Special Issue – Rethinking Philosophical Anthropology

Although philosophical anthropology is constituted around the question of the human, which also means the being of the human, it is not the question alone that makes for the distinctiveness of philosophical anthropology, but rather the primacy that is given to that question. In this respect, philosophical anthropology appears, not just as one branch of philosophy among others, but as actually bringing with it a distinctive conception of philosophy as fundamentally concerned with the human in a way that comes before anything else. Moreover, precisely because philosophical anthropology insists on the primacy of the question of the human, so it also resists the tendency to treat the human in any reductive or eliminative fashion. The question of the human thus remains a distinct question, and the manner in which it is answered remains equally distinct.

This prioritization of the question of the human is undoubtedly a key reason why philosophical anthropology has tended to remain the preserve of European philosophical traditions, notably neo-Kantianism and phenomenology, rather than being taken up within English-speaking ‘analytic’ philosophy. The latter has tended not to give the same priority to the question of the human nor to treat it as having any distinctive status in relation to other philosophical inquiries. Indeed, the tendency on the part of English-speaking philosophy, from the early twentieth century onwards, to give primacy to natural science, almost immediately places in question the idea of philosophical anthropology (or else treats it as indeed no more than a philosophically-inflected version of empirical anthropology) at the same time as it also implies a very particular conception of the nature of philosophy itself. On this basis, one might say that the stance taken in relation to the question of the human, especially as addressed from the perspective of philosophical anthropology, is one of the strongest points of differentiation between ‘analytic’ and so-called ‘continental’ (or ‘European’) thought – a confrontation that has itself been the focus for so much dissension and division. Certainly, whether one looks to Jaspers or Sartre, Arendt or Plessner, Husserl or Scheler, Levinas or Jonas, the question of the human, understood as both distinctive and central, appears as a common concern – and this is so regardless of whether the idea of philosophical anthropology is itself explicitly invoked and regardless too of the many other differences that separate these thinkers. Indeed, the critical engagement with the question of the human in thinkers such as Foucault or Heidegger should not be taken to represent the refusal of what is at issue in that question, but rather part of the attempt to take the question up anew – even if this also means contesting the idea that the question is indeed to be addressed by means of philosophical anthropology or what such an anthropology might actually imply.

To a great extent, moreover, the focus on the human that appears in the work of so many European thinkers arises, not merely as the continuation of an already existing philosophical concern, but also out of the sense of a contemporary crisis in respect of the human. This sense of crisis is itself a direct outcome of the growth of the natural sciences that has occurred since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and, along with it, the demise of the ancient and medieval worldview that gave the human, or more specifically, man, a special position in the cosmos. In this respect, the rise of philosophical anthropology can itself be seen as a response to the increasing dominance of, to use the German terms, the Naturwissenschaften over the Geisteswissenschaften even in respect of the inquiry into the human (philosophical anthropology sometimes taking the form of an appropriating of elements of the natural scientific back into the humanistic). The crisis that was evident in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has not abated in the twentieth or twenty-first, but has only taken on a wider and deeper form. In an age that is supposedly ‘post-human’, the question of the human remains – indeed, the very idea of the post-human invokes the human at the same time as it seems to move beyond it. If, in good hermeneutic fashion, we acknowledge that all understanding involves self-understanding, then if we are to understand and respond to our precarious place in the contemporary world, then we must also understand who and what we ourselves are, and that must mean understanding our own being as human. The rise of the post-human, the advent of the Anthropocene, these only make the question of the human even more pressing.

The essays that make up this special edition approach the question of philosophical anthropology in different ways and from different directions. Yet what they share is the same sense that the question of the human is indeed not a question to be bypassed or overcome, but rather a question that remains to be addressed – a question that claims us now no less than it has before. Inasmuch as there is a question as to whether the inquiry into the human does indeed take the form of a philosophical anthropology, so the inquiry into the human already invokes philosophical anthropology even if only as a site of questionability. There is certainly a danger that the focus on the anthropological may well lead towards a fascination with an array of contingent features of human life and being that lead away from the properly philosophical, perhaps even that confuse the philosophical. Yet it is hard to refuse the claim that if there is indeed a sense in which the question of the human is of central philosophical significance, then this must mean that there is also a sense in which philosophical anthropology can be construed in like fashion. Perhaps philosophical anthropology requires a certain degree of rethinking and reorientation if it is to be capable of meeting this challenge, but so too does the conception of the human. Such a rethinking and reorienting of the question of the human and of philosophical anthropology, pursued both conceptually and historically, is the primary aim of this Special Issue.

Andrew Benjamin
School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, Monash University, Clayton, Australia
School of Humanities, Kingston University, London, UK
[email protected] Malpas
Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Tasmania, Tasmania, Australia
[email protected]