2018FHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (1/2): 144–157

SPECIAL SECTION
TOWARD A NEW HUMANISM
INTRODUCTION

Toward a new humanism

An approach from philosophical anthropology
Thomas Schwarz W E N T Z E R , Aarhus University
Cheryl M A T T I N G L Y , University of Southern California

In this introduction to the special section, we revisit the case of humanism, including some challenges to its outworn and prob-
lematic metaphysical assumptions. We suggest that a new kind of humanism is demanded despite the many calls that humanism,
of any form, should be jettisoned. The new humanism we propose rests on an ethnographically based philosophical anthropology
which keeps in mind its reference to humankind while acknowledging the indeterminacy or inherent transcendence of human life
in its sociocultural and ecological situatedness. We believe that there are ontological, epistemological, and ethical reasons to pur-
sue the idea of a timely humanism, without which the social sciences and the humanities are at risk of losing orientations to their
own domains as well as their political bearings.
Keywords: humanism, philosophical anthropology, ethnography, phenomenology

Twentieth-century philosophy and social theory had its
prominent victims. The death of God announced by
Nietzsche was followed by the death of the subject
(Lévi-Strauss) and the death of the author (Barthes).
It was only a question of time when this fate would
strike the category of the human as such. “Man is an
invention of recent date,” Foucault famously wrote,
“and one perhaps nearing its end” (1994: 387). Execut-
ing Foucault’s conjecture, Derrida (1982) declared the
end of man in his “Finis homini,” following up on
Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism and the anthropocen-
tric deconstruction of Western metaphysics. The dis-
course on humanism, which had powered the history
of European thought from the ancient “Know thyself,”
through its Renaissance renewal in Pico della Miran-
dola and Marsilio Ficino, into Enlightenment philosophy
by Rousseau and Kant, up to early twentieth-century
Neo-Kantianism and existentialism, was exposed as lead-
ing to a dead end.
Once its religious and metaphysical foundations had
become questionable, traditional humanism proved to
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Volume 8, number 1/2. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/698361
© The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. 2575-1433/2018/0812-0018$10.00
be in a fragile position on a dubious and oppressive mis-
sion. Consequently, by the end of the twentieth century,
“the human” had become an outdated category. Its sup-
porters were obviously out of tune with the theoretical
affordances of the time, as manifested in postcolonial-
ism, feminist theory, biopolitics, material studies, and
adjacent discourses. Stuck in their “tired old human-
ism,” those advocates had not understood the lesson of
the century, expressed in “countless obituaries of the im-
age of the human being that animated our philosophies
and our ethics for so long: the universal subject, stable,
unified, totalized, individualized, interiorized” (Rose 1998:
169). It is precisely due to those attributes that the cate-
gory of the human and traditional humanism had proven
to be unable to do justice to the variety of human and
nonhuman life forms (Agamben 2004; Bennett 2010;
Frost 2016). Humanism was declared dead. The human
as analytical category as well as collective singular de-
scription capturing the subject matter of the humanities
was correspondingly buried. Recent decades have seen
an increasing dehumanization of social sciences in the
145
aftermath of poststructuralism and the rise of various
naturalisms, trends that have also fueled much theory de-
velopment in sociocultural anthropology. Multispecies
ethnography and the impact of material culture studies,
for example, question the ethnographer’s preoccupation
with human social life (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell
2007; Haraway 2007; Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Tsing
2015). Although these tendencies do not seem to outpace
the traditional human-oriented view, according to which
anthropology first and foremost is occupied with human
social life, one might worry that the absence of a concep-
tual framework induces a vulnerability to other social and
life sciences that are putting forward powerful dehuman-
izing frameworks of the human.
There is no doubt that, at the end of the day, most
sociocultural ethnography continues to concern itself
with living human beings and their interrelationships,
including with nonhuman significant others. Ethnogra-
phy is still a famously human-dependent research prac-
tice that relies heavily on the researcher’s sustained in-
terconnections to her interlocutors. But this empirical
ethnographic immersion, however central to the disci-
pline, may be insufficient to protect the field from ab-
sorption into cultural studies or annihilation owing to
the rising hegemony of naturalism and cognitive sci-
ence. If we are concerned with human affairs, we better
have an idea of what “human” in the expression “hu-
man affairs” might refer to. It is perhaps not surprising
that the 2017 Annual Debate of Anthropological Key-
words (ADAK) at the American Anthropology Associ-
ation—organized by HAU, the American Ethnological
Society, and L’Homme—had “Humanism” as its key-
word (cf. Mahmood, this issue). At the 2017 meeting,
the invited speakers noted the Eurocentric bias of hu-
manism’s history and the colonial violence perpetrated
in its name, voicing uneasiness about embracing any ver-
sion of human exceptionalism. And yet multiple speak-
ers also expressed reluctance to throw the baby out with
the bathwater and relinquish the conceptual project of
humanism altogether. This special section could be read
as one approach to saving the baby.
To be sure, the anti- and posthumanist movements
have proven to be important interventions. In their dif-
ferent versions and voices they have provided pivotal
correctives to the pathologies of traditional humanism
(Haraway 2007; Morton 2013; Kohn 2014; Latour 2015;
Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 2016). They have taught
us to be careful with ontological distinctions (i.e., hu-
man vs. nonhuman, person vs. things, prehistoric vs. his-
toric, literate vs. illiterate, premodern vs. modern, etc.),
TOWARD A NEW HUMANISM
which developed into political or economic strategies with
lethal consequences for those on the other side of the de-
marcation line (Tsing et al. 2017). But in doing so, they
nonetheless also taught us something about the human
being in its intrinsic entanglement (Miller 2005). Claim-
ing that humans are hybrid creatures in the metabolism
of biocultural material worlds is (also) making a claim
about humans. This introduction—and this special sec-
tion as a whole—tries to make a case for the project of
philosophical anthropology and the idea of a new hu-
manism, keeping the human at the forefront of attention,
even while attending to the aforementioned important
critiques.
