A Methodological Discussion

1. HUMANISTIC
APPROACH
Dr Madhu Prabakaran
Prof & Dean
School of Liberal Arts
IMS Unison University,
Dehradun
20-07-1922

2. Old Humanism
◦ Central position of Humans in the Cosmic order
◦ Functionalist
◦ Essentialist
◦ First expressed in 1589
◦ Dublin Review denounced it as ‘heathen’ in 1895 – as it was contra-theism
◦ The word got acceptance by early mid 20th Century
◦ Later became theocentric
◦ Secular Humanism cantered around “man kind”
◦ Reductionist

3. ◦Humanist Manifesto” 1933
◦Then appeared “Christian humanism” in 1940s
◦It become “secular humanism” in 1960s
◦Later, denounced for being species centric & not
accommodating “trans-human” expansion (technological &
psychoanalytical)
◦Karl Popper used it as “humanitarianism” in “open society &
its enemies”

4. OLD HUMANISM IS A SECULAR
RELIGION, AN INSTITUTION WITH
IDEALS.
METHODOLOGICALLY, IT IS COUNTER
RACISM, AND AN EGALITARIAN IDEAL.
IT IS AN IDEAL FOR “GOOD SOCIETY”

6. “humanism was nothing
more than an empty figure
of speech – a secular
version of theism”
- NIETZSCHE

8. Subject or Subjected?
My objective, instead, has been to
create a history of the different modes
by which, in our culture, human beings
are made subjects. My work has dealt
with three modes of objectification
which transform human beings into
subjects.

9. The first is the modes of inquiry which try to give themselves the status of sciences; for
example, the objectivizing of the speaking subject in grammaire generale, philology, and
linguistics. Or again, in this firstmode, the objectivizing of the productive subject, the subject
who labors, in the analysis of wealth and of economics. Or, a third example, the objectivizing
of the sheer fact of being alive in natural history or biology.
In the second part of my work, I have studied the objectivizing of the subject in what I shall call
"dividing practices." The subject is either divided inside himself or divided from others. This
process objectivizes him. Examples are the mad and the sane, the sick and the healthy, the
criminals and the "good boys."
Finally, I have sought to study-it is my current work-the way a human being turns himself into a
subject. For example, I have chosen the domain of sexuality-how men have learned to
recognize themselvesas subjects of "sexuality."

11. Subjected to

13. there is no ontology except in social practice, and
therefore all objects or concepts are socially produced and
maintained reifications (Garfinkel);
and second, that all social practices function to meet
explicit human needs, making these latter, therefore, their
ground or cause (Janich)

14. Habitat

15. Habitat
habitat is the territory inside which both freedom and dependency of the agency are
constituted (and, indeed, perceived as such).
Unlike system-like totalities of modern social theory, habitat neither determines the conduct of
the agents nor defines its meaning; it is no more (but no less either) than the setting in which
both action and meaning-assignment are possible.
Its own identity is as under-determined and mobile, as emergent and transitory, as those of the
actions and their meanings that form it.
habitat is a complex system, unpredictable;

21. Assemblage!

24. interdisciplinary, theoretical, and politically
committed field of inquiry, emerging roughly
at the millennium as part of what may be
termed the post-constructionist,
ontological, or material turn

25. Whereas new materialism essentially defines
materialism in a relatively conventional way –
as philosophical reflection upon the nature of
matter – historical materialism seeks not to
(re)define matter but to interrogate the
historically specific material conditions of
human production and reproduction

26. CHEMISTRY
OF
EMOTIONS

27. FRACTAL
TREES

28. Anti-Humanism
◦ Rejected because of Species-ism
◦ Functionalist consequences
◦ Essentialism
◦ Universal moral core of humanity vs Historical & genealogical
◦ A secular version of theism, empty phrase
◦ Morally, pro-establishment
◦ Unverifiable & not-empirical

30. Phoenix Rising!

31. Is Anti-Humanism against being human?
No.
It is a voice against reductive humanism

36. Play of Life
 Play lies outside the antithesis of wisdom, folly and
equally outside the truth & falsehood, good & evil
Ethical Homo Ludens are in creative change of values that
structure & re-ontologise
Ethics happens as the play unfolds

38. Playing is poiesis: the creation of infospheres to inhabit, within this
world, for ourselves and others to enjoy
Playing is a carefully balanced activity that proposes a world, gives it
a consistency through rules and props, and gives agents the
responsibility of keeping that world alive.

39. Homo poieticus is a steward of the values and informational integrity
of the environment in which they inhabit.
Similarly, homo ludens is responsible for the values that define the
encapsulated infosphere created when playing.

40. Human Uniqueness
human existence includes unique characteristics:
 self-reflection,
 purposefulness,
 language, and
 culture
hybrid networks of humans and non-humans

41. Any Understanding of Human should
 be rigorously faithful to the full richness of human existence
 methods developed for physical sciences is not adequate
human realm required hermeneutic or interpretative methods in order to disclose or
understand (verstehen) the meaning of and reasons for human expressions and actions
(Dilthey, Weber)
adopt a research methodology that is responsive to the complexity and openness of human
phenomena
 not impose nomothetic methods to idiographic state of affairs- For while the nomothetist
makes laws (nomos) and puts or places them, arranges them (tithein), the idiographer treats
particulars by drawing them, or writing them down (graphein)

42. Is being human
Normative?
Socially Constructed?
Reductionist?
Species-ism?
Historical?
Moralistic?
Disconnected?

46. ian mcgilchrist

48. Object vs Subject
Is human an object, or subject?

49. Objectivity
Controlled
For Prediction
For Utility
Do not operate at the realms beyond human interest

50. OBJECTIVITY IS A METHODOLOGICAL
CHOICE

51. A Methodological Choice
For an socialite order of things

52. Subjective actor vs objective subject is a methodological
choice, one is democratic the other is an objectified
institutionalized socialite heteronomy
Empiricism is not by its definition objective. Empirical
capabilities themselves are fundamentally subjective.

53. Subjectivity
 Imagination is inevitable
Our existence is in the realm of dialectical inferences, & dialogical but united by potential
Refusing to accept subjective dynamics of human action amounts to subjectingthem

54. Subject & Subjected
Is Human a Subject or Subjected?

55. A reliable Humanistic Method of Inquiry
has nothing in contradiction to:
Genealogical, archaeological, counter normative, counter-identity & accommodating
assemblage premises- human is not merely the human body
Interactionist, accommodating play of life (ludic)
Accommodating Actor-Network interaction complexities
A study of critical Ethography sans Identarian ethNography

56. Actual Vs Potential

57. What obstructs the Human Being From
Being Human?

58. That is the Human Inquiry!
Probing For a History That Did Not Happen!

59. A
Reductionist

60. Human Being Vs Being Human

61. Human Being is
Institutionalized
Institutionalized interests shape them
Life is not historical alone. Potentials are limited by history

62. Being Human
[Man] is freedom and power of his spirit. Facts are produced by
action cannot be explained by historical or philosophical
contextualization.
Freedom is produced by the force of individual actions
Being human has layers of existence from social construction to
their repulsion.
Being human is the “potential ontology” said in Badiou’s
terminology “subtractive ontology” & not an ontological claim of
normative humanism.

63. Being
Human
Ludic, habitat,
poesis
Structure. Position,
habitus, Field
Society, Economy, Polity &
Institutions
Human Being
Instictoid

64. Human
Condition
(greed, hatred
& pride)
Realm of
Deva
Realm of
Asura
Realm of
Manushya
Realm of
Naraka
Realm of
Purgation
Jwalamukha
Realm of
Animal
Instincts
Realm of
Temporality

65. Thank You!