The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH – VOL.2, ISSUE #3, JUNE-AUGUST/2010
Many commentators still reduce Frantz Fanon to an "apostle of violence" on the basis of a few pages written in support of armed resistance to the extraordinarily violent French suppression of the Algerian independence movements. Others still attack Fanon for his work for the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in the Algerian War of Independence. Nobody is interested when Marx or Mill or Hobbes conclude that violence is an appropriate response to certain circumstances. Sartre’s support for the Resistance usually counts in his favour. But, evidently, quite a few people are still not ready for a black man with a gun or for meaningful challenges to European colonialism.
But it is also true that from the mountains of Mexico to the factory floors of South Africa and the prisons of the new American gulag, to the Professors of Columbia and Harvard Frantz Fanon’s name is on more lips, and is being uttered more reverently, than ever before. It needs to be pointed out though that many who speak in his name have not read his work carefully or at all. He has become an icon of resistance whom all sorts of fantasies and prejudices have been projected. He is routinely misrepresented as everything from a black nationalist to some kind of postmodern literary theorist.
Nevertheless, it remains clear that for many people Fanon’s increasingly popular work has a peculiarly transformative impact. Many people have testified that his words change lives. George Jackson’s prison diary, Soledad Brother, is a classic in this regard and The Third Worldist journal, Partisans, spoke for many when its editors noted that "anyone who has . . . read those pages that blaze with lucidity, inevitably finds born in them a new vision of men and a burning desire to take the dimensions of this vision into the future." (Macey 2000:23) Sympathetic commentators, of the highest intellectual status, seem unable to resist metaphors of light when describing Fanon’s work and life. Words like "brilliant", "radiant" "incandescent", and "luminescence" abound.
What is it that gives Fanon’s work this extraordinary power; that makes it so inspirational and transformative for so many people? A few possibilities spring to mind. One is his subject matter. After all, many will find his vision of the redemption of the wretched of the earth and of a transcendence of the rigid categories and hierarchies of race to be welcome. In this world of massive and racialized inequality it comes as rain in a desert. But this cannot be the whole story as Fanon’s work has inspired many struggles that have nothing to do with race or the Third World. It may also be that some of the power of his work resides in its eclecticism. Fanon’s work is a mixture of philosophy, politics, psychology and sociology, it draws freely on Marx, Nietzsche, Jung, Lacan, Cesaire, Sartre and Hegel. Eclecticism can be a euphemism for a lack of rigour. But when, as in this case, the work draws on the best resources of a variety of disciplines to focus closely on a specific theme, it can be the road to unusually perceptive and resonant work.
However, while a method may be effective, it’s unlikely to change lives in itself. Much of Fanon’s capacity to inspire (and to redeem the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach) must lie in his style. His synthesis of logical analysis, polemic and poetry is extraordinarily passionate and beautiful. This was no accident. When Francis Jeanson, an editor on Les Temps Modernes, asked him to clarify a phrase that he had used in an article, he replied: "I cannot explain that phrase more fully. I try, when I write such things, to touch the nerves of my reader. . . . That is to say, irrationally – almost sensually." (Ehlen: 103) But Fanon’s ability to enlighten and to inspire action must lie in more than just the style in which he writes. This is made clear by the fact that many of his ideas have retained their extraordinary transformative power when used by less poetic and passionate writers like Steve Biko and Edward Said.
So what is the quality that animates Fanon’s work and that of many of the other theorists of the New Left, like Victor Frankel, Eric Fromm and Paulo Freire? To be quite clear about what it was they called it humanism, which they took seriously. This paper will make the deeply unfashionable step of taking Fanon’s humanism seriously, with the aim of fleshing it out and developing a tentative exploration of the nature of what I believe (but will not try to establish empirically) to be its extraordinarily transformative power and, therefore, value.
The paper begins by looking at the idea of humanism and, with reference to Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt draws a distinction between revolutionary and reactionary humanism. Still drawing on their work of Hardt and Negri, the chapter analyses the idea of immanence in Fanon’s thought. It concludes by looking at three categories in Fanon’s thought – existence, desire and interconnectedness, arguing that Fanon’s protest against objectification offers a way forward that is in conscious distinction to Sartre’s pessimism.
FANON’S DECLARATION OF HUMANISM
Fanon tells his readers, on the first page of his first book, Black Skin White Masks, that he writes "for a new humanism." (1967:7) He ends his last book, The Wretched of the Earth, written after exposure to the full barbarism of French colonialism as follows: "For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man." (1976: 255) His commitment to humanism is, explicit, constant and resolute.
Humanism was, for a long time, an idea with which radical thinkers were proud to be associated. In 1844 Marx was happy to write that "Communism . . . is humanism." (1983:149) and in 1945 Sartre gave his famous lecture "Existentialism is a humanism." (1987) Humanism still appealed to Biko in the early 1970s, but for the contemporary reader humanism is generally seen as, at best, a naive anachronism, and, at worst, dangerously repressive. Iris Murdoch’s Existentialists and Mystics is a typical example of the former view. In the 546 pages that make up this collection of her essays, her only comment on humanism is that it is one of the "flimsier creeds" which is " unrealistic", "over optimistic", and a "purveyor of certain falsehoods." (1997:337) Ever since Michele Foucault heralded the death of Man, post-structuralist and postmodern thinkers have tended to present humanism as a key structure in the repressive apparatus of modernity. Humanism has become a deeply unfashionable idea. It is not surprising then that almost all commentators sympathetic to Fanon – with notable (and non-postmodernist) exceptions like the existentialist Lewis Gordon (1995) and the Jungian Michael Adams (1996) – have simply ignored the explicitly humanist nature of Fanon’s thought as if it were an embarrassing anachronism. In this regard, it is interesting to note that in David Macey’s recent 600 page study of Fanon, humanism is, typically, not even indexed. The majority of those theorists who do acknowledge Fanon’s humanism quickly dismiss it as an anachronistic ideology complicit in repressive modernity and colonialism.
