Matthew Coate

Many critiques of humanism are motivated by concerns about the anthropocentric moral commitments that ostensibly follow from a humanist position. Scholars such as Cary Wolfe, in fact, go so far as to blame our worst abuses of nonhuman animals on humanism and argue that we cannot transform our treatment of other animals, including adopting vegetarianism on a wide scale, without a posthumanist transformation in our thinking. This view, however, can be contrasted with that of the posthumanist Dominique Lestel, who argues that when we reject the notion of human specificity we undercut all ethical support for vegetarianism. Given the apparent cogency of Lestel’s arguments, it simply appears inconsistent to adopt a posthumanist position while advocating for the adoption of a vegetarian or vegan diet. It is only apparently paradoxical to claim, as I will, that a humanist position, and not a posthumanist one, is instead consistent with this advocacy. To be specific, I will present an account of Emanual Levinas’s “humanism of the other,” which traces back the intentionality and self-consciousness of the human subject to the revelation of the other as such and the unconditional moral significance of this relation. Levinas’s phenomenological analyses constitute support for a kind of humanism, but one that in fact reverses the anthropocentric implications of traditional humanism; for if, as Levinas argues, the uniqueness of human subjectivity comes to pass precisely in our subjection to an unconditional responsibility that cannot by rights be halted by the limits of any identification, then our identification as a member of the human species cannot by rights halt its extension, implying that the human being qua subject is at its basis assailed by an obligation imposed by every other animal and not simply by every other human being, providing the at least potential justification for vegetarianism that posthumanism cannot.