In the sections that follow, we take up these points in
more detail. While acknowledging the worth of post-
humanist critiques, we contest the conclusion they often
draw, namely that one should leave the human behind.
Instead, we offer an opposite position, arguing that these
discourses (contrary to some of their own claims) actually
teach us more about what it means to be human and can
contribute to a new humanism. The motivation to address
and to revisit the human as such does not stem from some
Western intellectual nostalgia, but responds to the polit-
ical, ethical, and ontological needs of our time. We cannot
afford to do away with the category of the human in the
social sciences in general and anthropology in particular.
Turning the tables: A proposal
for a new humanism
We approach this discourse on humanism as a philos-
opher and an anthropologist, making the case that these
two disciplines—in collaboration—are uniquely poised
to develop a humanism that avoids the pitfalls of its ear-
lier incarnations. The discourse on humanism is not per
se a dead end if it removes its metaphysical waste and
accommodates the legitimate criticism of its opponents.
By absorbing and learning from its many critiques, one
might dare to think of a new humanism. By this expres-
sion we refer to the model of an ethnographically based
philosophical anthropology, which keeps in mind its ref-
erence to humankind while acknowledging the indeter-
minacy or inherent transcendence of human life in its
sociocultural and ecological situatedness as revealed em-
pirically through ethnography. We believe that there are
ontological, epistemological, ethical, and political rea-
sons to pursue the idea of a timely humanism, without
which the social sciences and the humanities are at risk
of losing orientations to their own domains as well as
 Thomas Schwarz WENTZER and Cheryl MATTINGLY
their ethical or political bearings. Such a humanism high-
lights the ambition to approach the human through its
complex and multifocal variations. It takes its point of
departure in real people living real and messy lives in
their sociocultural and natural ecologies.
Humanism, as we propose it, is not committed to
religious or metaphysical claims concerning human
essence or human superiority. It does not appeal to a
secular antireligious cultural movement, nor to a devel-
opmental stage in (Western-dominated) human civili-
zation. Rather, our proposal marks a commitment to
deal with “the human” as a common and indispensable
denominator for the ontological and ethical domains of
anthropology and adjacent disciplines. It allows us to
address humans as humans, and to explore whether
there is something like a human condition, without pre-
supposing qualities or features that have proven to be
either unwarranted or questionable.
The posthuman age as the human age
From the position of contemporary scientific thought,
it is true: human life has maneuvered itself into a posi-
tion which requires a repositioning of what we—the
members of this species—had previously taken to be
the matrix of any understanding of human life and life
in general on this planet. Humans are no longer consid-
ered to be just an invasive species apt to adjust extremely
successfully to evolutionary pressure within a system of
certain given conditions. Humans have themselves be-
come the determinative force that affects these very con-
ditions. Humans have intervened in natural history on a
scale that is incomparable to any earlier historical mo-
ment, undermining the distinction between earth history
and world history (Serres 1995; Chakrabarty 2009). Our
time, then, is the Anthropocene, an epoch declared the
aeon of the human; climatologists and geologists have
said so (Steffen et al. 2011; Zalasiewicz 2013).
Whether or not the scientific community ultimately
will adopt the claim concerning the Anthropocene is
not only a question with bearings on climatological,
ecological, or geological debates. It challenges the way
“we,” the members of the species acclaimed in the An-
thropocene, conceive of ourselves. One might wonder
whether “we” have begun to grasp the range of this claim
in its ontological as well as ethical implications (Raffnsøe
2015; Williston 2015; Frost 2016; Danowski and Viveiros
de Castro 2016; Connolly 2017; Morton 2017; Zigon
2018). Do we possess a suitable vocabulary that could
provide the means even to ask the right questions here?
They say that it’s “our” age; “we” are in charge. But does
146
the geological and biopolitical identification of a species
that is depicted as the decisive factor of the planet’s eco-
system refer to the same set of entities that we living hu-
mans are acknowledging as being “us”? Hence to what
entity does the phrase “the human” age refer to? Whose
age? What is “the human”?
Similar questions show up in another conversation
among the advocates of “transhumanism” or “human-
ity1” which declares that we are entering into a new stage
of human self-understanding (Humanity1 2009; More
and Vita-More 2013; Fuller and Lipinska 2014). Human-
ity as we know it can be overcome; according to the most
outspoken contributions, it actually has to be overcome
(Sandberg 2013). From this perspective, the human being
is taken to transcend itself in the most literal sense of the
word. In its scientific and technological capacities, it opti-
mizes itself in its own overcoming toward a new, a truly
posthuman species. But again, what was this species that
is said to be overcome? What is the “human” in trans-
or posthumanism that these trends try to save us from?1
What are the criteria according to which a transhuman
condition would be more desirable or preferable than a
human one? And what does it mean to think of the hu-
man life form as an intermediary state, a state of in-
between? As Roden (2015: 6) has put it, even if one refrains
from endorsing something like human essence, talking se-
riously about trans- or posthumanism nonetheless pre-
supposes some “matter of fact about being human in
the first place. But what kind of fact is it? . . . Any philo-
sophical theory of posthumanism owes us an account of
what it means to be human such that it is conceivable that
there could be nonhuman successors to the human.”
