Against relativism, humanism

The universal has a bad press these days, suspected as it is of being only the false nose of white domination as it was exercised under colonization and as it continues to claim to exercise itself on the rest of the world. Generally speaking, has the universal in its different variants – universality, universalism – not always consisted, under the pretext of defending human rights, in justifying the most horrible crimes such as those committed by Leopold IIKing of the Belgians, in the Congo, or to maintain the hegemony of the dominant classes over the subordinates?

Similarly, the idea of ​​a common humanity, which is at the foundation of the universal, is not in vogue today, while the specificities of each group are highlighted, specificities of color, race, religion, gender, class, etc. The “universal of overhang” as it was defended by Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) and which he brought to light in categories common to all cultures – the prohibition of incest and the opposition nature/culture – was undermined both by the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and by the disciples of the author of Sad TropicsPhilippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The nature/culture opposition would thus be specific to each culture and some of them would not operate this opposition, so that not only would multiculturalism have to replace universalism, but the former would also have to give way to a sort of multi-naturalism.

The contribution of philosophy to the defense of the universal

Francis Wolff, a renowned specialist in ancient philosophy, taught for many years at the École Normale Supérieure and other universities. His latest book, Plea for the universalis thus part of a burning debate that concerns both the hegemony of the West over the rest of the world, the supposed rights of nature and the domination of man over other species. Let us immediately specify the extremely valuable and courageous character of F. Wolff’s position which goes against the new doxa dominant, doxa which could be quickly defined as relativist, multiculturalist, ecological and post or decolonial. F. Wolff is not afraid to engage in this slippery terrain, while keeping himself away from the opposing movement, that is to say both republican and “secular” – to put it quickly, that of the “Republican Spring” – and productivist.

In the first part of the book, the clearly designated target is cultural relativism, so that the argument deployed concerns the anthropologist first and foremost. According to the author, there is a real cultural relativist aporia since the designation of the other – comparativism – immediately presupposes a universalist aim. To use his own words, cultural relativism presupposes three sophisms: moving from the cultural variability of values ​​to the variability of all cultures, moving from the absence of effectively common values ​​to the absence of universal values ​​and finally moving from the variety of social norms to moral variability (p. 61). Or again, there is a difference between moral norms (each person is himself only in the eyes of the other), which is the relativist position, and ethical norms according to which each person treats himself as another and treats others as himself (p. 71).

F. Wolff, as a good Aristotelian and a good Kantian, thus becomes, against the grain, the defender of a humanist and universalist ethic, which opposes both Martin Heidegger and Louis Althusser. In the same sense, there exists, according to him, a specificity of the human, a sort of humano-centrism which prohibits granting rights to nature, that is to say making certain sites subjects of law, which ends up disfavoring the human groups who live on these sites and can be driven out to allow the creation, for example, of natural parks.

This specificity of the human, or even this superiority, also extends to the domain of machines, and in particular robots that cannot compete with man in terms of reflexive consciousness or what he calls the “logos of dialogical reason” (p. 129). This superiority of the human logically applies to anti-antispeciesism, that is to say to the hostility to putting different genres—plant, animal, and human—on the same footing. His reflections do not concern the plant kingdom, within which some identify “guiding plants” or thinking trees, and they focus solely on the animal kingdom. This thinker of bullfighting is therefore unsurprisingly the advocate of establishing a radical difference between man and animal, contrary to the doxa current which emphasizes the absence of a solution of continuity between the two kingdoms. Indeed, human animals are not only living beings, but also conscious animals endowed with a language, a language whose power is indefinite unlike that of animals. Humans are thus capable of expressing themselves through negation and indignation. This withdrawal of consciousness into itself (this reflexivity) allows us to judge, conceptualize and think “I”. Man is therefore a being of truth and freedom, which no robot or animal will ever succeed in being.

