Atheism Criticizes Humanism

[Alex]

The atheistic critique of humanism has been all but forgotten
New atheists duck the philosophical arguments of atheistic anti-humanism
Giles Fraser
4 June 2011
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jun/04/atheistic-critique-of-humanism-forgotten

...The sunny optimism of the Enlightenment – not least its commitment to progress and a sense of the intrinsic goodness of human nature – was profoundly dented by the horrors of the first world war and the Nazi death camps. The Enlightenment hadn't found another word for sin. And just as Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, a developing anti-humanism started to announce what, in less gender-conscious times, Foucault was to call "the death of man". Indeed, Nietzsche himself insisted the belief in humanity was itself just a hangover from a belief in God and, once God was eradicated, the belief in human beings would follow the same way.

It was mostly Marxists who developed this idea and ran with it. Louis Althusser coined the term anti-humanism. Forget the significance of the human individual, he argued, it is historical processes that make the difference. There is no such thing as intrinsic humanity, we are all the product of external forces. Everything that cannot be analysed structurally is false consciousness. Humanism itself is false consciousness. Others made a parallel critique using Freudian psychoanalysis. Human beings are not little gods free to choose for themselves on the basis of reason alone. We are subject to forces outside the reach of rational scrutiny. And, broadly speaking, the intellectual left all rose in applause. As Emmanuel Levinas observed in 1957: "Contemporary thought holds out the surprise for us of an atheism that is not humanist."  ...


A few good comments worth reflecting on:

A true atheist must be atheistic on all things non tangible. One cannot replace the false gods of religion with the false god of humanism. It's hypocrisy at it's highest.
Dreagon

There are a lot of atheists who buy into the idea that people desperately need something transcendent to believe in. If it isn't religion, it might be fascism, so we'd better replace religion with something nice and fuzzy like humanism or environmentalism! But there are many more of us who don't buy into the "replacement thesis". We think that life without belief in any transcendent thingy is perfectly achievable. It is certainly a more difficult life, though.
Dissimul

"There is no such thing as intrinsic humanity, we are all the product of external forces." Isn't that a Buddhist concept?
StevHep

Sartre got it right when he wrote, "Every belief is a belief that falls short; one never wholly believes what one believes." That cuts the ground from under any belief system, atheist, humanist or religious.
Haveatye