1. We are aware of the risk of taking the different and hetero-
geneous approaches of “transhumanism” and “posthuman-
ism” as representing familiar positions. One way to distin-
guish conceptually—albeit contestable as well—might be
to suggest that “posthumanism” typically is arguing against
traditional humanism, objecting to any effort of claiming
humans to be exceptional or of higher value compared to
other—organic or hybrid—life forms. “Transhumanism”
is arguing in favor of a technologically improved “human-
ity.” All things being equal, “transhumanism” is concerned
to improve the future of the human species (or its techno-
evolutionary successors); “posthumanism” is concerned
to correct our anthropocentric worldviews and their un-
timely expressions (conceptual clarification is provided
by, among others, Braidotti 2011; Ferrando 2013; Her-
brechter 2013; for a different way to distinguish, see Roden
2015).
147
The challenges posed by these posthumanisms un-
derscore two things. One, the question of the human
cannot be left behind, no matter what posthumanist
proponents claim. Two, in light of the complex ethical
questions raised by the human influence on our own
species and, beyond that, on our entire planet, we find
ourselves in a situation that demands reopening the
question of the human. Entering into a discourse on
humanism from this direction is notably not triggered
by some obsolete religious or metaphysical scheme in
the tradition of tired old Western humanism. Rather,
our strong suggestion is that the current posthuman
epoch demands attention to the sociocultural realities
that cannot be left behind in contemplating what it
means to be human.
The question of the human in anthropology’s
ontological and ethical turns
We have argued that even those contemporary discourses
most dedicated to ridding themselves of the human as an
ontological category are in a paradoxical position. They
actually not only continue to show themselves depen-
dent upon this category but also offer avenues for revi-
talizing it through their very reframing of traditional or
metaphysical formulations. This also holds true for dis-
courses that have developed within anthropology. Two
are particularly notable for renewing the question of the
human: the ontological turn and the ethical turn. We
briefly consider how each of these turns accomplishes
this in generative ways.
For the sake of this introduction, let us roughly de-
pict the ontologists as maintaining there is something
fundamentally flawed about mainstream anthropolog-
ical epistemologies: one has to face and explore the on-
tological implications of human as well as nonhuman
diversity. (For an informed overview, see Palacek and Ris-
jord 2013; Kohn 2015; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017.) It
is the ontological other that anthropological theory has
to deal with in an adequate way. The concern to do so
is not primarily based on an abstract (and still human-
centered) ethical appeal to our responsibilities toward for-
eign cultures, be they human or nonhuman (Holbraad,
Pedersen, and Viveiros de Castro 2014). It is a concern
to recharacterize what one can take to be a multiworlded
reality or, in an alternative phrasing, a multiplicity of
worlds, taking alterity or otherness “seriously.”
Of course, anthropology has always been dealing
with alterity in the manifold of human life forms, ex-
TOWARD A NEW HUMANISM
ploring divinities and ghosts, sites and places, tools
and weapons, pets and beasts. But this alterity is usually
framed within the paradigm of culture (however fraught
that concept has become) and the corresponding idea of
(using the phrasing of Viveiros de Castro 2015) “multi-
culturalism.” The ontological underpinnings of this par-
adigm rely on the assumption of one nature, which al-
lows and supports for a multitude of cultural worlds or
worldviews. Ontological anthropology is concerned to
undermine this picture, giving an ontological status to
the other as such including exploring “multinaturalism”
(Viveiros de Castro 2015). As a result, personhood is
no longer linked to humans alone, but is a feature of
nonhuman natures as well. Akin to what is called “spec-
ulative realism” or “object-oriented ontology (OOO)”
in recent philosophy (Meillassoux 2008; Harman 2010,
2011), the ontological turn seeks to leave the human-
centric perspective behind (Morton 2017). Its protago-
nists advocate a “flat ontology” (Bryant 2011) that refuses
“representationalism” in its idealist or Kantian as well as
in its empiricist version. They turn to a Nietzschean or
Deleuzian dynamic perspectivism, methodologically in-
voked by a comparison of mutually reversed perspec-
tives. In the words of Holbraad et al. (2014): “The anthro-
pology of ontology is anthropology as ontology; not the
comparison of ontologies, but comparison as ontology.”
The fascinating movement referred to as “the onto-
logical turn” questions the demarcation line between an-
thropology and philosophy in a slightly different way and
with different ambitions than the project of philosophical
anthropology. (For some critical comments concerning
this ontological turn, see Vigh and Sausdal 2014; Ingold
2015: 120ff.; Pina-Cabral 2017: 45f.) A significant feature
of the “ontological turn” in anthropology is that it shifts
the traditional paradigm of sociocultural analysis and the
concept of culture toward ontology (and into the tradi-
tional domain of philosophy). What is at stake in this turn
is rethinking our very concepts of the world or world-
liness with an ontology that avoids the predominant par-
adigm of Western modern philosophy (be it in its ra-
tionalist, structuralist, idealist, positivist, materialist, or
whatever fashion).