However, there are at least three reasons why we should defy current orthodoxy and take Fanon’s humanism seriously when we engage his thought. The first is the simple point that Fanon took his humanism very seriously, and that a serious engagement with his work must, in the interest of intellectual responsibility, do the same.
The second is that Fanon, and other anti-colonial thinkers like Steve Biko, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Memmi, were fully aware that humanism had been used as a legitimating ideology for colonialism. However, unlike the postmodernists they didn’t see this as a reason for opposing humanism. Their view was that this was a perverted form of humanism as it objectified the bulk of humanity. Hence Sartre opened his preface to The Wretched of the Earth by arguing that: "Not so very long ago, the earth numbered two thousand million inhabitants: five hundred million men, and one thousand five hundred million natives." (1976:8) The anti-colonial humanists thought that the solution was to retain the idea of humanism but to expand it to include all of humanity. This explains Biko’s passionate attachment to a ‘true humanity". It is interesting to note that just at the time that the formerly subjugated people of the Third World were, through the language of humanism, demanding their place in the world, the West decided that humanism must be abandoned. Its replacement with the postmodern cynicism about progress and emphasis on difference has been accompanied by an enormous setback in the progress of the Third World and active imposition of a rapacious neo-colonialism. Although humanism is rightly associated with Western hypocrisy, it must also be remembered that it fueled Third World resistance more effectively than any of the ideas that have come to replace it.
Finally, it is important to note that, very recently, a number of theorists have argued that it is a serious error to look at modernity and its legitimating philosophy, humanism as is usually done, in a reductive way. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri do this particularly well, and their work makes a useful starting point for an explanation of the strand of humanism to which Fanon was so passionately attached.
REVOLUTIONARY VERSUS REACTIONARY HUMANISM
Hardt and Negri argue that there are two opposing humanisms in modernity – one revolutionary and one reactionary. In their view, modernity began as a revolutionary movement in that ‘the powers of creation that had previously been consigned exclusively to the heavens are now brought down to earth. This is the discovery of the fullness of the "plane of immanence." (2000:73) Immanence, they argue, is radical and revolutionary in that it "develops knowledge and action as scientific experimentation and defines a tendency toward democratic politics, posing humanity and desire at the center of history." (2000:74)
They understand immanence to refer to the view that the powers of creation inhere in humanity and, more particularly, in the multitude rather than The People. They define the multitude as ‘the universality of free and productive practices" and The People as "an organized particularity that defends established principles and properties." (2000:316) But it is perhaps more useful to note that they speak of the multitude in terms of a disordered collection of desiring subjectivities and the people in terms of an ordered collection of subjectivities disciplined in the name of some transcendent power above and beyond the individual desires in which creative powers are taken to inhere. That transcendent power may be God or the Gods, ethnicity, The Nation, The Market, The Leader, History, The Party and, of course, Europe or the West. Hardt and Negri are resolutely against transcendence when transcendence refers to a realm or agency outside the grasp – in time, space or capacity – of the multitude. They insist that "Immanence is defined as the absence of every external limit from the trajectories of the multitude, and immanence is tied only . . . to regimes of possibility." (2000:373)
They are committed to the revolutionary Renaissance idea of immanence precisely because it puts the powers of creation in the hand of the multitude and so they endorse, fully, the vision of human beings in a perpetual state of becoming with regard to their mode of being, mode of political organisation and material circumstances of existence. They do not use the word ‘transcendence" to describe this overcoming of facticity, but endorse the possibility and value of this transcendence of facticity on the plane of immanence i.e. changing the facts of the here and the now, by taking concrete action in the here and the now rather than denying or diminishing the significance of those facts. They celebrate immanence precisely because its leads to this type of transcendence.
However, Hardt and Negri argue that this revolutionary assertion of immanence was opposed by:
a counter revolution in the proper sense of that term: a cultural philosophical, social, and political initiative that, since it could neither return to the past nor destroy the new forces, sought to dominate and expropriate the force of the emerging movements and dynamics. This is the second mode of modernity, constructed to wage war against the new forces and establish an overarching power to dominate them. It arose within the Renaissance revolution to divert its direction, transplant the new image of humanity to a transcendent plane, relativise the capacities of science to transform the world, and above all oppose the reappropriation of power on the part of the multitude. The second mode of modernity poses a transcendent constituted power against an immanent constituent power, order against desire. (2000:74)
Hardt and Negri argue that Bruno, Duns Scotus and Spinoza were surpassed by Descartes, Hegel and Kant and so:
Victory went to the second mode and the forces of order that sought to neutralize the power of the revolution. Although it was not possible to go back to the way things were, it was nonetheless possible to reestablish ideologies of command and authority, and thus deploy a new transcendent power by playing on the anxiety and fear of the masses. (2000:75)
With regard to the poststructuralist critique of humanism they argue that: "Michael Foucault’s final works on the history of sexuality bring to life once again that same revolutionary impulse that animated Renaissance humanism. The ethical care of the self reemerges as a constituent power of self-creation." (2000:91) In their view there is only an apparent paradox between Foucault’s assertion of an anti-humanism and the clearly humanist content of his later work. They argue that:
Antihumanism follows directly on Renaissance humanism’s secularizing project, or more precisely, its discovery of the plane of immanence. Both projects are founded on an attack on transcendence. There is a strict continuity between the religious thought that accords a power above nature to God and the modern ‘secular’ thought that accords the same power above nature to Man. The transcendence of God is simply transformed to Man. Like God before it, this Man that stands separate from and above nature has no place in a philosophy of immanence. Like God, too, this transcendent figure of Man leads quickly to the imposition of social hierarchy and domination. Antihumanism, then, conceived as a refusal of any transcendence, should in no way be confused with a negation of the vis viva, the creative life force that animates the revolutionary stream of the modern tradition. On the contrary, the refusal of transcendence is the condition of possibility of thinking this immanent power, an anarchic basis of philosophy. (2000: 91-92)
Heidegger’s response to Sartre’s Existentialism Is a Humanism is often taken to have been a key influence in the anti-humanism of recent French thought – Foucault, Lacan, Derrida etc. Indeed often it is claimed casually that Heidegger developed the definitive refutation of humanism. As Dermot Moran explains, "Humanisms remain metaphysical concepts whereas Heidegger wants a thinking which is a thinking of Being. Being appears through humankind, humankind is the ‘shepherd of Being’ and ‘language is the house of Being’." (2000:216) It seems clear that Heidegger’s critique of humanism is a critique of a specific type of humanism – the type which Hardt and Negri identify as reactionary and explain as the replacement of the transcendence of God with the transcendence of Man. So, although Heidegger’s anti-humanism has been very influential, it does not require a response here beyond pointing out that his critique was of the strain of humanism identified by Hardt and Negri as reactionary.
