Humanism and the Studia Humanitatis after 9/11/01: Rethinking the Anthropologos

Abstract

But if man is to find his way once again into the nearness of Being he must first learn to exist in the nameless. In the same way he must recognize the seductions of the public realm as well as the importance of the private. Before he speaks man must first let himself be claimed again by Being, taking the risk that under this claim he will seldom have much to say. Only thus will the preciousness of its essence be once more bestowed upon the word, and upon man a home for dwelling in the truth of Being. —Martin Heidegger1 It is even part of my good fortune not to be a house-owner, Nietzsche already wrote in the Gay Science. Today we should have to add: it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home. —Theodor Adorno2 Of course [responding to his Jewish interlocutor's observation that his criticism of Zionism for attaching too much importance to home sounded very Jewish]. I'm the last Jewish intellectual. You don't know anyone else. All of your other Jewish intellectuals are now suburban squires. From Amos Oz to all these people here in America. So I'm the last one. The only true follower of Adorno. Let me put it this way: I'm a Jewish-Palestinian. —Edward Said3 [End Page 219] In 1991, following the disintegration and demise of the Soviet Union and its empire, Francis Fukuyama published an essay (later expanded to book length) which announced "the end of history" and the advent of a "new [global] world order" under the aegis of American liberal capitalist democracy.4 This annunciation was justified by appealing not to history but to History, that is, to a Hegelian/Kojèvian ontology which assumes that history is characterized by a directional dialectic process that, in the end, precipitates a world in which historical contradictions have been sublimated into a harmonious and conflict free totality. To arrive at this Quixotically optimistic and brutally reductive—world picture, Fukuyama, as Derrida and others have shown,5 was compelled by the binarist logic of this metaphysical ontology, this representation of history from after or above its disseminations (meta ta physika)—to overlook and discount the volatility that has characterized modern history, and, more important, the violence that the West, not least America, has perpetrated to produce this global volatility. I am not simply referring to the sustained practice of Western imperialism vis a vis its "Other" that began in the heady age of exploration. This was the predatory history that bore witness to the virtual extinction of the natives of North and South America, the African slave trade, the ruthless colonization and exploitation of the Middle East and India, and the destabilization of China and Japan, and, in its culminating phase, to the wholesale slaughter of World War I and, following World War II, to the carnage of the "small" hot wars of the Cold War, not least the one undertaken by the United States in Southeast Asia, in the name of "saving" it for "the free world," a "hot war" during which approx-imately two million Vietnamese were killed, their land destroyed by bombs and chemicals, their rice culture shattered, and their organic community reduced to a society of refugees. I am also referring to the modern Western interpretation of being, which was simultaneous and indissolubly complicitous with this devastating global imperial practice: specifically, its supplanting of the Word of the Christian God (the theo-logos) by the Word of Man—the anthropologos—as the measure of all things, spatial and temporal, and the mode of inquiry and learning endemic to this apotheosis of Man which came to be called humanist studies, Studia Humanitatis. Subsequent world historical events—not least the rise of a militant Islamic reaction to American hegemony in the Middle East—have subverted Fukuyama's euphoric...