For purposes of clarification, let us profile our position
vis-à-vis the ontological turn by recalling a sentence of
Tim Ingold’s, which has gained some fame lately. “An-
thropology is philosophy with people in it,” Ingold stated
(1992: 696), providing an ironic affirmation—but an af-
firmation nonetheless—of ethnographic engagement
with people, that is, with humans. Martin Holbraad’s—
by now likewise famous—rejoinder exhibits the differ-
 Thomas Schwarz WENTZER and Cheryl MATTINGLY
ence in kind between the project of philosophical an-
thropology, as Ingold proposes it and as we advocate
here, and the project of ontological anthropology. Hol-
braad states: “What is at stake are the ideas, not the peo-
ple who might ‘hold’ them. So if, as the original organizer
[Tim Ingold] of these debates notoriously said, anthro-
pology is philosophy with people in it, I’d say he is right,
but only without the people” (Holbraad in Carrithers
2010: 185). While we recognize the rhetorical flourish
in this exchange, these contrasting statements signal an
important difference. Whereas Ingold acknowledges an
intrinsic correspondence between the two disciplines,
claiming the superiority of anthropology over philoso-
phy because of its commitment to its domain—namely
human beings—Holbraad ultimately seems to resolve
anthropology into philosophy. For Holbraad, the issue
for anthropology is the radical exploration of “alterity”
and the process of its “conceptualization,” in virtue of
which the anthropologist-philosopher adjusts her onto-
logical assumptions about the way she approaches some-
thing or is approached by something (Holbraad in Carri-
thers 2010: 180; see also Holbraad and Pedersen 2017:
9ff.). Holbraad’s description sounds very like the usual
business of philosophers, the exploration of ideas and
concepts through assessments of their inferential rela-
tions as well as their ontological assumptions. Without
the commitment to actual human life that has character-
ized anthropology, the difference between the anthropo-
logical and the philosophical endeavor becomes difficult
to see. By contrast, we think we should keep the people
in; philosophical anthropology as we approach it re-
mains obliged to approach human life in its sociobiolog-
ical entanglements. (We further elaborate our version of
philosophical anthropology in a subsequent section.)
No matter where one lands in this debate, the primary
point we are making here is that even a posthuman on-
tology does not free itself from consideration of the hu-
man. In fact, one could argue that it actually highlights
the need to revisit a concept of the human in light of
the ontological possibility to conceive of nonhuman agency
and nonhuman agents. One might wonder: Where do
we extract our conception of “agency” (in nonhuman
agency) from, if not from some conception of human
agency? Even setting this problem aside, how does the
ontological reformulation of worldliness influence our
conception of the human? What does such a claim imply
for the human condition? The ontological turn does not
leave these questions behind but rather raises them
anew.
148
Something similar could be said for proponents of the
“ethical turn” in anthropology, although they begin from a
different starting point and different concerns about hu-
manism. While within the ethical turn (well represented
by the articles in this collection) something like “humans”
and even “the human” are still crucial protagonists, schol-
ars have often tried to distance themselves from any sort
of humanism (Mahmood 2005; Faubion 2011; Laidlaw
2013; Zigon 2018). There has been an enormous outpour-
ing of recent work in this area, including a number of
special issues, commentaries, and books that review, dis-
cuss, and debate various positions taken within it (e.g.,
Fassin 2014; Keane 2015; Lambek 2015; Lambek et al.
2015; Mattingly et al. 2018). We cannot do justice to this
ethical turn in any nuanced way but simply point to a few
of its notable features that have most relevance for our
argument. In large part, the ethical turn has been precip-
itated by dissatisfaction with what one may call social or
structural reductionism. The various protagonists are con-
cerned to give an account of situated human (inter)sub-
jectivity that is able to let us understand agency as more
than just the reproduction of social norms and behavior
or the exhibition of social structures in its Durkheimian
fashion (Dyring, this collection).
While anthropologists have always been attentive to
the moral life of societies, the recent ethical turn is nota-
ble for its insistent problematization of “morality” and
“ethics” (and related terminologies) as constructs. Many
voices can be credited for triggering this line of question-
ing, but it is perhaps true that Laidlaw’s (2002) program-
matic intervention has been especially decisive in spark-
ing a debate about how to conceive socially embedded,
ethical subjectivity in a way that allows us to conceptual-
ize human agency in the domain of ethics—however dif-
ferently the ethical or the moral might be approached by
the various contributors. Concepts like “value” (Robbins
2016), “virtue” (Lambek 2010; Mattingly 2012, 2014),
“ethical judgment” (Lambek 2015), “existential impera-
tives” (Jackson 2005, 2013), “moods” (Throop 2010),
the “themical” (Faubion 2011), and “freedom” (Laidlaw
2002, 2013) are brought to bear to pinpoint the ethical
dimension in the behavior of ordinary people in their ev-
eryday living (Das 2007), in claiming either the ethical
autarky of the everyday or the transcendence of the eth-
ical within the everyday (Zigon 2007).
Despite all their differences, the aforementioned au-
thors either tacitly or explicitly hold that we have to con-
ceive of humans as ethical beings. (This is explicitly
claimed by Faubion 2011; Laidlaw 2013; Keane 2015;
149
Lambek 2015.) This assertion that humans are ethical be-
ings of course does not mean that all humans act in ways
that support their version of the moral good. It only
means that all humans act in the space of ethical claims
to which they must respond, often through deliberation
and judgment. Ethical claims may take many shapes—
values, virtues, moral norms, emotions or affordances,
imperatives, criteria, etc.—and are variable across and
within societies. Nonetheless, for these scholars, the eth-
ical domain marks a fundamental feature of the human,
a feature irreducible to the mere reproduction of social
norms and habits as well as resistant to discourses of uni-
versal moral laws or ethical theories. But what does it
mean to think of humans as ethical beings? What does
this claim imply for the human condition? Here again,
these questions are raised anew.