In their view, modernity developed two humanisms. The first was the revolutionary assertion that human beings exist in the plane of immanence and the second was the reactionary assertion of a new transcendence in the form of Man. (And of course, as Fanon points out, Man is European Man.) If we reflect a little deeper than Hardt and Negri, it is clear that the revolutionary form of humanism understands human beings as having the potential to awaken and use, freely, their creative energies to engage with and change the material and symbolic realities of the world in which they found themselves. In this vision humanity is seen as: (1) free and responsible for the exercise of that freedom in the existentialist sense of being condemned to respond freely to facticity, (2) capable of self creation in the sense of, in Nietzsche’s phrase, being in a perpetual state of becoming, and (3) capable of changing the material and symbolic world. Moreover, a high value is ascribed to these three human capacities, and actions which allow for their universal flourishing are taken to be good while actions which inhibit them are taken to be bad. There is a connection between revolutionary humanism and a whole range of philosophies which emphasize human development, freedom and creative engagement with the world, like Jungian psychology, existentialism and ubuntu. Politically it has direct connections with the such theories of liberation as classical liberalism, anarchism, Marx’s earlier humanist writing, Mikhail Bakunin’s vision of a society in which "every human being should have the material and moral means to develop all of his humanity" (1953:295); Marx’s vision of a society in which ‘the free development of one is the condition of the free development of all" (1983:197), and John Stuart Mill’s view that "Liberty consists in doing what one desires" and that ‘the sole end for which mankind are warranted...in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection." (1976:72-73 ) The best known contemporary defender of revolutionary humanism is probably Noam Chomsky who, although he defines his position as anarchist, celebrates John Dewey’s vision of a society "of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality." (1996:75)
Both humanisms are often, but not necessarily, atheistic, but they always reject the idea that human beings can find meaning in a transcendent, external God. However, the reactionary strain of humanism employs two secular strategies to fix and control humanity – to turn a multitude into a people. The first is to project the powers of creation on to some transcendent realm or agent (Europe, the Nation, the Leader, History, the Party, the Market, etc). The second is to present, in the name of humanism, one particular mode of being as the normal, highest or best mode of being. This is, in and by itself, repressive. Moreover, because the particular mode of being presented as normal or ideal is often in the direct interests of the powerful, the reactionary strain of humanism tends to be an oppressive ideology, for example, when the idea of humanity is reduced to European Man.
There is, clearly, a profound difference between the enabling and expansive approach of recognising and encouraging the fractious, anarchic energies of the multitude and the normalising and restrictive approach of reifying one image of an ideal humanity into ‘Man’. The view that (European) Man is anti-human is the pivot on which Fanon’s entire project turns, and I will take it up shortly. But first I will make some brief remarks on the relationship between Fanon’s immanence and his humanism.
FANON’S COMMITMENT TO IMMANENCE
Fanon’s restless intelligence ranges over the plane of pure immanence. His philosophy is never distracted from an engagement with the material realities of the here and now. Fanon prescribes a "voracious taste for the concrete" (1976:74). He begins Black Skin, White Masks by telling his readers that: "I do not come with timeless truths. My consciousness is not illuminated with ultimate radiances" (1967:7). He ends The Wretched of the Earth by insisting that "If we wish to live up to our people’s expectations, we must seek the response elsewhere than in Europe." (1976:254)
Throughout the whole corpus of his work, he never once waivers from his commitment to the immediate – to the phenomena that can be discerned in the here and now from a particular, embodied, position. Marx began, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, by insisting that "We proceed from an economic fact of the present" (1983:107), but ended up replacing a transcendent God with transcendent History. Unlike many on the left, Fanon never gives in to the temptation to ground and solidify his secular humanism by turning history into History. He is scrupulous in his rejection of all mechanistic explanations of human behaviour. Early in Black Skin White Masks he wrote that he "turns (his) . . . back on the degradation of those who would make man a mere mechanism." (1967:23) In the case of historicism he argues that: "It is rigorously true that decolonization is proceeding, but it is rigorously false to pretend and to believe that this decolonization is the fruit of an objective dialectic which more or less rapidly assumes the appearance of an absolutely inevitable mechanism." (1965:170)
There is no necessary connection between immanence and humanism. Revolutionary humanism must be a philosophy of immanence, but the plane of immanence can also accommodate naturalistic and instrumental thinking. Consequently, it is important to point out that Fanon’s immanence is consciously and resolutely humanist.
