Is there «human nature» and humanism any more? Foucault and Heidegger or Chomsky and Marcuse?

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«Any serious social science or theory of social change must be founded on some concept of human nature» (Noam Chomsky, letter to Peter Wilkin [1])
 

At the end of his book Les Mots et les Choses (1966, english title The Order of Things, 1970), Michel Foucault writes:

As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention ofe recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event [...] were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did at the end of eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.

This worldview, with what it implies and with all its ever-returning beginnings and genealogies - from Nietzsche through Heidegger to the (post)structuralists - has been fought from a very beginning to a theoretical level. Typical examples were two of the few remaining «wise elders» of our own era, then at the beginning of their creative maturity: Noam Chomsky and Jürgen Habermas. The famous conversation between Chomsky and Michel Foucault, titled «Human Nature: Power vs. Justice» remained in time as one of the most important «philosophical duels» of the 20th Century.[2] From this side of the Atlantic, Habermas often «opened fire» against this target in his books and academic teachings, sometimes with a lot acidity, especially in the context of his whole controversy with postmodernists. For this sharpness, much later, he felt the need for some mitigation, especially for the Foucault case.[3]

All this context of attitudes, mindsets and worldviews is first seen in cultural trends - in the case of France we see it in post-surrealist artistic avant-gardes (eg Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, Maurice Blanchot) and the «new novel». It then takes the form of theory into the various philosophical anti-humanisms of thοse Habermas called «young conservatives» (Jungkonservativen), and finally infiltrates aspects of everyday life culture. Of course not only in France. And not mainly in France. However, in the intellectual world of its birthplace France, the theoretical opposition to the icy cruelty of «cultural anti-humanism» was clearly weaker than elsewhere in those decades. Perhaps it is not entirely unfounded to argue that the soil had been soaked and laid down since the end of the 1940s with the Martin Heidegger's Letter on Humanism (1947), which, apart from being addressed to his young French friend, the philosopher Jean Beaufret, was welcomed especially in France. 

In the Letter, the concept of humanism, in all its manifestations, Christian, Marxist, Existentialist, is systematically deconstructed.

«Every humanism is either grounded in a metaphysics or is itself made to be the ground of one», writes Heidegger. «Every determination of the essence of man that already presupposes an interpretation of being without asking about the truth of Being, whether knowingly or not, is metaphysical. The result is that what is peculiar to all metaphysics, specifically with rcspect to the way the essence of man is determined, is that it is “humanistic”. Accordingly, every humanism remains metaphysical».[4]

Habermas responded by linking Heideggers philosophical position to his political praxis:  

Heidegger «disconnects his actions and words from himself as an empirical person, and attributes them to a destiny for which he is not himself responsible» [5].

When Martin Heidegger met Jacques Lacan and Kostas Axelos (1955). From left: Heidegger, Axelos, Lacan, Jean Beaufret, Elfriede Heidegger, Sylvia Bataille (then Lacan's wife) © Progressive Geographies/Difundir Psicoanálisis

However, even in France, as everywhere, we see a radical opposition to the anti-humanism of the «young» French post-structuralists or deconstructionalists of 1960s, deriving from the most paradoxical sources of the culture of everyday life. But let us not forget that half a century before these «young» French, there was the anti-humanism of the «young» Germans (Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, Ludwig Klages, also Ernst Jünger in his youth, before writing Auf den Marmorklippen in 1939). Τhe young Heidegger himself, already before being politicized, has joined at some point to this worldview.[6] Their «young» originator at the end of the 19th century was Friedrich Nietzsche. Even Max Weber was influenced, although he was a thinker with a lot of peculiarities, was not unaware, as well as the the young Thomas Mann when writing the book Betrachungen eines Unpolitischen, the later Nazi-chased, a refugee in the US and a militant internationalist democrat. But in that dark German interwar period, the social counterattack to irrational anti-humanism was trapped in the ruins of the Weimar Republic and completely eradicated by the rise of the National Socialist Party (NSDAP) and Hitler in 1933.
However, the opposition to «deconstruction of man» is constantly being regenerated emerging from lifeworld (Lebenswelt); it is ubiquitous in the world of everyday social life. This recalls Chomsky's argument that there are constants that give every right to reasonable thinking to speak of «human nature». For example, two years after the publication of Foucault's book, there came the «Annus mirabilis» 1968. At that time, besides many other things that happened and even cause debate and disagreement, we heard the leading French troubadour and rocker of the time Jean- Philippe Léo Smet, known as Johnny Hallyday, to exorcise the hybris of these «youngsters» of philosophy. The late Johnny Hallyday (died 2018), who himself was in his first youth, then spoke clearly, though - most likely - could not know in depth (or not at all) what was happening in the strange for the troubadours world of such thinkers:

