In her latest book, Susan Babbitt picks out a key topic in anthropology and cultural studies, namely humanism, and explores it from a philosophical perspective while taking issue with philosophical liberalism. Through her thorough examination of humanism, she makes a timely, significant contribution to the philosophical study of the nature of human knowledge. Framing her epistemic project in an embodied picture of the human mind, she addresses a number of difficult philosophical problems by identifying and scrutinizing their intersections, in the five chapters of her book. Along the way, she convincingly argues that secularism, properly understood (as a movement towards the freedom of inquiry), should shift its target from religion to philosophical liberalism.
In particular, she makes a case for naturalistic realism in meta-ethics in order to elaborate the embodied nature of knowledge and the significance of self-knowledge in all ethical and political understanding. More specifically, she argues that naturalistic realism captures the spirit of embodiment, as a view about the nature of knowledge, better than other approaches. She, then, draws upon naturalistic realism in order to advocate a humanist perspective in normative ethics, in general, and to put the question of humanist truths (shaping one’s understanding of oneself) at the centre of debates about global development (understood as struggles for radical independence), in particular (8). Revealing the disembodied approach of philosophical liberalism to ethical questions about human encounters with the socially subordinated (or the ‘unfitted flesh’ of the other, to borrow her own phrase), Babbitt challenges basic assumptions of philosophical liberalism about what constitutes ‘freedom.’ Along the way, she suggests that religious moral traditions have more resources than non-religious analytic ethics for comprehending the embodied nature of reason. In her study, Babbitt revisits and provides an elaborate investigation of philosophically-loaded notions of truth, rationality, objectivity, embodiment, authenticity, alienation, humanism, and liberalism.
Humanism is a central theme in Babbitt’s project in this book and she provides a very specific understanding of this notion throughout it. She argues that humanism, in the sense she defends, is presupposed by those who are committed to global justice as a struggle against systemic oppression. As she puts it, “systemic oppression dehumanizes people and dehumanization presupposes humanization. Resistance to dehumanization presupposes at least some knowledge of humanism” (3). On the naturalist picture of reality that she advocates, social kinds such as “racism” or “sexual harassment” (141), although socially constructed, are not unlike non-human natural kinds in that they can both be meaningfully named and objectively known in reliable ways through embodied experience of the cause and effect nature of reality. In this sense, she maintains, ethical inquiries, if properly carried out, may unveil truths about the human condition just as scientific inquiries, if properly carried out, may discover truths about the non-human natural world. She refers to this meta-ethical stance as humanism.
It is important to note that Babbitt’s argument for humanism rests upon a reconceptualization of the notions of objectivity and rationality, as being embodied. Her reconceptualization reconciles the objectivity of the human reason (including practical deliberation) with the constitutive role of subjective feelings and intuitions in the process of reasoning. One of the distinctive features of her study is that she presents an analogical line of reasoning in order to give plausibility to the idea of objective moral knowledge, despite rejecting foundationalism and acknowledging the dialectical nature of human knowledge. The analogical reasoning she provides in her first, second, and forth chapters brings a new insight into the debates about moral realism by putting them beside the debates about scientific realism. Through her analogical approach, she puts seemingly unrelated areas of philosophy in insightful conversations with one another. In particular, she draws connections between 20th century epistemology and analytic philosophy of science (Philip Kitcher, Ian Hacking, Robert Wilson, and Richard Boyd), analytic ethics (Richard Hare and Christine Korsgaard), and philosophy of language and metaphysics (Hilary Putnam, Willard Quine, and Sydney Shoemaker). Setting the stage for conversations among seemingly unrelated philosophical areas in this way has been a characteristic of Susan Babbitt’s writings in the past decade. Footnote 1
Apart from drawing connections between a variety of different philosophical areas (named above), Babbitt also engages a number of importantly different philosophical traditions, comparatively. For instance, her study speaks to the phenomenological, existentialist, and Marxist (more precisely, dialectic materialist) traditions in Western philosophy. In her engagement with these philosophical traditions, she points out what they have in common and what sets them apart in response to the question of the nature of human knowledge. This approach makes her study a valuable comparative project in ethics. Again, this kind of engagement with a broad range of philosophical traditions is not new in her scholarship. Footnote 2 In this book, one also notices another common thread in Babbitt’s scholarship, namely the constitutive role literary examples play in her philosophical arguments. For instance, in her first two chapters, she brings in moral examples from the writings of Eugene Ionesco and Ernest Hemingway, among others.
The conceptual clarifications that Babbitt offers in this book could also lend a helpful theoretical framework for critical studies of late modernity in humanities and social science disciplines. For instance, she offers a careful distinction between the notions of liberalism and humanism that are often mistakenly lumped together in anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, and global development literature. This aspect of her work makes her book a substantive contribution from an interdisciplinary perspective. Moreover, she begins and ends her investigation with foregrounding the ethical insights of religious philosophical traditions on the causal nature of human knowledge. More specifically, in her first, second, and fifth chapters she draws upon the teachings of Christian and Buddhist ethics in order to challenge the liberal ideal of self-sufficiency. Including these resources is a promising move toward undoing the dominance of secular perspectives in Western academic humanities.
Finally, Babbitt’s complex critique of the liberal ideal of self-sufficiency points to some practical strategies for resisting the alienation that results from uncritical engagement with social conventions imposing themselves on individuals in late modern states. What is overlooked in her analysis, though, is the disproportionate risk of resisting alienation, for subordinated social groups. Babbitt does not discuss this asymmetry. However, the issue of reducing the risk of resistance for disadvantaged social groups is an important political challenge for theorists who are critical of philosophical liberalism. Perhaps a useful way of framing this issue in Babbitt’s project would be to highlight the political, uncertain character of the decision to respond to personal encounters with reality, on the part of the subordinated. The subordinated might strategically decide to play along with social conventions for the sake of a greater collective achievement such as gaining control over the right time to bring about significant social change.