Resettling humanism: A border conversation
between anthropology and philosophy
Arendt’s Human condition offers what might be taken
as a basic agreement among anthropologists. Instead of
discovering or articulating an “essence” or “nature,”
there is a fundamental recognition of pluralism: “Not
Man but men inhabit this planet. Plurality is the law
of the earth,” Arendt states (1958: 7). Keeping the post-
humanist intervention in mind, this law has to be ex-
panded to nonhumans as well, urging us to facilitate
hermeneutical enterprises of border conversations. This
is the spirit of Tim Ingold’s recently acclaimed position
(discussed above and repeated in his article in this col-
lection): “We anthropologists, I contend, can do philos-
ophy better, by virtue of bringing into the conversation
the voices, the experience, and the wisdom of countless
human beings—not to mention legions of nonhumans—
which would otherwise be excluded. To do this kind
of philosophy is, in effect, to make a conversation of life
itself” (158). We could read Ingold’s statement as a plea
for a philosophical anthropology in the spirit of cross-
cultural and multinatural conversation. The approach
to a new humanism we propose in this special section
has implications for how we understand both philoso-
phy and anthropology as a border conversation. It en-
tertains anthropology philosophically, that is, without
forfeiting the preoccupation with the human being or
the universal perspective of the discipline. It speaks to
this conviction: anthropology and the theoretical hu-
manities, especially philosophy, must not refrain from
TOWARD A NEW HUMANISM
addressing the human within the discourse of a new hu-
manism. Let’s explore the possibilities of philosophical
anthropology based on a programmatic collaboration
between two disciplines that are both challenged as well
as summoned by the aforementioned theoretical trends
and tendencies that have rejected humanism. We see the
possibility for a register of philosophical anthropology
that takes its point of departure from ethnography.
Recently, some major trends within anthropology sug-
gest an entry into philosophical anthropology from the
anthropological side. As we have seen, the anthropology
of ontology and the anthropology of ethics are engaging
what have traditionally been core disciplines within phi-
losophy. There has, of course, been a long tradition of en-
gagement with philosophy, but recent work signals a new
promise of fertile intersections (most recently, see Giri
and Clammer 2013; Das et al. 2014; Liisberg, Pedersen,
and Dalsgård 2015; Cahill, Gustafson, and Wentzer
2017). It is not surprising that a number of anthropol-
ogists contributing to these trends have described their
work as a type of “philosophical anthropology.” This
self-description demonstrates the rise of a particularly
robust and promising philosophical turn within the dis-
cipline, a new rapprochement (Mattingly 2018). It is as
if anthropology has now become philosophical itself, an
empirical philosophy of being-in-the-world. As these re-
cent works underscore, there are obviously many ave-
nues for approaching the idea of a new humanism via
a discourse of philosophical anthropology. The one sug-
gested in this special section is in large measure inspired
by the phenomenological tradition. But our orientation
is not meant to exclude other traditions within Western
philosophy or those from other world regions that
could be integrated or consulted.
In order to situate our ambition to further a border
conversation between the two disciplines, it might be
helpful to recall a philosophical entry point. This is the
vibrant tradition of “philosophical anthropology” in Ger-
many which emerged simultaneously with Boas’ and Ma-
linowski’s groundbreaking works in the first quarter of
the twentieth century.2 Apart from some rare exceptions,
2. “Philosophische Anthropologie” is usually connected to the
names of (among others) Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner,
Adolf Portmann, Arnold Gehlen, Michael Landmann; for
the sake of this introduction, one might also include Ernst
Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Hans
Blumenberg. (For an overview, see Solies 2010; Wulf 2013;
Wentzer 2018.)
 Thomas Schwarz WENTZER and Cheryl MATTINGLY
this tradition had little engagement with or impact on so-
cial and cultural anthropology. However, it introduced
an orientation that provides inspiration for the kind of
philosophical anthropology we suggest here. Most nota-
ble was the shared conviction that a philosophical dis-
course about the human must not result in just another
a priori, teleological or old-humanist definition. It should
not yield another variant of the animal rationale para-
digm that had been so dominant in Western thinking.
Any such effort had already been proven to fail (with re-
gard to its epistemic value or ethical implications or
both) because of the patently irreducible manifold of hu-
man life forms, the dynamicity and wealth of cultures
and societies in history.
The antimetaphysical impulse of cultural relativism
and the corresponding debates in twentieth-century an-
thropology support this assessment. But does this imply
giving up on questioning the human in a universal way?
Couldn’t there be a path that kept open the question of
human nature while acknowledging the manifold of hu-
man and nonhuman existence? It might be true that the
human being transcends or exceeds any effort of its
conceptual determination.3 But precisely this circum-
stance is a legitimate point of departure for philosoph-
ical anthropological questioning, the representatives of
philosophical anthropology argued. Their idea was that
we might address the human in a way that accounts for
its essential indeterminacy. There is something about
the way humans are that means they inevitably tran-
scend or exceed their essence.
Taking both anthropological and philosophical re-
sources into consideration, how might a truly interdis-
ciplinary philosophical anthropology reshape the di-
vides that so often characterize the disciplines of both
anthropology and philosophy? We offer one—admit-
tedly simplifying—answer, starting with a formulaic
depiction of disciplinary differences. All things being
equal, philosophical arguments and discourses are typ-
ically engaged in the business of conceptual clarifica-
tions. The “What-is-x?” question—historically exem-
plified in the figure of Socrates—displays the usual
focus of philosophical interest. A philosophical discourse
about human beings would then be guided by the ques-
tion “What is the human being?” or “What is human na-
ture?” Traditional Western humanism came up with an-
3. “Precisely the indefinability belongs to the essence of
man. . . . A definable human being would not have any
significance” (Scheler 1955: 186).
150
swers that referred to some substance or essence, which
proved to be based on dubious metaphysical, religious, or
political presuppositions. All things being equal, ethno-
graphic studies, by contrast, provide answers to ques-
tions concerning the “how” of particular humans living
their lives. How is it to be a human, among other beings,
and with other humans, in distinctive sociohistorical
contexts?
