in the
fact that this is a form of anti-humanist in anything but name. This
remains the central tenet of the posthumanist literature. Humanism
as representative of the contemporary sensibility is no longer
because it is already dead (Davies 1997).8
The inability to commit fully to an anti-humanist perspective is
however dependent on the fact that, both cognitively and
normatively, she cannot do without a sense of subjectivity who
cares about the world and is worth caring for Braidotti. Subjectivity
remains a key theoretical cornerstone of her posthumanist project
because only there can to anchor any possible sense of agency as
the locus of critique (2013: 50-4). Full-blown anti-humanism
becomes ultimately untenable on grounds that are similar to
Latours: first, because as a form critique, Briadottis discourse
requires normative motifs that, despite the rhetoric, can only
introduced as a human concerns for dignity, justice, solidarity and
freedom. Secondly, humans beings matter because they are the
ones that mobilise normative ideas in society, at stake here are
creative capacities of human action itself. As she deconstructs the
inconsistencies of humanist discourses anthropocentrism,
8 Briadottis key intellectual and biographical references are Deleuze and Guattari
and in Chapter 1 we will explore in detail Heideggers French connection and its
fundamental irrationalism and elitism.

androgenism, racism Braidotti will have no difficulty in ubiquitously

appealing to traditional humanist values for her own justifications:
justice, dignity and solidarity. The explorations into the limits,
exceptions and contradictions of Western humanism are potentially
illuminating, but the Heideggerian influence is again apparent in the
elitism that ensues.9 On the one hand, her whole normative project
depends on the need to speak on behalf of those who cannot do so
themselves and, whether we like it or not, this is a quintessentially
modern political issue. On the other hand, Briadotti does not really
know what to do with the values and institutions of the modern
world: she loathes them as merely ideological and yet never reflects
on the fact that she can do so because she can take them for
granted: people die every die for the right to work, basic human
decency, equality before the law.10
Let me finally turn to the fields of cognitive science and artificial
intelligence, where I would like to focus on the work of Edinburgh
philosopher Andy Clark. The original proponent of the so-called
extended mind thesis (Clark and Chalmers 2008 [1998]), he argues
that the way in which we understand cognitive processes cannot be
reduced as a self-contained occurrence inside our skin and skull.
Rather, he suggests that we can only explain cognitive processes if
we allow in all sorts of external factors buildings and iphones, pens
and books. This is interpreted as a posthumanist sensibility because
it points towards the softening if not downright dissolution of a
self-contained idea of the human being and its agential powers. He
then rejects the idea that the cognitive can be defined
unproblematically and indeed makes his reflections on the cognitive
processes central to the comparison between the main creatures
he is interested in: humans and robots (Clark 2008: 86). For our
purposes, there are three main tenets of this argument that are
particularly relevant:
(1) Humans are defined by the constant interplay between mind,
body and world, so they are anything but locked-in agents (2008:
30). Rather that looking at the differences between internal process
that allegedly occur inside our body/mind and external ones that
take place in the world, he contends that all cognitive operations
truly occur in their interface. Whilst robots are of course unlike
9 The thrust of the argument has been well captured by Gillian Rose (1995: 117):
Previously, modern philosophical irrationalism was seen retrospectively by
philosophers and historians as the source of the racist and totalitarian movements
of the twentieth century. Now, philosophical reason itself is seen by postmodern
philosophers as the general scourge of Western history. To reasons division of the
real into the rational and the irrational, is attributed the fatal Manichaeism and
imperialism of the West
10 There is also a parallel literature on trans-humanism that accepts the more
conventional humanist position that our species holds a pride of place in the
cosmos and favour an active engagement in the redefinition of what it means to
be human (Fuller 2011, Fuller and Lipinska 2014).

humans in several regards, in relation to mind, body and world, their

cognitive stance is in its outcomes, potentially indistinguishable
from that of humans.11
(2) The design of robots as increasingly intelligent and indeed
mobile creatures is a major resource in helping us better understand
cognitive and indeed wider mechanical mechanism of human beings
themselves. In fact, this is an argument that resembles traditional
etiological and socio-biological notions that humans do learn about
themselves as they compare their own ways of doing things with
those of others creatures: The human agent, says Clark, is
natures expert at becoming expert (2008: 75)
(3) Whilst technological innovations have been a constant
throughout human history, we now witness a new phase in we move
from mere embodiment to basic and then profound embodiment
of technologies. Similar to Schelers tripartite classification of plants,
animals and humans, Clarks also depends on the incremental
degree of openness in the reactions to external stimuli. The current
generation of humans are natural-born cyborgs because we have
grown predisposed to permanently innovate: A profoundly
embodied creature or robot is thus one that is highly engineered to
be able to learn to make maximal problem-simplifying use of an
open-ended variety of internal, bodily, or external sources of order
(2008: 43)
We can see that all three propositions point in the posthumanist
direction. Not only do they favour a levelling out between humans
and robots but reject the conventional notions that humans are selfcontained and even discard ideas of human supremacy and
exceptionalism: here, humans are creatures but so are animals,
plants, robots and cyborgs so that the artificial can teach the natural
(2008: 54). In contradistinction to Latour or Briadotti, however, Clark
does not ultimately make the final posthumanist move of dissolving
the human. Rather the opposite, he emphasises that there is an
ultimate organic reference to humans:
[i]n rejecting the vision of human cognitive processing as
organism bound, we should not feel forced to deny that is (in
most, perhaps all, real-world cases) organism centered. It is
indeed primarily (though not solely) the biological organism
that, courtesy especially of its potent neural apparatus, spins
11 The common reference point here is Alan Turings (2005 [1950]) famous
imitation game that is devised in order to answer the question can machines
think? In a game whose goal is to find out whether your interlocutor is male or
female, there is a third participant that will offer the clues. If a machine is able to
play this third role as well as a human would do, then Turing contends that for all
practical purposes we can say that the machine can think. See, classically, John
Searles (2005 [1980]) critique of Turings thought experiment and Margaret
Bodens (2005 [1988]) critique of Searle.