The standard definition of "immanence" is that the word refers to ‘the pervasion of the universe by the intelligent and creative principle, a fundamental conception of Pantheism." (Chambers Dictionary:309) This definition can, and often has been understood as a vision in which human beings are just another part of nature. This is problematic for a humanist, who, by definition, places a particular value on the human. What’s more, some neo-pantheists have gone even further and perverted immanence into an anti-human fetish of the non-human – i.e. "nature". The Unabomber and the Anarchist communities in Eugene, Oregon are good examples of neo-pantheists who see the bulk of humanity as fallen and corrupt and seek to defend nature at the expense of humanity. A thinker with a humanistic commitment to immanence must oppose this. It is not necessary to go as far as Nietzsche who argues that "Nothing is beautiful, only man . . . nothing is ugly, but degenerate man."(1977:145) But the humanist must, at least, agree with Sophocles that "Marvels are many, but man is greatest." This does not require an exploitative instrumentalisation of nature. On the contrary, because humanity is part of nature and, therefore, inseparable from, and dependent on nature, the cavalier exploitation of nature must be considered anti-human. It is possible to achieve some balance in this regard, by understanding that nature is fragile but valuable to and for humans. Something of this spirit is captured in a rather mystic or poetic form by Hardt and Negri in the concluding paragraph of Empire, which has been hailed as the new Communist Manifesto. They write of Saint Francis of Assisi who:
in opposition to nascent capitalism refused every instrumental discipline, and in opposition to the mortification of the flesh (in poverty and in the constituted order), he posed a joyous life, including all of being and nature, the animals, sister moon, brother sun, the birds of the field, the poor and exploited humans, together against the will of power and corruption. (2000:413)
Neither the moon nor the sun nor the birds of the fields can be for or against anything. The sun and the moon are, of course, objects, and, while birds have a limited level of consciousness, they simply are – they have no power to reflect on their being. So, clearly, Francis of Assisi, very much like William Blake, Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda, is proposing a mode of being that ascribes value to nature for and through human consciousness.
Fanon does not acknowledge the dangers for humanity of the modern tendency, both Marxist and capitalist, to take an exploitative instrumentalist approach to nature. He may have ignored this because environmental degradation was not an obvious crisis at the time of writing, because his vocation was to speak and act against the immediate and massive human suffering induced by the barbarism of colonialism, or because he wished consciously to stress humanity at the expense of the natural environment in order to counter the racist discourse which naturalizes Africans. Fanon was acutely aware of this form of racism and wrote that: "The Algerians, the veiled women, the palm trees, and the camels make up the landscape, the natural background to the human presence of the French." (1976:84) The explicitly humanist vision which he offers in opposition to that is "There are houses to be built, schools to be opened, roads to be laid out, slums to be torn down, cities to be made to spring from the earth, men and women and children to be adorned with smiles. This means that there is work to be done over there, human work." (1967b:6) But there is nothing in his thought that militates against care for nature in order to enhance the well being of humans. On the contrary Fanon, like Marx, would probably look forward to an order where "nature has lost its mere utility in the sense that its use has become human use." (Eagleton 1997:23) He would also agree with Marx that "that man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature." (1983:112)
It is also important to point out that thinking may be on the plane of immanence without being egalitarian. Nietzsche’s contempt for the herd is a paradigmatic philosophical example. For Nietzsche the plane of immanence is the plane of the real, but only the ubermensch can live there because it requires that the individual “set up his own ideal and derive from it his law, his joys and his rights." (1977:177-178) But through their cowardice the majority are destined to remain the slaves of those who preach ‘submission and acquiescence and prudence and diligence and consideration and the long etcetera of petty virtues." (1977:243) In Nietzsche’s view this is inevitable – it would be foolish to expect more than a few souls to live without the comfort of a transcendent power, and the herd, those who have failed, are unworthy of respect. Indeed, in his view, any attempt at egalitarianism is not only destined to fail but also dangerous because it will rein in the bold spirits and "It is the strongest and most evil spirits who have up till now advanced mankind the most." (1977:97)
Fanon does not romanticize the multitude. On the contrary, he argues that it often requires a tremendous effort to rouse the masses from their lethargy and tendency to objectify and, therefore, deny the humanity of both the self and the other. But he retains a respect for all humanity and is convinced that every human being, no matter how wretched, carries the potential to be a self-actualising and authentic being. His thought is not egalitarian in the sense of aspiring to conformity, but Fanon certainly does share Marx’s vision of a society in which everyone has, equally, the opportunity to develop oneself freely. He presents any denial of the humanity of the self or the other as a serious moral failing:
All the problems which man faces on the subject of man can be reduced to this one question: ‘Have I not, because of what I have done or failed to do, contributed to an impoverishment of human reality?’ The question could also be formulated in this way: ‘Have I at all times demanded and brought out the man that is in me?’ (1967:34)
In some ways Fanon’s thought is best understood as a synthesis of the Nietzschean valorization on the plane of immanence of the immanence, to be and the Marxist vision of universal flourishing.
Fanon’s assertion of immanence is not, as in Zen Buddhism, simply a question of being fully present in, and thus being able to value the moment. It is not a mere defense of the quotidian and the concrete against the abstract and the transcendent. Fanon’s immanence is rigorously and passionately humanist. At every point he speaks for the creative power of the multitude and against the forces of reaction that seek to appropriate that power. His project is political and retains the extraordinary moral power that comes from a vocabulary that allows the words human and inhuman to be used as adjectives in the political sphere. Three aspects of his humanism are immediately clear. The first is that his views are existentialist in that he sees humanity as confronted by the problematic of freedom and responsibility. The second is that he sees humans in terms of desire. Like the early humanist Marx and a variety of other schools of thought, including Bakunin’s anarchism, Fanon sees humans as carriers of the potential to develop their agency and creativity. Thirdly, like Heidegger and many non-Western schools of thought – including the Eastern philosophies which influenced Heidegger – Fanon sees humans as inter-connected rather than as the atomistic units of English liberal philosophy. I will discuss these three points in turn.
FANON’S EXISTENTIALISM
Fanon’s thought is clearly existentialist in that he shares, with other existentialist thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, a belief that the human condition is to be free – in the sense that existence precedes essence – and to be fully responsible for the exercise of that freedom. The nature of that freedom lies in the capacity to choose and to act – to create within the context of the unchosen facts in response to which we negotiate our lives – facticity in existential discourse. So, for example, Fanon insists that: ‘the body of history does not determine a single one of my actions. I am my own foundation." (1967:231) Denial of that freedom is considered to be self-deception – bad faith – and is, clearly, considered as an ethical failure by Fanon. So, for example, he argues that "Every one of my acts commits me as a man. Everyone of my silences, every one of my cowardices reveals me as a man." (1967:88-89) Two of the more important examples of bad faith mentioned by Fanon are denial of the embodied nature of existence and denial of the humanity of the Other. The embodied nature of existence is obviously important in the context of racism. And, indeed, Fanon, in the chapter from Black Skin, White Masks titled The Fact of Blackness reproached Sartre on the grounds that: "Jean-Paul Sartre had forgotten that the Negro suffers in his body quite differently from the white man." (1967:138) In the context of anti-black racism, blackness becomes a stark reality in the social world. To deny it is bad faith.