However, the very project proposed here and envis-
aged as “philosophical anthropology” undermines the
distinction between the “what” and the “how.” It urges
us to think of the human not as a pregiven reference or
fixed category, but as a life form in movement, character-
ized exactly by its being-in-movement. In this vein, we
should think of the universal category envisaged as
“the human” in a way that accommodates the dynamic-
ity and the indeterminacy of its reference. While not re-
linquishing the universal question, it becomes necessary
to refine our ontological vocabulary to support the idea
that the “how” is the “what.” Our plea for a “new human-
ism” acknowledges an obligation to address human life
along these lines, as a plural form of life in the manifold
of its potentiality. Seen in this light, the recent engage-
ment with philosophy in anthropology’s ontological
and ethical turns offers contributions to a philosophical
anthropology of the human that begins with ethnogra-
phy.
In making this general claim, we recognize that there
are, of course, many forms of ethnography. Even the
small sample of anthropological contributions to this
special section illustrates an impressive range of styles.
It would be a daunting task to summarize the variety
that constitutes contemporary anthropological repre-
sentations, field sites, or methodological approaches.
It would be even more hazardous to offer any single
overarching definition. Such tasks are well beyond the
scope of this introduction. For our purposes, we can
simply note a few enduring characteristics of ethnogra-
phy that are important for our argument. One, already
underscored, is that for the most part, humans, in all
their manifold modes of sociality and materiality, con-
tinue to be centrally featured. Two, most anthropolo-
gists persist in embracing an empirical commitment
to long-term immersion in selective social communi-
ties. It is certainty true that this engagement, and the texts
that emerge from it, no longer neatly fit Geertz’s (1973)
version of “thick description,” with its holistic assump-
tions of relatively bounded local worlds. Instead, anthro-
pologists are more likely to situate communities within
151
global networks and histories. However, fieldwork, by
and large, continues to involve cultivating relationships
with particular people in particular places over sustained
periods of time. Ethnographic texts are expected to show
evidence of this sort of in-depth field engagement. Three,
emic (human) understandings of life in those places, in-
cluding indigenous concepts, concerns, and commit-
ments, still matter and play a central analytic role. In
virtue of its classic subject matter and especially its eth-
nographic tradition, anthropology can claim a unique
position for proposing a new kind of humanism.
The puzzle of the human:
Themes of the special section
Each of the contributing essays, written by either an an-
thropologist or a philosopher, could be said to provide
preliminary answers to the question: What is the hu-
man being? Or, put differently: What is the human con-
dition? Taken as a whole, this collection indicates hori-
zons of thought rather than definitive conclusions. While
the contributions are heterogeneous, all authors insist
upon a border conversation created between anthropol-
ogy and philosophy (see also Dyring, Mattingly, and Louw
2018). Many anthropological contributors have found it
important to justify what anthropology contributes to
“big questions” about the human. What does this disci-
pline’s penchant for situated particularity offer? What
kind of questioning about the human is available through
deeply embedded excursions into the divergent practices,
experiences, and beliefs of local communities or histori-
cally specific global conditions? What is gained by in-
troducing interlocutors who and lifeworlds that differ
radically from the “home” world of the anthropological
investigator, especially when interlocutors introduce a
different heritage than the legacy of Western thought
and philosophy (Jackson, Throop, Ingold, this collec-
tion)?
Addressing this question of the human from two
different disciplines immediately raises a matter of
method, or orientation—a style of asking and answer-
ing that has to be noted. As to be expected, a number of
contributing anthropologists develop their “answers”
through an inspection of ethnographic fieldwork they
have done. Every anthropologist makes the case for the
importance of fieldwork in addressing the question of
the human. Michael Jackson, for example, insists upon
the centrality of ethnographic engagement as a necessary
TOWARD A NEW HUMANISM
precondition for a philosophical anthropology. Ingold
puts this in the boldest terms, by declaring not only that
anthropology is already philosophical (see above), but
also that it provides a way of doing philosophy that is su-
perior to those of philosophers themselves. It might seem
as though anthropologists like Jackson and Ingold are
drawing familiar lines in the sand by defending anthro-
pology’s particularities against philosophy’s abstractions.
But, in fact, they are sketching—as others do—what they
take to be the kind of liminal or paradoxical space re-
quired to think about the human with the particular
and the universal, the one and the many.
Three notable border-crossing features emerge in
this collection. First, several of the anthropologists, even
while extolling the virtues of fieldwork, make extended
theoretical arguments in a manner more frequently as-
sociated with philosophy, drawing sparsely, if at all,
upon any ethnographic “data.” The few ethnographic
examples they provide are not intended to provide empir-
ical findings so much as illustrate or gesture to forms of
thought. By contrast, a philosopher (Wentzer) offers
one of the more extended concrete examples based
upon his research of his family history. In introducing
his case, he adopts a strategy familiar to anthropology
by developing his theoretical argument in tandem with
a close analysis and interpretation of his empirical ma-
terial.
To be sure, it is not difficult to find anthropologists
who develop their positions without recourse to detailed
ethnographic analyses, especially in essay form. (For re-
cent book-length examples, see Das et al. 2014; Lambek
et al. 2015.) On the philosophy side, one can also find
philosophers who develop their arguments through close
analysis of a concrete cultural or historical case. (A well-
known recent example is Lear 2006.) But this depar-
ture from a stereotypical disciplinary divide becomes
more striking when combined with a second discipline-
traversing feature of the essays. In situating their claims,
all the anthropologists draw upon philosophy and phi-
losophers draw on anthropology. Again, this, in itself,
is not unique. But there are also rarer levels of engage-
ment. Some anthropologists provide close readings of
philosophical works or entire traditions (Throop, this
collection). The philosophers offer close readings of an-
thropological and sociological (as well as philosophical)
works and traditions (Dyring, this collection). This cross-
reading is put to use by both anthropologists and philos-
ophers to suggest parallels between intellectual positions
that can be traced across both disciplinary histories. Such
 Thomas Schwarz WENTZER and Cheryl MATTINGLY
efforts mark a further development as compared to other
recent collaborations between anthropologists and phi-
losophers.
