Anti-Anthropologism in Contemporary Western Philosophy

Abstract

 This research is relevant since it allows us to understand more deeply the specifics of contemporary European discourse about the human being, which is characterized by denaturalization and rejection of wholeness of a human subject, criticism of anthropocentrism and the tendency towards an ontological equation of the human being and material objects. The origins and causes of anti- anthropologism are associated with the crisis of European humanism and attempts to overcome this crisis through a different idea of a human being. Based on the analysis of the philosophical views of M. Heidegger, A. Kojeve, G. Bataille, L. Althusser, M. Foucault and some other thinkers, the author shows the main stages of the development of anti-anthropologism in European philosophy: anti-fundamentalism, anti-humanism, structuralist and theoretical anti-humanism, and ontological anthropology. One of the objectives of this paper is to perform a retrospective analysis of the discourse about the human being in the 20th and 21st centuries. The article considers anti-fundamentalism in the philosophy of M. Heidegger, who dissolves anthropology in ontology. The author demonstrates that in the structural anthropology of C. Lévi-Strauss the problem of unconscious processes paves the way for anti-anthropology. Attention is paid to the influence on philosophical anthropology of the philosophy of M. Foucault, whose interests lie not in the human subject, but in discourse structures. He replaces anthropology with epistemology. The article reveals the essence of the ontological turn in anthropology and discusses the key ideas of ontological anthropology and the concept of multinaturalism. It is emphasized that ontological anthropology not only raises ethical issues, but also aims to reformat our traditional understanding of the world and society. The author stresses the inadequacy of the anti-anthropological trends aimed at discovering a place of harmonious coexistence beyond humanity and postulating the idea of abandoning the traditional understanding of a human being. With the prospects of such a fundamental change, the question inevitably arises of a new axiological model of value orientations, which cannot be resolved without turning to the discourse about the human being.