It is also vitally important in the context of the bodily needs that must be met if the body is to survive and be healthy and so allow consciousness to survive and flourish. So, while it is important to recognise that a man in prison is free to choose how to respond to the fact of his imprisonment, it is also important to acknowledge that human beings are not pure consciousness and that, therefore, a full understanding of freedom must include some recognition of the needs of the body. There is a clear recognition of this throughout Fanon’s work – from Black Skin, White Masks through to The Wretched of the Earth. He takes somatic well-being very seriously. But the recognition of the importance of embodiment does not mean that the body is always prior to consciousness in value. Clearly, consciousness cannot survive without the body, but Biko, who would be considered a hero in existentialist terms, put his body on the line to defend the integrity of his consciousness.
There is also an important connection between embodiment and the other. As Lewis Gordon explains: "The human being is at least three perspectives of embodiment: the perspective from a standpoint in the world; the perspective seen from other standpoints in the world; and the human being is a perspective that is aware of itself being seen from other standpoints in the world." (1995:19) For Fanon it is imperative that human beings recognise not only themselves but also each other as human – as agents who are free/responsible and expansive rather than as objects who are determined/not responsible and contained. "I do battle" he says "for the creation of a human world – that is, of a world reciprocal of recognition." (1967:219) Fanon’s central concerns – a desire to avoid bad faith in general and a particular desire to avoid the objectification of human beings – leads to a short but clear statement of his basic (existential humanist) ethical position: "I have one right alone: That of demanding human behaviour from the other. One duty alone: that of not renouncing my freedom through my choices." (1967:229) So, for Fanon freedom and responsibility are not just an ethical neutral description of the human condition. They are also a positive ethical position. It is an ethics which takes truth as fundamental, not received truth or any form of doxa, but rather truth as an honest examination of one’s self and the world. For Fanon the humanity of man is the truth and so inhumanity must either be founded on conscious lies, a failure to face up to the truth or sheer, conscious contempt for humanity. But, because even in the latter case contempt for humanity will often mask itself, an inhuman society is a society in which "everyday reality is a tissue of lies, of cowardice, of contempt for man." (1967 b:52)
This commitment to truth is not the reactionary humanism that presents some normalising orthodoxy/ideology as the essence of what it is to be human. This is a humanism that returns to the truth of the experiences of individual human beings – to immanence.
FANON AND DESIRE
Fanon insisted that "Man is a Yes or vibrates to cosmic harmonies" (1967:8) and reported that he "came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world." (1967:109) His rejection of instrumentalism and mechanistic explanations appears to be grounded in the view that to be human is not just to be free and responsible for the exercise of that freedom- but also to want – to desire. Existentialism is founded on the view that existence precedes essence, and so this idea that to be human is to desire may seem to be at odds with existentialism – to be an example of bad faith or the spirit of seriousness which Sartre explains as follows: "Marx proposed the original dogma of the serious when he asserted the priority of object over subject. Man is serious when he takes himself for an object." (1992:741) But, I will argue, Fanon’s assertion that the human being desires is not afflicted with the spirit of seriousness.
One of the key differences between the thought of Fanon and Sartre is that Fanon’s primary concern is with being-in-itself rather than being-for-itself and so, consequently, he is interested in desire more than absurdity. This means that there is a very different tone in the work of the two existentialists. Consider, for example, the difference in tone between Nausea and Black Skin, White Masks. Both are existentialist and phenomenological accounts of a disintegrating psyche. But the difference in the words which Sartre has Roquentin say at the end of Nausea and the words with which Fanon concludes Black Skin, White Masks is instructive. Roquentin says, rather blandly and pessimistically, "A time would come when the book would be written, when it would be behind me, and I think that a little of its radiance would fall upon my past. Then perhaps through it I could remember my life without repugnance." (1959:238) But Fanon’s statement is full of passionate and hopeful commitment: "As a man I undertake to face the possibility of annihilation in order that two or three truths may cast their eternal brilliance over the world." (1967:228) This dramatic difference in tone can be partially understood in terms of Fanon’s observation that "Being and Nothingness describes an alienated consciousness." (1967:138). Fanon’s work, on the other hand, is about the collision between an integrated consciousness and an alienating society.
In Being and Nothingness Sartre’s vision of abandonment, meaningless and absurdity is bleak. He argues that: "consciousness absolutely can not derive being from anything, either from another being or from a possibility, or from a necessary law. Uncreated, without reason for being, being-in-itself is de trop for eternity." (1992:29) Sartre even goes so far as to argue that it makes no difference whether one gets drunk by oneself or leads nations because "Man is a useless passion." (1992:784) Fanon, on the other hand says things like:
Human reality in-itself-for-itself can be achieved only through conflict and through the risk that conflict implies. The risk means that I go beyond life towards a supreme good that is the transformation of subjective certainty of my own worth into a universally valid objective truth. As soon as I desire I am asking to be considered. I am not merely here-and-now, sealed into thingness. I am for somewhere else and for something else. (1967:219)
If Fanon had a patient like Antoine Roquentin, he would probably have considered the patient to be profoundly alienated. His therapy for Roquentin may, we can speculate, have aimed to divine, behind the passive apprehension of absurdity and meaninglessness, "a fundamental aspiration to dignity." (1967b:53) He may, perhaps, have proceeded by encouraging Roquentin to reflect on why he is attracted to his favourite record – Some of These Days.