This humanist and universalist ethic applies equally to the field of science, with regard to which F. Wolff deploys a position that some may doubtless find somewhat objectivist and positivist. Indeed, if the laws of physics apply in principle at all times, in all places and to all people, the decolonialists believe, for their part, that this postulate ignores the “feelings” of different populations, while the partisans of epistemological anarchism (Paul Feyerabend) or those of epistemic charity (Bruno Latour) affirm that the Azande witchcraft of Sudan-Khartoum is just as good as nuclear physics, and that therefore everything is equal (anything goes). Not to mention the defenders of indigenous mathematics, African or otherwise, that some oppose to Western science. To better convince his opponents, it seems to me that F. Wolff, instead of posing the absoluteness of Science with a capital S, would perhaps be better founded in postulating that (Western) science has fired from all cylinders, drawing inspiration from and relying on embryos of local mathematics, although it alone has been able to synthesize these different contributions and impose them on the rest of the world.

In the same sense, we could also compare this process to the phenomenon of “cultural appropriation”, considered here from an economic perspective, and which is expressed, for example, by the monopolization or patenting of indigenous Amazonian plants by certain laboratories, patenting which has the effect of dispossessing local populations of their therapeutic knowledge. In the same way, it seems to me that “Western philosophy” was built in XIX^e century by inventing a unilinear genealogy from the “Greek miracle” while appropriating certain philosophical outlines from other systems of thought. (Western) philosophy was thus able to become a registered trademark and claim the universal monopoly of its own approach. As a result, the debate between said Western philosophy and other philosophical claims (African, Amerindian, etc.) has become inextricable since these different knowledges have been confined to watertight spheres.

Philosophy and anthropology

While we can praise F. Wolff for having adopted, against the grain, an anti-relativist position and for having thus opposed an insular vision of cultures that would imprison individuals in a straitjacket (“not everything is culture in a culture”, p. 50), the fact remains that his reflection leaves the anthropologist hungry. Indeed, the philosopher’s posture is in some way self-referential. It is by returning to canonical texts, “constructive rumination”, to use an expression of Jack Goody, developed from the corpus of the history of philosophy that F. Wolff intends to found his universalist point of view. However, the enunciation of the great timeless philosophical principles, such as humanist and universalist ethics, to which one can only subscribe, has the effect of placing these principles, as Marx said, “in the sky of ideas” and therefore of evacuating their role as issues and markers in a given political framework. Let us take the example of human rights as they are instrumentalized, for example, in the political domain in Mali. We can a priori defend, according to the principle of the universality of human rights, the public expression of homosexuality, the fight against early marriages or that against excision and thus give reason to the Malian political class which officially defends this principle. Conversely, one can fight the Islamists who accuse homosexuality of having been introduced by the West, or defend cultural practices such as excision or early marriages in the name of the defense of “customs” which they consider for their part to be an integral part of Malian identity, but which the West judges, in the great colonial tradition, as being backward or “barbaric”.

By making a purely philosophical judgment on this debate, one could deduce that it primarily concerns a confrontation between the obscurity of tradition and the “Enlightenment” of modernity. The ruling class would be “enlightened” and the Islamists “obscurantist”. In reality, these practices and principles, which both sides throw in each other’s faces, are only markers allowing the two adversaries to define themselves and oppose each other in the political arena. The political class is no more convinced by human rights than the Islamists are by the obligation to maintain tradition. It is simply that the former, by defending the public expression of homosexuality and fighting excision, are anxious to please the Western powers in order to obtain the support of donors. Symmetrically and inversely, Islamists, by showing themselves to be conservative or even retrograde on the societal level, have every chance of attracting the good graces of the Gulf countries and obtaining subsidies from them. The fight, apparently moral and conducted in the name of great principles between the two groups, therefore falls more within the political and economic domain.

Plea for the universal has the immense merit of clearing the ground of all the obstacles that go against a universalist position. By identifying in the history of philosophy ideas and concepts that allow us to escape both relativism and anti-speciesism and neuroscience, F. Wolff provides valuable philosophical weapons to the anthropologist who does not necessarily have all the elements to engage in this debate. But the question of human rights as they are propagated by the West throughout the planet, as well as the opposition they arouse, require an approach situated geographically, historically and socially in order to determine how these elements are arranged and come into conflict within a given society and at a given time.