  

[...] Young man / You speak like a mature man / Having the experience of a lifetime / You think you know everything
But what do you know about a child living alone? Do you know how this child feels when Christmas comes?
You, what do you know about the dog that is left alone and his master is in the sky?
You think that you' ve seen everything / that you' ve read all the books written
[...] You show your punches / You are hard, without mercy
And what do you know about those who no longer have a home?
What do you know about the wreckers drown in the night? [...]

Jeune homme/Tu parles comme un homme/A croire que dans la vie /T'as tout appris

Mais que sais-tu d'un enfant tout seul quand vient Noël? Oui, que sais-tu de ce chien dont le maître est au ciel?

[..] A croire que t'as tout vu/Que t'as tout lu

[..] A voir tes poings fermés / T'es sans pitié

Mais que sais-tu de celui qui n'a plus de pays? Et que sais-tu d'un bateau qui sombre dans la nuit? [...]
 

(Jeune Homme, 1968)

«Philosophical duel» Chomsky - Foucault, 1971

What the troubadours always try to say with their own means, music and verse, in Paris of 1968 or in medieval Provence of 1200, thinkers try to say it in the language of philosophy and sociological theory. However, how could thinkers such as Foucault or Deleuze or Heidegger or Althusserian Marxists or Max Weber himself (although he confesses his impasse) or Lacanian «heretics» of psychoanalysis or the theorists of the pure systems theory a la Niklas Luhmann, or the structuralist-functionalist sociologists, talk about the values ​​or motivations of acting individuals or societal groups? Since they restrict themselves to a theory of structures, a system-theory, without an actions-theory, a theory of social agents, it's impossible. 

What the troubadour tries to say, thinkers of classical tradition, from Aristotle, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to Karl Marx and Hannah Arend tried to say it with little or more success. However, nowadays, these so far classics speak to us about worlds, that is to say social environments, that modernity itself (and not some supposedly post-modern state of order) step by step transformed them. And still the late modernity transforms them all the more in worlds that there have been but are passing, worlds that become worlds of yesterday. And maybe tomorrow there will be nothing more left but only their history and their ruins. The claim that these social environments are or would be «erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea» has a basis and is reasonable. But with a possible reservation of their «return» as a «revival of old ideas and ideals» (Max Weber). But Foucault's assertion is something completely different; and to the extent that it completely erases man as a being who thinks and acts consciously, it does not find a real backing.
Although we now know that what we once called «human nature», implying a fixed and unaltered whole, is rather a mere guess of an unsubstantiated metaphysical anthropology, Foucault's claim does not find a real backing, because empirical reality, that is, the way the real participants in societies are acting and reacting, does not verify it.

What the troubadour tries to say, was formulated by Herbert Marcuse, as clearly and simply is possible in the language of a contemporary thinker, in a dialogue of the first with the second generation of Critical Theory 30 years ago. He even invoked the inter-subjective foundations of man's most important abilities as a support.
Markuse in his youth was a student of Heidegger and did not remain unaffected by his master.[7] He was also influenced by Max Weber,[8] who influenced also the other two «heads» of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, as well as by Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukacs. Even in Habermas' works there is evident some Weber's subsequent influence and critical transcedence). Nazism forced Marcuse to refugee in the United States, like many others. Unlike Adorno and Horkheimer, he did not return to Germany, but he was the first to urge his former teacher Heidegger to account as a thinker for his co-operation with Nazism. In vain.