and maintains (or more minimally selects and exploits) the

webs of additional structure that then form parts of the
machinery that accomplishes its own cognizing () Individual
cognizing, then, is organism centered even if it is not
organism bound (2008: 123)
This argument that cognitive expansion depends on an organic core
is one that I would like to retain. Clarke can compare different forms
of creatures and possibly contend the autonomy and even
superiority of machines with regards to a growing range of cognitive
skills and processes. What matter to us, however, is that there is
also a fundamental ontological irreversibility built into his claims:
there is always, ultimately, a problem of design. On the material
side, there is the human skill of building robots and technologies
which can do stuff. More importantly, on the ideational side, the
whole body literature depends on the design of all kinds of thought
experiments that allow for the testing various arguments and
counter-arguments. It is the refreshingly ludic side of this literature
that makes my point: colleagues seem to really be having fun at
outwitting one another. 12
Structure of the book
Chapter 1 looks closely at a discussion on humanism that took place
right at the end of World War II between Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin
Heidegger. In Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre offered a defence
of traditional humanist values freedom and autonomy for all on
the traditional grounds of anthropocentrism man is the measure
of all things and constructivism the world we inhabit is of human
making. In Letter on Humanism, Heidegger responded by making
three fundamental counter-claims: through its egalitarianism and
constructivism, humanism was itself to blame for the war and its
atrocities, man cannot be made a source of value so we ought to
worship higher forms of being, and through their masterful
command of language, a new elite of poets and thinkers were to
restore human dignity by becoming self-appointed shepherds of
being. I then look at Jacques Derridas intervention in the 1960s in
order to construe more fully the anti-humanist environment within
which later debates have taken place.
After reassessing this twentieth-century debate on humanism, the
book looks closely at several writers with the help of which I try to
unpack some of the key anthropological dimensions that will allow
12 My claim this does not change even if machines get much better than humans
and playing chess, if machines create new games that are very much like chess or
even if machines create machines whose purpose is to create new games. What is
uniquely human is the original impulse that leads humans to play games at all:
having fun, socialising, creating and improving on rules, getting better at them,
etc.

us to construe a universalistic principle of humanity. This

anthropological question is arguably not the central concern for any
of these writers; their substantive contributions lie elsewhere and
include of course a number of very different areas: from general
epistemology to totalitarianism via ethical naturalism and economic
sociology. Yet all writers felt at some stage the need to articulate out
the conceptions of the human with which they had been operating,
more or less implicitly, up to that point.
The order of the chapters is chronological but their focus is on one
particular dimension of the human: Chapter 2 focuses on Hannah
Arendts idea of self-transcendence as the human capacity for
looking at others and themselves as if from an external position,
Chapter 3 looks at Talcott Parsons idea of adaptation as the organic
vortex through connects the various layers of human life to the
natural
environment,
Chapter
4
discusses
Hans
Jonas
understanding of responsibility as human relation that creates a
normative obligation on the ground of power differentials, Chapter 5
reconstructs Jurgen Habermas idea of language as the
quintessentially social aspect of human life that however is never
altogether detached from its individual instantiation, Chapter 6
explores Charles Taylors idea of moral goods as those objects of
concern with help of which people organise the usually conflictive
normative priorities that they experience their lives, Chapter 7
assesses Margaret Archers notion of reflexivity as the key agential
power through which people talk to themselves as they decide their
future courses of action and Chapter 8 reflects on Luc Boltanskis
work on reproduction and abortion in order to assess the dual
natural and social dimensions of the reproduction of life. The book
ends with a text that lies somewhere in between an individual
chapter and a general conclusion. There, I revisit Hans
Blumenbergs posthumous work that reassesses the main
contributions of the early tradition of philosophical anthropology as
a general enquiry into the question what is a human being. In order
to remain true to the general orientation of philosophical sociology,
the book then includes four philosophers (Arendt, Blumenberg, Jonas
and Taylor), three sociologists (Parsons, Archer and Boltanski) and
one writer who can be seen as either (Habermas).
An enormous and usually extremely interesting debate surrounds
the interpretation of every one of the individual writers I have
discussed here and I have not been able to give justice to their
interpretative wealth. My goal is to offer neither a comprehensive
nor a wholly original account of their work; instead, for each chapter
I have focused on one or two texts where I think they succeed in
making apparent a key dimension in their conception of the human.
Some of my interpretations below will be controversial, but I
nonetheless expect each individual chapter to stand both as a

general argument on a specific anthropological dimension and as an

essay on the writer in question.