A third cross-over strategy involves drawing parallels
and contrasts between local emic concepts and scholarly
philosophical ones. Notably, when calling upon emic
concepts, the very concept of concept itself shifts, as these
contributors illustrate.4 Emic concepts may be expressed
via explicit terminologies, but often they surface indirectly
through practices and cultivated forms of experience.
What is especially notable about this third disciplinary
spanning strategy is that it does not involve a static com-
parison of concepts across lay/scholarly lines or West-
ern/non-Western ones (which is, after all, quite familiar).
Rather, contributors taking this approach opt for a more
dialogical and open-ended process of concept develop-
ment precisely by tacking back and forth among multi-
ple discourses to deepen understanding.
One thread that runs through the entire collection is
an existential or phenomenological orientation. This is
revealed most strikingly when one looks at two dilemmas
or lacunas authors seek to address: the challenge of the
contested universal and the place of possibility (or poten-
tiality) in the “actual.” These are elaborated below.
The contested universal (or the problem
of the one and the many)
Answering questions like “What is the human?” or
“What is the human condition?” seems to demand an-
swers grounded in appeals to universals. Indeed, this is
a significant issue, even a problem, that authors feel re-
quired to address. It is voiced in several ways. Some de-
scribe it as an enigma of how to speak of the one and
the many. This “one and many” difficulty is articulated
variously. There is the question of human diversity and
plurality (anthropology’s stock in trade) and the possi-
bility of making universal claims (philosophy’s tradi-
tional approach). One might call this the cultural ver-
sion of the problem. When authors address this, they
are more focused on how to think about both cultural
plurality and the unity of human life (Ingold, Jackson).
But some also raise the question of the ontological sta-
tus of the embodied, particular experience or particular
human life. They ask: How can singular experiences, in
4. This is a crucial task, which deserves further develop-
ment. Notably, Das (in Lambek et al. 2015), inspired es-
pecially by Wittgenstein, offers a very interesting discus-
sion of how to rethink the concept of concepts.
152
all their singularity, speak to universals about human
existence (Throop, Mattingly, Jackson)?
Unsurprisingly, a starting assumption for all contrib-
utors concerned to articulate a new humanism is a re-
jection of traditional philosophy’s essentialist manner
of addressing the question of the human. This is also,
of course, common fare for anthropologists, who have
routinely challenged metaphysical humanism. Critiques
that contributors raise often resonate with familiar and
longstanding anthropological positions. But they also
do more. Authors not only presume that the plurality
of human societies demands a revision of these princi-
ples, they also reject a cultural pluralism (or radical on-
tology) that, as discussed earlier, claims to render the
question of the human obsolete. Instead, they propose
a variety of alternative considerations about what might
hold universally. This further step entails rethinking the
concept of the universal itself. While this rethinking has
its own history, especially within philosophy (as the works
of, among others, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Derrida at-
test; see Caputo 2000), engaging the question of the uni-
versal in close contact with the specificities of ethno-
graphic fieldwork prompts further reformulations and
suggestions. That is, engagement with anthropology’s
thick descriptions of particulars, both cultural and (some-
times) singular first-person experiences, prompts contrib-
utors to also rethink and try to define or gesture toward
what a postmetaphysical universalism might look like.
Jackson’s claim, for example, is that the human is that
sort of being who is at once singular but not individual—
a “singular universal” who is enmeshed in and character-
ized by living a pluralistic existence, being one among
many. The answer to the question is a paradox—humans
are both singular and members of a species. Jackson
brings two insights to bear on this paradox. One is
Sartre’s view that individuals are better thought of as
“singular universals” because, as Sartre puts it, “A man
is never an individual.” Another is “Arendt’s paradox
of plurality (all human beings are at once unique and
members of a single species)” (185).
Ingold tells us that we are the kind of being faced
with the enigmatic and unanswerable question “What
is life?” to which we must respond. Although Ingold in-
cludes nonhumans in his one world, one can still sense
here a focus on how humans experience and live with, or
alongside, others—including nonhuman others—and
what this means for them. For Ingold, “the universal
and the particular could well turn out to be the cen-
tral problem of a truly philosophical anthropology”
153
(159). Ingold locates his way of meditating on the sin-
gular and universal, on the plural and the one (world), in
critical conversation with anthropology, in particular its
apparent allergy to the whole notion of “singularity” as a
coinhabiting of one world. One might say that Ingold’s
quarrel with the anthropological ontologists is that they
are not radical or skeptical enough. In speaking of multi-
ple ontologies, they seem to ultimately embrace positions
that they are trying to step back from, such as cultural rel-
ativism.
Excessiveness and potentiality
Another key consideration of this collection is the ex-
cessiveness of experience (Mattingly 2017, 2018; Dyring,
Mattingly, and Louw 2018). The particular of an event
or a life necessarily exceeds any third-person category
into which it might be placed. This excessiveness bears di-
rectly on a portrait of the human characterized by poten-
tiality or possibility rather than actuality (Wentzer, this
collection). A related claim is that no phenomenon is
“actual” in the manner of a fact, or pure immanence,
but rather evinces qualities that transcend its status as
mere object, or member of a type. Authors ask how
to consider human plurality and the alterity of other
“worlds” in ways that do not reduce lives and worlds
to third-person categories or subsume others’ logic into
our own. Throop, for example, relies on Merleau-Ponty
to articulate this delicate mode of understanding that
does not “reduce . . . the other to the categories that
we deploy in our efforts to understand them” (200).