Sartre does himself hint that Roquentin may be able to find some redemption by exploring what desire he does experience. And in Being and Nothingness Sartre insists that desire is fundamental to humanity:
Fundamentally man is the desire to be, and the existence of this desire is not to be established by an empirical deduction; it is the result of an a priori description of the being of the for-itself, since desire is a lack and since the for-itself is the being which is to itself its own lack of being. The original project which is expressed in each of our empirically observable tendencies is then the project of being; or, if you prefer, each empirical tendency exists with the original project of being, in a relation of expression and symbolic satisfaction just as conscious drives, with Freud, exist in relation to the complex and to the original libido.(1992:722)
He goes so far as to promise that: "Existential psychoanalysis is going to reveal to man the real goal of his pursuit, which is being as a synthetic fusion of the in-itself with the for-itself; existential psychoanalysis is going to acquaint man with his passion." (1992:797) But in general Sartre’s vision is fairly bleak. He seems to indicate that Roquentin can hope for a life a little more immediate and passionate. Nowhere does Sartre speak, as does Fanon, of meaningful redemption.
Indeed, Sartre generally presents desire as the project in which man seeks to be "the foundation of its own being-in-itself by the pure consciousness which it would have of itself." (1992: 723 – 724) And, he explains, the best way to understand this desire is to say that "man is the being whose project is to be God." (1992:724) So for Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, to be human is to be driven by a fundamental but unrealisable desire. This is not Fanon’s view.
Sartre pays ‘special attention to moments of vertigo, anxiety, and nausea." (Moran:362). There is some value to this because, as Heidegger stresses, we are more able to be authentic when we have been jolted out of our quotidian comfort. So it is not surprising that Fanon also pays special attention to glimpses of the void – although he is primarily concerned with alienation caused by racist objectification. But, unlike Sartre, he pays equal attention to moments of coalescence, transcendence, solidity etc. He is very clear that the desire to integrate one’s consciousness is often frustrated. Consider the concluding lines to The Fact of Blackness – the chapter in Black Skin, White Masks in which Fanon describes various strategies of defending the ego against racism: "Yesterday, awakening to the world, I saw the sky turn upon itself utterly and wholly. I wanted to rise but the disemboweled silence fell back upon me, its wings paralyzed. Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep." (1967:140)
But even here he never abandons his passion: "I feel in myself a soul as immense as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers." (1967:140) Indeed, there can be no weeping without desire. And in Black Skin, White Masks Fanon anticipates that desire can be redeemed from alienation by revolutionary struggle. He quotes Cessaire:
Start something!
Start what?
The only thing in the world that’s worth the effort of starting: The end of the world, By God!" (1967:96)
In all of his following three books the authentic militant is demonstrated to be a reality.
So what is the nature of this desire that has no name but which, when it is confronted by forces which seek to deny it via objectification, can find redemption in revolutionary praxis – this desire which seems to be indestructible – this desire which gives Fanon’s philosophy more life and optimism than Sartre’s philosophy? It is clear that Fanon writes to inspire and make space for the full flowering of the creative powers of the multitude in the plane of immanence. As has been mentioned before, he writes in the introduction to Black Skin, White Masks that "Man is a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies." (1967:8) Later on, towards the end of the book, he writes: "I said in my introduction that man is a yes. I will never stop reiterating that. Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a no. No to scorn of man. No to degradation of man. No the exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom." (1967:222) In Being and Nothingness Sartre argues, with echoes of Hegel, that consciousness "constitutes itself in its own flesh as nihilation of a possibility which another human reality projects as its possibility. For that reason it must arise in the world as a No; it is as a No that the slave first apprehends the master, or that the prisoner who is trying to escape sees the guard who is watching him." (1992:86-87) Fanon, whose work and life fused into a statement of radical rebellion against racism and colonialism, said "No" in the most profound ways. But for Fanon "No" follows "yes". The prisoner must say "yes" to freedom before saying "no" to the master and Fanon is careful to explain the "yes" that becomes the source of the "no" and that without the "yes" there would simply be resignation. He explains that: "I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects." (1967:109) And the crushing of this "yes", presented in the quote below as desire, leads to a resolute rejection of oppression – a firm, revolutionary, "No".
As soon as I desire I am asking to be considered. I am not merely here-and-now, sealed into thingness. I am for somewhere else and for something else. I demand that notice be taken of my negating activity insofar as I pursue something other than life; insofar as I do battle for the creation of a human world – that is, of a world of reciprocal recognitions. He who is reluctant to recognize me opposes me. In a savage struggle I am willing to accept convulsions of death, invincible dissolution, but also the possibility of the impossible. (1967:218)
This desire is clearly a desire to be recognised as a person and not an object. But Fanon’s defense of desire is also, crucially, an assertion of the value of bringing one’s creative powers to bear on the world. Fanon’s work, especially in The Wretched of the Earth, makes use of a whole range of metaphors to describe progress. They include, in descending order of frequency, metaphors of movement, growth, waking up, new vision, rebirth and renewal. Fanon’s protest is grounded on "Yes" – Yes to human flourishing.
This is predicated on the view that the human being is possessed with a desire and a capacity to engage with the world. This is, therefore, a theory of human nature. But human nature is a notoriously difficult terrain. In philosophy and psychology, theories of human nature multiply and develop continually. Even amongst those that, for example, assume a fundamental drive there is a wide variety including Nietzsche’s will-to-power; Freud’s will-to-pleasure; Frankl’s will-to-meaning; Jung’s will-to-integration; Hegel’s will-to-recognition etc, etc. They all have some explanatory power, and they all make particular sense in certain situations or with certain individuals, but equally they are all limited.
There are also many traditional visions of a fundamental life force. In India the creative energy or life force is referred to as prana. In China and parts of West Africa it is known as Chi. Modernity’s mechanistic secularism denied it in Europe, but Jung recognised it and called it the libido. Here in Southern Africa it is referred to as Ntu. Fanon does not tell us whether he sees these words used to describe the creative energies as metaphors or as nouns. He just asks, "What use are reflections on Bantu ontology when striking black miners in South Africa are being shot down?" (1967: 85) But the question is consistent. Desire lives in action, whereas ontology is abstract and possibly objectifying. Therefore, he chooses desire and denies, metaphysics.
