Antihumanism: Overcoming Humanism or a New Version of It?

The article analyzes the concept "antihumanism" and its relation to the concepts "humanism" and "posthumanism". The hypothesis of the author of the article is that the criticism of humanism, which is hidden behind the prefix "anti-", has the opposite character - it leads either to posthumanism, or, on the contrary, tends to the ideas of a new anthropology. The author studies the problem of antihumanism by analyzing J.-P. Sartre's landmark work "Existentialism Is a Humanism" and the subsequent reaction of western philosophy. The author shows the drama of this reaction: Sartre's humanism meets the criticism of Heidegger and Nancy, while Heidegger's position evokes a response from Derrida, on the one hand, and from Sloterdijk, on the other. After Derrida, Francis Fukuyama develops his philosophy, and Derrida's thought subsequently converges with the ideas of Heidegger. The article shows two meanings of the word "humanism" in Sartre and notes that humanity for Sartre is connected with the figure of the Other. Responding to Sartre's work, Heidegger criticizes humanism for its inability to pose a genuine question about the human. Humanism in this interpretation is insufficient because it cannot rise to the "humanitas" of the human, limiting itself to the dimension of "animalitas". Nancy, in turn, criticizes Sartre for the fact that, wanting to radically denote the freedom of the human, he did not abandon the concept of essence. Nancy suggests that we speak of the human in terms of existence. The article explores the relationship between Nancy's conception of exposition and posthumanism. Sloterdijk, responding to Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism", reproaches him for posthumanism because Heidegger displaced humans from the center, making them the shepherd of being. In contrast to Heidegger, radically opposing the human and the animal, Sloterdijk offers to understand humanism as the transformation of the human from the animal. The direction of Derrida's thought is bifurcated. He criticizes Heidegger for his belated anthropologism and calls for overcoming the human in the Superhuman. However, in his later period, subjectivity becomes the central category of Derrida's philosophy, which correlates with Heidegger's thought. The author concludes that antihumanism, on the one hand, contains criticism of humanism for its imperfection in the approach to the human, thus claiming the status of genuine humanism; on the other hand, it is a form of denial of the idea of the exclusivity of human existence.

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