Again, the second-generation exponent of Frankfurt School, Habermas, recounts what his friend Marcuse - being at the end of his life - said to him:

Before his eightieth birthday, and in preparation for an interview on that occasion, Marcuse and I had a long discussion on how we could and should explain the normative base of Critical Theory. Last summer [1979], seeing him for the first time since that discussion, Herbert was under intensive care in a hospital in Frankfurt, all types of controlling apparatuses on his left and on his right. None of us knew that this was the beginning of the end. On this occasion, indeed our last philosophical encounter, Herbert made the connection with our controversy two years ago, telling me: look, I know wherein our most basic value judgements are rooted - in compassion, in our sense for the suffering of others.[8]

George V. Ritzoulis

ΝΟTES

[1] The Chomsky - Foucault debate (pdf). See, also, Peter Wilkin: «Chomsky and Foucault on Human Nature and Politics - An Essential Difference»?, in Social Theory and Practice, vol. 25, Nr 2 (Summer 1999)
[2] See [1]

[3] As to the sharpness of the confrontation with the French post-structuralists and deconstructionists, Habermas followed what his mentor Theodor W. Adorno has done against the so-called structuralist current of Marxism, especially Louis Althusser's. It is probably a myth that at the question of  «how Critical Theory must treat structuralists a la Althusser», Adorno's answer was «bis aufs Messer». This is a metaphorical expression that marks in the German language the struggle to the end, the struggle to death, but the (literally) implied is «we will fight them even with knives». Adorno had a lot of humor, but of a different kind, not of the British, with words dripping Arsenic acid and underlying smells of vitriol and hydrogen cyanide. However, this legend, in itself, shows Adorno's moods. For the mitigation of Habermas attitude towards Foucault (posthumously), Derrida etc., see his interview with Michaël Fessel of the French magazine Esprit (2015). Habermas says to Fessel: «I referred to Foucault and Derrida - admittedly in an excessively warlike and thus unfair manner - as “young conservatives”. I was trying to tell them, that some German writers, whom, among other things, they are most relying on, belong to poisonous political contexts[...] Of course, I should have tried harder to control my emotions».

[4]«Letter on Humanism», in M. Heidegger, Basic Writings, David Farrell Krell (ed.), New York, Harper & Row, 1977, p. 202

[5] Jürgen Habermas: The Philosopical Discource of Modernity.

[6] Jürgen Habermas: «Work and Weltanschauung - The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective», in Critical Inquiry, vol. 15, iss. 2, January 1989

[7] See Herbert Marcuse: Heideggerian Marxism (ed. Richard Wolin and John Abromeit), University of Nebraska Press, 2005. See also Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History, Routledge, 2005.

[8] See Michael Löwy: «Figures of Weberian Marxism», in Theory and Society, vol. 25, iss. 3 (June 1996), s. 431-446.

[9]  J. Habermas: «Psychic Thermidor and the Rebirth of Rebellious Subjectivity», in Berkeley Journal of Sociology, iss. 24/25 (1980), s. 1-12. This was a lecture on 14.3.1980, in «Symposium for the Thought of Herbert Marcuse», which took place at the University of California at San Diego. It was republished in PRAXIS International, iss. 1/1981. It was published in Marcuse: Critical Theory & the Promise of Utopia (A. Feinberg, R. B. Pippin and Charles P. Webel editors, 1987), together with all the contributions of the Symposium (R. F. Bernstein, A. Feenberg, M. Jay, C. Offe, R.B. Pippin and orhers).

Herbert Marcuse (right) with Ernst Bloch in Korčula, Dalmatia (1968, summer seminar of PRAXIS)