Each theory about the fundamental drives that constitute human beings, if taken as the sole truth about humanity, can be limiting and even oppressive. Unsurprisingly it has become very fashionable to seek an easy way out of this problem and to deny that there is a human nature. But to deny human nature is to make a substantive claim about human nature. It is a claim with a long history which John Locke called tabula rasa. If we accept that to deny human nature is to assert something substantive about human nature then there is no escape from this challenge. The only way to make some sense of the paradox is to make an assertion about what it is to be a human being that is specific enough to be useful and general enough to avoid being reductive. Fanon achieves this balance with his view that to be human is to desire to be recognised as a free and responsible agent and to seek to change the world through creative engagement with it. It is the second point which makes his philosophy more positive than Sartre’s.
FANON’S BELIEF IN THE INTERCONNECTEDNESS OF HUMANITY
Fanon’s commitment to freedom feeds into an ethic of virtue, that is, of desire which generates a project of individual and collective self-creation. But he does not see this in terms of the radical individualism of the early Sartre. On the contrary he argues, in a more Heideggerian spirit that: "In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself. I am part of Being to the degree that I go beyond it." (1967:229) But Fanon sees Being in far larger terms than Heidegger’s ethnic parochialism and insists that: ‘there are in every part men who search. I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny. I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence." (1967:229)
Fanon’s first expression of the interconnectedness of humanity is in the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks where he shows that "to speak . . . means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization" (1967:17), because ‘to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture." (1967:18) He also gives a clear and persuasive endorsement of Jung’s idea of the collective unconsciousness. Fanon defines it as "purely and simply the sum of prejudices, myths and collective attitudes of a given group." (1967:188) It is, perhaps, necessary to point out that Fanon rejects the view that the collective unconsciousness is inherited (genetic) and insists that it is purely cultural and that it can and will continue to change and develop. It is important also to point out that Fanon clearly thought that the contents of the collective unconscious should and could be made conscious. He also shows that the symbolic order which structures the collective unconscious extends far beyond the boundaries of language. He is, for example, able to speak of the collective unconscious of Europe as a whole. The "cosmic harmonies" which Fanon refers to when he writes that man is a yes are not explained. But Fanon does refer, further on in Black Skin, White Masks to the "cosmic Jung" (1967:151), and it seems fair to guess that he uses the phrase "cosmic harmonies" to refer to the universal archetypes through which we experience our particular desire. We grow from a collective consciousness, live in it and, if we have the courage and vision, challenge it and extend it. But we are always part of it.
Fanon’s view of humanity as interconnectedness is taken still further by his existentialist commitment to freedom and responsibility. Responsibility has no borders and so he argues that "I cannot disassociate myself from the future that is proposed for my brother. Every one of my acts commits me as man. Every one of my silences, every one of my cowardices reveals me as a man." (1967:89) He quotes, approvingly, Karl Jasper’s view:
There exists among men, because they are men, a solidarity through which each shares responsibility for every injustice and every wrong committed in the world, and especially for crimes that are committed in his presence or of which he cannot be ignorant. If I do not do whatever I can to prevent them, I am an accomplice in them. (1967:89)
Fanon comments that:
Jaspers declares that this obligation stems from God. It is easy to see that God has no business here, unless one choose not to state the obligation as the explicit human reality of feeling oneself responsible for one’s fellow man: responsible in the sense that the least of my actions involves all of mankind. When I express a specific manner in which my being can rise above itself, I am affirming the worth of my action for others. Conversely, the passivity that is to be seen in troubled periods of history is to be interpreted as default on that obligation . . . every European has equally to answer for the crimes perpetuated by Nazi savagery. (1967:89)
This degree of responsibility, and, therefore, of human connectedness, is often denied, but the human capacity to act and to change the world is a fact. The use or failure to use that capacity to oppose oppression is also a fact, and so Jaspers is clearly correct – even if this knowledge makes us uncomfortable. But the long reach of our responsibility is not just a crushing obligation to people whom we may never have even met – for instance, Indonesian workers whom a South African has never met. As Terry Eagleton explains in the context of Marxism, "In developing my own individual personality through fashioning a world, I am also realizing what it is that I have most deeply in common with others, so that the individual and species being are ultimately one." (1997:27)
FANON’S SPIRITUALITY
Fanon writes like a religious mystic. This could be dismissed as merely a question of style which has no significance to the content of his work. But I would argue that it is a fundamental part of his rebellion against objectification – material and symbolic. The religiousness of his work is vital to his project in that it is part of the reason why his work, unlike that of so many dry positivist philosophers, has been able to move and inspire so many people. It is no accident that people routinely refer to Black Skin, White Masks or The Wretched of the Earth as "my bible" or "our bible."
The religious tone of his work allows him to retain a sense of the sacred via the religious mode of apprehension best described as awe or reverence. A sense of the sacred can be reactionary, but when, as with Fanon, it is located in a neo-pantheistic manner in the creative powers of the multitude, rather than in any abstraction or transcendent realm, it is revolutionary. This is the source of the love about which even the most battle-scarred of revolutionaries can speak with no shame.
