5. Naming the Human(ities)

Here is a common misconception, and I sometimes feel I had to fight it my entire scholarly life. The fact that a noun or a phrase would be selected to yield meaning more readily does not entail that words encapsulate and, even less so, create semantics. In particular, the absence of a term in a given vocabulary shows that the relevant group of speakers does not feel a need to lexicalize; this does not prove the absence of signification, even at the juncture of social institutions. Contrary to what is argued here and there, the recourse to “the humanities” as an academic category in American universities does not at all entail that this grouping is only “an effect of a particular time and world.”1 The currency of the locution in the United States today is the mark of a specific social-historical development and embedding within political structures; but it is not an “effect.” Rushed inferences serve to diminish scholarship. As much as we could justifiably speak of “the humanities” in contexts that are historically and culturally distant from modern American academia if we do not apply a preconceived understanding of them, we could also dispose of the expression. This essay could be rewritten using terms other than the humanities and, retaining its significance, through different meanings.

For instance, one could speak of the “science of the mind” (in German, Geisteswissenschaft), or of “letters” (in French, lettres), or of “human writings and culture” (in Chinese, rénwén), or of “liberal arts” (in Latin, artes liberales).2 I sometimes use these phrases in this book, as nonoverlapping equivalents, to which I add other expressions, such as “the discursive disciplines.” Each time, the task is not only to acknowledge the preconditioned semantics such utterances convey but also to modify the understanding of the given. The humanities, here, are never “the humanities,” as if everybody knew what they were and naturally agreed on their definition. If such were the case, there would be no place for the strife I have mentioned. And similarly for all other synonyms, all of them being inserted in a setting but being equally capable of reaching further—each time, however, the mark of this setting conjures up an aspect, a form, a contour that should not be a terminus ad quem but a quo. If I write “the discursive disciplines,” I am focusing through the second term on the epistemic dimension, notwithstanding the possibility of a perspective or of an idea that would go beyond the established branches of knowledge. With the adjective discursive, I insist on a certain use of human verbal language that is running its course (dis-cursus) or is in flux, thereby apt to exacerbate its own signification, and in contradistinction with mathematical notations and all positions on stylistic transparency that equate writing with a direct script or dictation of mental concepts (what logician Gottlob Frege called Begriffsschrift), another constituent of the AI agenda within reflexive theory.3 It also reminds us that we are working in language. Were we to speak of Geisteswissenschaften, we would relate scholarship to noetic activity and face the validity of the computer as a model of mental activity. The ensuing opposition between the sciences of the mind and the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) is immediately becoming dubious to us, if the distinction serves to extract the human mind from the rest of nature, which is nothing more than a parochial, theological view. As for artificial intelligence itself, it would seem to be a product, based on methods perfected in the sciences of nature, that would fall into an inquiry about the mind, being granted that the spiritual connotation of Geist almost spontaneously hints at the ghost in the machine. When I refer to artes liberales, I stress the emancipatory dimension of a certain sort of liberating knowledge. There, the next question would concern the place and role of the formalized and experimental sciences, traditionally included, at least in part, in the liberal arts. Alternatively, I could use letters, a term that is not restricted to the alphabetic but signals a form of writing within writing (as “letters” are not understandable as all books and manuscripts), a plurality, as well as a literary becoming. While it is certain that the appellation lettres, in French, was tied to the reformation of the university under Napoléon (with the instauration of the “faculty of letters,” alongside those of “medicine,” “law,” and “sciences,” and the consecutive divisions in secondary education or at the École normale supérieure), its potential is vaster: it exhibits the stratified use of language in scholarship and a possible influence—within knowledge itself—of the literary, understood as the warrant of signification, and of the differential poetics of the disciplines.

In this lexicon, the humane letters, just like rénwén in Chinese, have the particularity of enunciating what looks like a human core. Is it humanism? And, if yes, which one? Does this matter as we consider artificial intelligence? Humanism is largely a word coined by nineteenth-century historians to render what they perceived to be an intellectual renaissance, often said to begin with Petrarch.4 The novelty of the term, in its own turn, does not rule out its relevance to addressing transformations occurring in the fourteenth century or before. Then, one finds in Cicero and, right before him, in Scipio Africanus’s circle the repeated invocation of humanitas for a combination of education and scholarship with some cultured, civilized benevolence.5 A banal understanding of this appeal to the human by the very name of the humanities (or to rén in rénwén) would put at their center a predefined conception of what “we” are, as well as the mission to laud, like, or protect humankind (GPT’s imperative to “embrace our humanity”). Notably, the oldest mention of rénwén, in the Yijing, has a manifestly different acceptation that one could say has been later co-opted as a Chinese equivalent for the humane letters. Wén could stand for culture, to an extent; it is an inscription, an adornment, a writing. From the Yijing to Mencius, rénwén is contrasted with tiānwén, the mark of the (divine) heaven.6 Ancient Greek occurrences of anthrōpinos or anthrōpeios (human) in an epistemic situation equally articulate the terms with the vocabulary of the divine.7 In such corpora, Chinese or Greek, the human affairs are negatively determined, essentially, by their upper boundary (the divine). They do not arise from the stipulated characteristics or dignity that the disciplines of culture should exemplify, mirror, or consolidate—another, concurring, interpretation of the human supposition within the humanities. Besides these negative and positive determinations is a third conception we would call “human,” in a particular and nonbiological sense—that which is shaped by the humanistic viewpoint. Humanness would not be a factual positionality or an essence but a becoming (thus, not a datum), a gradient. I have more sympathy for this latter approach, to be found from the ancient Romans to Renaissance scholars to contemporary radical Black thought.8 It also allows for members of other species, such as the bonobo Kanzi, to become “human,” in his way and under the condition of dialogue.9 It may point toward the particularities of self-cultivation through an immersion within the worlds of letters. It even, tangentially, makes room, within the process of humanization, for AI, although clearly not under its current manifestations.

Nonetheless, one should not conceal that any qualification of the human in the humanities is opening the possibility of undue exclusion. The negative definition easily introduces religious ordering, banning nonbelievers; the positive determination repeatedly served to dehumanize people perceived to be barbarians, Indigenous, Black, or “of color,” and still sustains the structural relegation of (other) animals into one category; the postpositional interpretation entails that if we could become more human, then some of “us” are less so, which resonates too quickly with other hierarchical systems of domination. Because of that, one could be tempted to abandon the jargon of the humanities altogether. Still, the very intricacy of the category, its multifold and perilous semantics, might be better decided by renewed inquiry than by principled erasure. At any rate, labels such as “posthumanities” would not suffice to alleviate concerns, especially if they were to espouse AI in general, as a way to bypass traditionalist (positive) “humanism.”10 Whatever lexicon we will opt for, we will have to problematize our own discourse, which, after all, is also what letters are for.