of all perplexed and empty-headed moralists’, and Nietzsche dismissed it rapidly. These days, it is seen as a relic of essentialist thinking – giving the human a kind of essence. It has gone out of fashion in much thinking, and at its very best is seen as (yet another) contested concept.
Still, we should not be too dismissive too quickly. Dignity shows signs of widespread use today and is undoubtedly central to much thinking about justice and rights. It is also bound up with the value of a human self. It suggests that each individual has the right to be valued and treated well, including the idea of equality of peoples. People are vulnerable and need security from others; they need to be valued. That said, they are often failed by society, in which systems of rank, privilege and status are created that devalue vast swathes of people. Life becomes a struggle for honour and esteem.53 So, as we will see in detail later, the very term ‘dignity’ can also be used divisively: to carve out the dignified and non-dignified, doing terrible things in the process.
Two contemporary thinkers are worth noting here: Christian Smith and Martha C. Nussbaum. Realist sociologist Christian Smith writes from a position often called personalism, claiming that the person and their agency form the prime locus of human studies. He is worth quoting, as he represents one major contemporary stance:
Dignity inheres in the emergent constitution of human personhood … It is inalienable. It cannot be thought or wished away … [It is] an inherent worth of immeasurable value that is deserving of certain morally appropriate responses. Dignity makes persons innately precious and inviolable … The ontology of personhood makes it morally true that persons are creatures worthy of being treated with respect, justice, and love.54
This is an unusually strong stance. Smith puts dignity at the very heart of his scientific account of what it means to be human. For him, the idea cannot be contested: he takes a strong essentialist line.
Likewise, philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum – indisputably one of the most prolific and central philosophers of humanity55 – weaves her many wide-ranging and influential discussions around the connectedness of human capabilities, human rights, cosmopolitanism and dignity. She does not use the language of essentialism, but it is clear she accords major worth to the idea of human dignity. At the very least, all this means that the idea of dignity should at least be a part of the vocabulary of a critical humanism.
Humanism as transhumanism
The most well-known contemporary debate about humanity is that it is being enhanced and changed out of all recognition by new technologies. This becomes the challenge of transhumanism. Western Enlightenment ideas (and often secular humanism) evolve to show how new digital technologies, artificial intelligence, space travel, etc. are leading to a new humanity. We are becoming a supercharged, superintelligent, machine-based techno-animal. Transhumanism becomes ‘an intensification of humanism’.56 It leads to better health and a longer life, enhances our capacities, and increases our control over minds and bodies. We have already become quantified, data selves.57 But we have further to go: the machine (and singularity) will take over (and probably rightly so!). At its tipping point, we face superintelligence: machines will move far beyond the level of the existing human being. Today’s humanity will be superseded by the hyperintelligence of transhumanism.
Humanism abolished: the posthuman
A final illustrative debate takes all this to an extreme conclusion. Looking disdainfully at humanism (as well as ‘humanitarianism’, ‘rights’ and even ‘transhumanism’), this debate aims to deconstruct these notions and come up with a real alternative. It suggests a posthuman, as opposed to a humancentric, worldview.58 This argument stretches back to the nineteenth century with Nietzsche and Spinoza. It moves forward in the context of two world wars and the Holocaust, with landmark debates between, first, Cassirer, Heidegger, Sartre, Barthes and Adorno, and, later, Foucault, Levinas and more: all, ironically, white European men. Ultimately, it pronounces on the ‘death of man’. It turns active human action and language into discourse performance and text; active human consciousness into a language of human subjectivity. It claims that too much damage has been done in the name of humanism: the very idea has been used to divide groups, and has brought suffering and cruelty to the world in its own name. It was most flagrantly revealed in the horrors of the Holocaust. Here, humanity was used by Nazis and fascists as a weapon to mark out the human from the nonhuman, the civilized from the barbarian, the grand colonizer from the pathetic colonized. Gradually (under the influence of largely male French theory), it morphs itself into the posthuman, against humanity and a sense of universal man. At its most flagrant, humanism is about man not woman. As a major proponent Rosi Braidotti says: ‘Universal “Man” … is implicitly assumed to be masculine, white, urbanized, speaking a standard language, heterosexually inscribed in a reproductive unit, and a full citizen in a recognised polity’ (I might add able-bodied, too). As she wryly asks: ‘How non-representative can you get?’59 More: it ignores animals and other forms of life. Here we have a humanism of elite and dominant groups working as a dangerous and exclusionary ideology.
In this argument, the central modern strategy of humanism is exposed as that of essentialism and racialization. It makes the nonhuman out to be a racialized being, the other. Exemplified in the appalling examples of indigenous peoples, slavery, the Jew and the Holocaust, it can also be found in the worldwide exploitation of lands and people through colonization. Here, large populations of the world have been subordinated (often slaughtered) by the invasion and rule of other (mostly European) countries. It was exemplified in the rise of scientific racism. And right now, often in the name of ‘humanitarian exceptionalism’, conflicts like those in Afghanistan have been waged, creating new dystopias.60 With seeming good reason, this is a growing argument that wants to abandon any kind of humancentric view of the world.
And it has a wide range of followers in a very broad range of activities. A work like Braidotti and Hlavajova’s Posthuman Glossary shows an extraordinary cacophony of new voices making new claims for the future, with an explosion of exciting new ideas from ‘Blue Humanities’ (Steve Mentz) and ‘Ecohorror’ (Christy Tidwell) to ‘Gaga Feminism’ (Jack Halberstam) and ‘Necropolitics’ (Christine Quinan). There is much of great interest in such detailed studies.61
That said, critical humanism cannot agree with any position whose ultimate conclusion is to announce the death of humanity and the human. I call this the fallacy of the end times. Once we announce the death of man, and the arrival of the posthuman, we are gone. There is little, maybe nothing, more to say about us. We have wished and written ourselves away. We are not here. End of Story. And these accounts ultimately do pronounce, even celebrate, this end of humanity.
Again, a critical humanist can agree with some of this posthuman analysis. But it argues that posthumanism throws away the baby with the bathwater. Despite its many earlier sins, maybe now we have reached a key time when we can learn to think of the wide interconnectedness of humanity with all life, all things – with the world and the cosmos.
Moving Humanism On: The Dynamics of Diverse Thought
Let’s be clear. Debates can move ideas along, even as they disagree with each other. The world of ideas is a magnificently grand, agonistic and open one. Western Enlightenment humanism has undoubtedly advanced humanist thinking in important ways, demonstrating the importance of rationality and the strong idea of human amelioration. Secular humanism has been a vital corrective to the dogmatic, schismatic, irrational, religious conflict that is doing the world no good at all. Rights thinking has weaknesses but a strong future. Transhumanism has shown how human beings are making great strides both in understanding the universe and in enhancing its workings. And posthumanisms have surely shown us just how flawed many past versions of ‘the human’ have been, as well as introducing us to a scintillating array of new ideas and complexities.