This reverence for the creative powers of the multitude does not mean that Fanon accepts things as they are or that he thinks that progress is easy. "Consciousness" he suggests "is a process of transcendence" and ‘This transcendence is haunted by the problems of love and understanding. (1967:7) Hardt and Negri are not alone in understanding (revolutionary) humanism as a secular and, indeed, anti-religious philosophy. Yet as an intellectual ancestor they present Spinoza, a pantheist who sought to remove the sacred from the distant heavens and rediscover it in the here and now. And, of course, the word immanence has, in itself, religious connotations in that it usually refers to pantheism. Pantheism is often, like Buddhism, characterised as a form of religious atheism but, as the leading Spinoza scholar, Anthony Quinton, writes, "We must admit that in the emotional economy of human life as a whole these attitudes are genuinely religious, even if they are directed towards objects which are not the familiar objects of religious attitudes in our culture." (Magee 1988:107)
It is interesting to note that while orthodox religion has often been presented as the great enemy of immanence many, and probably most of the popular, and therefore effective, prophets of humanistic immanence have had a religious aspect to their thought. Poets like William Blake and Walt Whitman and musicians like Woody Guthrie, Bob Marley and Bruce Springsteen have all, despite their hostility to orthodox religion, been possessed of a certain religiousness. For example, Bob Marley’s deep spirituality and commitment to Rastafari didn’t stop him from singing an anthem of immanence against transcendent religion in Get Up, Stand Up:
Most people think/
Great God will come down from the sky/
Take away everything/
And make everybody feel high/
But if you know what life is worth/
You will look for yours right here on earth/
So Get Up Stand Up/
Stand up for your rights/
So it seems that immanence can be rooted in, or opposed, by a religious sensibility. On the other hand, it is clear that neither atheism nor secularism guarantee respect for humanity. On the contrary, secular ideologies, particularly those based on historicism (be they in the name of Communism, Development or The Market) and Herbert Spencer-style perversions of Darwinism, have legitimated such most appallingly anti-human actions as genocide, slavery, colonialism and gross exploitation. The well established critique of (secular) instrumental reason is fully endorsed by Fanon. He tells his readers that: "I turn my back on the degradation of those who would make man a mere mechanism" and insists that "It is by going beyond the historical, instrumental hypothesis that I will initiate the cycle for my freedom." (1967:230)
Marx was explicitly anti-religion. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, he argued that ‘the more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself" (1983:134) and anticipated a society which will allow ‘the return of man from religion, the family, the state, etc. to "his human, i.e. social, life." (1983:151) His work shows no sign of the Nietzschean fear that atheism will necessarily lead to a destructive nihilism, but he is careful to point out that atheism is, in and by itself, no guarantee of social progress. He saw no necessary connection between atheism and humanism and argued that "Communism begins where atheism begins . . . but, atheism is at the outset still far from being communism; indeed it is still for the most part an abstraction." (1983:151)
So, the obvious question which arises in an age of increasing secularism is how can atheism or agnosticism be developed into an immanent humanism? How can the temptation to create a new transcendence be avoided? How can instrumentalism be avoided – i.e. how can a society, where every human being is an end, be created?
Marx’s early thought, which usually is characterised as humanist is, clearly a philosophy of humanistic immanence. In the conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon quotes a passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire which is an excellent statement of Marx’s immanence:
The social revolution . . . cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself of all its superstitions concerning the past. Earlier revolutions relied on memories out of world history in order to drug themselves against their own content. In order to find their own content, the revolutions have to let the dead bury the dead. Before, the expression exceeded the content; now, the content exceeds the expression. (1967:223)
And, of course, the Theses on Feuerbach is an attack on secular thought which "raises itself above itself and establishes for itself an independent realm in the clouds" and a defense of "revolutionary practice" as "practical, human-sensuous activity." (1983:156) But Marx felt the need to prove the validity of his ethics. He did so by denying ethics and claiming that he was a scientist. And his followers, from Engels in his eulogy at Marx’s funeral, to bureaucrats of the Soviet Union believed that: "Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history." (1983:68)
But, although Marx claimed to be a scientist, his later thought clearly is, infected with the transcendent categories of orthodox Christian thought, to which Marx had been passionately attached as a teenager. Marx himself became the bearded prophet and turned the proletariat into Jesus; class struggle into the Holy Spirit; the bourgeoisie into Satan; history into the unfolding of God’s will and Communism into Heaven. Marx’s attempt to legitimate his humanist concerns with a new transcendence undermined, profoundly, his commitment to both humanism and immanence.
In his own lifetime Marx’s claims to have discovered a transcendent science was opposed by the anarchist Michael Bakunin. Bakunin spoke, very specifically, against morality which is ‘transcendent, super-human and therefore anti-human." (1953:139) Fanon never falls into Marx’s trap. He never abandons his commitment to immanence. He never seeks some transcendent justification for his revolutionary passions. His work, despite its incandescent passion, is always characterised by a lightness – an openness. He does not turn his immanent existential humanism into a religion. But his vision could be called spiritual in the sense that Victor Frankl’s psychology is spiritual. Frankl, who identifies himself as an existential humanist, argues that the human being has a will-to-meaning (as opposed to the Freudian will-to-pleasure and the Nietzschean will-to-power) and that this, together with the capacity to choose, gives the human being a spiritual dimension. In this sense of spiritual (i.e. when ‘spiritual" refers to a free being’s will-to-meaning, rather than to the possession of a non-material soul or a human connection with God) would allow us to describe Fanon’s work as spiritual and to note that some of its power to create new humanistic subjectivities may inhere in its spirituality. A spirituality which, unlike that of certain forms of orthodox religion, does not preclude human freedom.
This sense that there is some sacred potential in humanity, a potential which can be and is actualised from time to time, can lead to a sense of awe and reverence for the sacred nature of human creativity. This feeling or subjectivity has an extraordinarily persuasive power not simply in that it wins readers to Fanon’s cause (e.g. anti-racism or decolonisation), but also in that it can create in the reader the subjectivities that generate an emotional or, in Frankl’s terms, a spiritual identification with what is human. In turn, this can inspire action aimed at realising a more human world Where "human" describes the realisation of the positive potential that exists in every human being.
Bakunin realised that this mode of apprehension carries with it extraordinary power when he wrote that "we are the sons of the Revolution and we have inherited from it the Religion of Humanity which we have to found upon the ruins of the Religion of Divinity." (1953:142) If atheism or secularism is understood necessarily to lead to the abandonment of these modes of apprehending the world, of being in the world, then secularism strips humanity of a mode of being that generates and focuses powerful energies. This could be likened to throwing the proverbial baby out with the bath water. The listlessness and anomie that result may not be overtly reactionary, but they are hardly able to fuel the desires required for real transformation.
It should, by now, be clear that it would be dishonest to try to explain Fanon’s thought without reference to his humanism and I hope to have developed a rough explanation of its nature. But the question I hope to have raised is whether we should consider a return to the transformative power of revolutionary humanism.
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