Throop draws upon this formulation to provide a con-
trasting point of view to some of the current work in
anthropology’s ontological turn. In striking contrast to
efforts to “decolonize” thought, Merleau-Ponty views
such openness as predicated upon efforts to understand
another “without sacrificing him to our logic or it to him”
(1964: 115).
Mattingly explores ethical potentiality as an ontolog-
ical feature of human life as it is lived concretely, in small
moments of everyday life. She engages Waldenfels’ re-
sponsive phenomenology of the alien to “expos[e] the
way that ethical transcendence resides in the midst of
ordinary life” (173). In doing so, she issues a friendly
provocation to philosophy. Drawing upon a few scenes
of family life in an African American community, she
works to show how ethnographic particulars can chal-
lenge philosophical formalisms in analytically produc-
tive ways. She illustrates this by amending Waldenfels’
proposal for a responsive phenomenology in light of
TOWARD A NEW HUMANISM
her ethnographic material. She contends that even ap-
parently trivial ethnographic moments, put in conversa-
tion with philosophy, can yield conceptual insights about
human potentiality and the transcendent dimensions of
ethical life that philosophy, on its own, cannot deliver.
Dyring, as a philosopher, engages directly with an-
thropological texts in considering human potentiality.
He recalls the problem of freedom in the anthropology
of ethics, urging scholars to explore in more detail the
intrinsic link between ethical life and a concept of free-
dom. In his deconstruction of Durkheim, Kant, and
Foucault—the background figures of Laidlaw’s (2002)
notable proposal—Dyring considers some internal apo-
rias inherent in these positions. He argues that rather
than treating human freedom as an unexamined axi-
omatic necessity, one might take up a notion of “existen-
tial transcendence” based in “human finitude” as a way
to think about freedom.
In Wentzer’s article, possibility gains ontological sig-
nificance when we try to understand a particular per-
son’s ethical decisions. He interprets a historical epi-
sode of a mother in the turmoil shortly after World
War II, who is asked to forfeit her child to a stranger. Us-
ing Heidegger’s hermeneutics of Dasein and Waldenfels’
responsivist phenomenology as the conceptual frame for
his analysis, Wentzer suggests that we think of the hu-
man as a responsive being. This description, Wentzer
claims, captures the experience of an agent being ex-
posed to certain requests that exceed her capabilities
but that she nonetheless has to respond to. In this setting,
the analysis is focused not upon social norms, particular
moral values, or institutions, but on the experience of the
existential asymmetry between the requests of life im-
posed on a person and her available answers.
Conclusion
In rethinking the human, we try to open up a space be-
tween philosophy and anthropology, one that brings the
resources of ethnography-based philosophy to bear. We
are not merely suggesting a discipline-specific anthropo-
logical version of humanism, however. Rather, we are
making a bolder proposal: a border conversation between
anthropology and philosophy (of the sort we begin to
sketch here) offers a place to develop a “new humanism”
for the humanities and social sciences more broadly.
What does an anthropological commitment to field-
work yield? Anthropology brings more to the table
than its ability to introduce a wide range of perspectives
 Thomas Schwarz WENTZER and Cheryl MATTINGLY
on “what is a human” that emerge from ethnographic
work. (Though this is not small.) It also brings a range
of styles or types of response to the question, ones that
do not immediately look like answers at all. For the
kinds of answers that anthropologists might “discover”
from their field experiences with their interlocutors are
unlikely to emerge in the scholastic form of theoretical
abstractions (though of course they may). Instead, they
may show up as moods, dilemmas, dreams, choices, rit-
uals.
This anthropological insight has some philosophical
correspondence, as, for example, in Heidegger’s start-
ing point of a “hermeneutics of facticity.” Heidegger’s
notion of “facticity” alerts us to a feature of concrete ex-
istence that can be easily overlooked, the way that in
living, in acting and experiencing, we are already being
philosophical in the sense that we are already answer-
ing or responding to the question of “What is human?”
or “What makes us human?” (Wentzer 2017). In other
words, answers to these questions are not only or ini-
tially found in philosophical treatises or ethnographic
descriptions when they have somehow been correctly
categorized and methodologically reworked. Human
living is already providing those answers. This does
not mean living itself (or theoretical treatises that re-
work and categorize it) provides complete or final an-
swers to the question of the human. Humans respond
to the claims of life while living it. If there is an indeter-
minacy to human life, one might even say an insuffi-
ciency to meet the demands and burdens of human life,
then ethnography is particularly suited to reveal and
explicate it. From the point of view of Western philos-
ophy, recognizing this insufficiency stresses the Socratic,
existential undercurrent that modernism in all its flavors
too easily ignores.
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157 TOWARD A NEW HUMANISM

Thomas Schwarz WENTZER is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. He has
specialized in phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics. His recent publications include two coedited vol-
umes on philosophical anthropology: Finite but unbounded: New approaches in philosophical anthropology (De
Gruyter, 2017) and Moral engines: Exploring the ethical drives in human life (Berghahn Books, 2018).
Thomas Schwarz Wentzer
Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas, Aarhus University
Jens Christian Skous Vej 7, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark
filts@cas.au.dk

Cheryl MATTINGLY is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern California whose works include
Healing dramas and clinical plots: The narrative structure of experience (Cambridge University Press, 1998), The
paradox of hope: Journeys through a clinical borderland (University of California Press, 2010), and Moral laborato-
ries: Family peril and the struggle for a good life (University of California Press, 2014).
Cheryl Mattingly
Department of Anthropology, University of Southern California
Kaprielian Hall, 3620 S. Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA
mattingl@usc.ed