BEYOND EXCLUSIVE HUMANISM A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Government By Paula Louise Olearnik, M.A. Washington, DC November 4, 2010 Copyright by Paula Louise Olearnik All Rights Reserved ii BEYOND EXCLUSIVE HUMANISM Paula Louise Olearnik Thesis Advisor: Robert B. Douglass, Ph. D. ABSTRACT Contemporary liberal theory and the theoretical justification thereof are intimately related to the pre-political worldview of exclusive humanism. This form of humanism maintains the primacy of human life and flourishing to the exclusion of any transcendent values. The veracity of this form of humanism has recently been questioned by a number of political theorists including John Gray, Charles Taylor and Václav Havel. This dissertation investigates the merits of their critiques, pitting them against self-avowed humanist partisan Richard Rorty. It evaluates the merits of the alternatives to exclusive humanism offered by the aforementioned authors. What consequences for liberal theory and culture would going beyond exclusive humanism entail? iii Whenever I came to a difficult point in the dissertation or was simply exhausted, I would pull out a piece of paper and begin to write my acknowledgements. I would think of all the people who had educated, motivated and sustained me throughout the years of my doctoral study, and those who did so well before. I now own reams of handwritten acknowledgements in notebooks, on the backs of articles and scribbled on pieces of scrap paper, so many in fact that it would be impossible for me to reproduce them all here. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to very many friends and loved ones and although I do not list all your names here, please know that you are precious to me. In a special way, of course, I recognise the mentorship of my advisor Prof. Bruce Douglass. In his musings on education, the Polish philosopher Józef Tischner wrote that upbringing and education are work with and upon a person who is in the process of maturing. It therefore creates between teacher and pupil bonds analogous to fatherhood - not as the passing on of life, but as the passing on of hope. The teacher is a confidant of the pupil’s hope; he is its support and strength. Prof. Douglass, you have been a true teacher in this sense; the bearer of my hope. I also sincerely thank professors Patrick Deneen, Colin Bird and Richard Boyd for their help and guidance along the way. I further acknowledge my fellow political theorists at Georgetown for their solidarity in the ordeal, especially: Hamutal Bernstein, Craig French, Kristine Miranda and Briana McGinnis. Finally, I thank my parents Henryk and Irena Olearnik and my brother Gabriel. This journey has taken me far from home but your love and support has always been close beside me. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction …..…………………………...………………………………………..1 Chapter 1: A Defence of Humanism …..…….……………….…………………16 Chapter 2: An Anti-humanist Challenge …..….……..…………………………52 Chapter 3: A Transcendent Perspective ………..……………………………....91 Chapter 4: Politics beyond Exclusive Humanism ….…………..……………..129 Conclusion ………………………………………………...……………………..169 Bibliography ……………………………………………...………………….......176 v Introduction Liberalism needs to move beyond exclusive humanism? Sounds suspiciously like metaphysics… Ever since John Rawls attempted to free liberalism from metaphysical claims, political theorists have been embroiled in debates over neutrality concerning the good, the reasonableness of comprehensive doctrines and the continual reliance on substantive truth claims in politics. A lively public debate – especially, though not exclusively in the United States - has also ensued about the role of religious discourse in the public square. The present investigation however does not engage in those well-rehearsed and, frankly, tired debates. In drawing attention to the problematic nature of the exclusive humanist worldview, which in many ways lies beneath many of those debates of the 80’s and 90’s, neither does it aim at getting at the same issues in a peculiar and oblique way. Rather it is interested in answering the following question: what, if anything, do contemporary critiques of humanism entail for liberal theory and liberal culture? This enquiry is prompted by a number of recent critiques of humanism - a fact made all the more intriguing by the diversity of their provenance. Its primary task is to examine the validity and persuasiveness of these critiques, both on their own merits but also by considering responses to them. A secondary, though no less important task, is to determine what the results of this investigation entail for liberal theory; a finally, to examine the alternatives to the humanist worldview. 1 Before embarking on any of these endeavours however, several preliminary tasks must be carried out. The first is to define the kind of humanism under consideration; that is, to clarify the term ‘exclusive humanism’. The second is to establish the relationship between exclusive humanism and procedural liberalism. What is exclusive humanism? Humanism is best thought of as a worldview or life-stance which identifies and promotes the value of human beings and carries with it a series of obligations about how we ought to live and treat others. 1 This succinct description is largely accurate, if not exhaustive, of all forms of humanism despite significant differences in terms of their specific content. The humanist worldview has a long and complex history, one which has seen Renaissance, Enlightenment and Modern iterations – to name but a few examples. None of these are of immediate concern, however, since the humanism under consideration here is supplied by Charles Taylor’s term ‘exclusive humanism’. Exclusive humanism, Taylor specifies, consists in the combination of two elements – one practical; the other theoretical. The practical element avows the primacy of human life, largely understood in material terms as the valuing of physical life and its necessary corollaries – food, shelter, alleviation of sickness and pain, education, employment, opportunity for a personal life and so forth. The second-order element supplies the additional claim that there is nothing beyond the primacy of human life as outlined in the terms above. 2 This characterization acts as a good working 1 Paul Kurtz, Toward a New Enlightenment (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 277. 2 Charles Taylor, A Catholic Modernity: Charles Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture with responses, ed. James L. Heft, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 19. 2 definition of the prevailing form of contemporary humanism. However it requires a further precision which Taylor himself does not supply. Exclusive humanism, like every other kind of worldview, can function in a variety of ways. It is important to disambiguate. The present investigation will be primarily concerned with exclusive humanism which functions as a pre-political foundation; that is to say, which functions as a minimal conception affirming the moral claim that human beings have intrinsic worth (‘The First Anthropocentric Principle’) and the epistemological claim that reality can only be judged from a human perspective (‘The Second Anthropocentric Principle’). It is important to differentiate between a pre-political foundation and a comprehensive doctrine, the latter of which would articulate a complete conception of the good covering all recognized values and virtues within one rather precise system. Humanism has, of course, functioned as a comprehensive doctrine. Historically, humanist notions of the ‘autonomous individual’ became central to our modern self-understanding and helped to supply the substantive underpinnings of liberal politics. Even today exclusive humanism continues to function as a complete moral conception in some quarters, as the manifestos of various humanist associations attest, issuing a robust set of first-order political, social and ethical commitments. 3 For reasons that will shortly be articulated it will be necessary to limit the present inquiry to a form of exclusive humanism that functions as a pre-political foundation or minimal conception. It will become clear however that the authors under 3 See for example The British Humanist Association http://www.humanism.org.uk/ 3 consideration will be rather less disciplined in keeping to these functional distinctions; therefore where exclusive humanism functions as a comprehensive doctrine, or as will more often be the case, as well-defined set of practical commitments that eschews a metaphysical conception of the good, this will be duly brought to the reader’s attention. What is the relationship between exclusive humanism and procedural liberalism? The second preliminary task is to explain the relationship between exclusive humanism and contemporary liberalism. It is undertaken in order to pre-empt what would otherwise be the first objection to the entire project. Whether the critiques of humanism are valid or not - so the objection would go - is irrelevant to most forms of contemporary liberalism which, following the Rawlsian model, do not commit themselves to any single worldview or set of beliefs. Granted – the objection will continue – a convincing case could be made that early modern liberalism derived normative principles such as individual autonomy, freedom and equality from enlightenment humanism and as such any critiques of