Cecelia Hollcraft

Philosophy of Anthropology
Dr. Dennis Sepper
February 25, 2018
Agamben, Geertz, and Problems at the Turn of a Century
In his work, The Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford Geertz brings to the forefront the
tendency to separate man into the different fields of study and look at man from a very
constricted viewpoint. In this way understanding of the human person has become restricted
because there is a lack of integration of the whole man and this lack results in the animalization
that Agamben talks about in his work The Open. The animalization of man happens in a variety
of ways but ultimately results in a skewed understanding of who the human person is as a being
that is different from the rest of the animal kingdom. These discussions are helpful in upheaving
the modern discourse of man which puts man into a box and leaves the human person stripped
down to nothing but an animal with opposable thumbs who lacks heightened senses to defend
itself.

Early in his work Geertz turns to Lévi-Strauss and his rejection of the modernist scientific
notion of reductionism. (36-7) This approach takes from the person everything that makes them
human and leaves them at only one aspect of what makes them human. Every person needs those
aspects in them to make up the person they are just as a puzzle needs all the pieces to create a
whole. Each of these aspects are so integrated that they even begin to influence the other, there is
nothing the mind does that does not show itself in the body or behavior. The scientific tendency
to reduce man to a single aspect of their being results in incomplete knowledge of who they are
and typically results in assumptions based on faulty evidence. Geertz, in his interpretation of
Lévi-Strauss, says that to find what is truly human these aspects of the sciences must be super-
imposed on one another. Once this is done the different layers would influence and inform each
other leading researches to well-rounded conclusions that help lead to greater understanding of
the human person.

Once this is done the cultural aspect of the person would stand out against the
background of the rest of the levels of personhood because, for Geertz, it is culture that is alone
distinctive to man. The culture a person grows up with affects how they think, act, the choices
they make and animals do not have this development of choice and act. Agamben points out that
the more we learn about animals the more they are made into man and the more man is made
into animal and there is a lot of truth in that. As people learn more about animals they try to
approach man in a different way through new perspectives but continue to break the person into
these different layers. But it is impossible to break a person up into different layers let alone take
away those layers and be left with a subject that is human. Man then becomes animalized and
loses those things that makes them man. Agamben makes sure to point that people are looking at
certain aspects of man and forgetting that there are aspects that cannot be lost, such as wonder,
creativity, and language.

These are three aspects to the human person that are lost when taking apart the layers, but
they are important to making people something different from the average animal. Man has been
made for itself. He can wonder about the world and learn about the environment and self, outside
the constraints of instinct. A lion is aware of itself when it is hungry or needs sleep, but a man is
aware of his body and mind at all times. People are constantly interacting with the world and
finding different ways to interact, but when these interactions are separated from the act of
understanding then they become animalized and the person is no longer seen as something
greater than an average animal. The wonder in the world is important in making man what it is.

Man has an amazing capability to creativity and this is what makes people so adaptable.
Animals can only live in certain environments because they are tied to food, water, shelter, but
man, through imagination, has moved past these basic needs and created for the self ways to not
only survive in their environment but thrive in any place they may be living. Agamben and
Geertz are trying to point to this capability of man that modern researchers and intellectuals are
putting aside. They want to say that boredom and adaptability are not unique to humans and
animals can experience these things too resulting in a smaller window of separation between man
and the animal. Though a person can only take part in one possibility of life at once they are
aware that there are many other possibilities. There is a need to act upon the environment in such
a way that makes the environment a catalyst for creativity, and only the human has the
imaginative mind to realize the full potential of the environment beyond the instinctual reaction.
If this is taken away through the act of reductionism all a person has to make them human is the
aspect of language.
 In the end these researchers have only language to turn to if they want to keep animals
separated from man. In the absence of language men are transformed into passive creatures
always absent of emotion (Agamben, 8). They no longer communicate beyond carnal needs,
instinct, and use, rather they would fall from the creature who thinks for itself to a creature to one
who thinks only of food and shelter. In the separation of man, there is a disconnect between the
need for language and where this need belongs. The anatomical man has the ability to speak but
no reasons to, the psychological man has the need to communicate but no means to, the
intellectual man knows how to communicate but lacks the emotional aspects to connect with
others, the emotional man can connect with others but cannot understand them.

It is interesting that, though researchers are so focused on separating the different aspects
of the human person and think about the human body as lesser than the rest of the animal
kingdom, there is a disconnect. Often these scientists are so focused on this separation of mind,
body, and soul they forget to think about the ways that the human body aids all the human does.
Though the senses of a person are somehow lacking in comparison to the rest of animals the
senses are so balanced that it allows man to be adaptable; man is not constrained to a handful of
environments as a result of a need to compensate for its abilities. Creativity combined with the
senses allows man to have a control over their environment that animals do not have and from
this control comes the capability to create culture.

Geertz focuses on the necessity of people to live in culture and community. Every culture
contains the entirety of the person, not a single aspect. Cultures and humankind are too complex
to reduce to only one or two aspects and it allows a ‘personhood’ to develop in the rational
creature that is not present in the non-rational creature. A cat may have a personality and get
bored but does not have the wonder, creativity, or language to create a culture and community
that man has the ability to create. Nothing he does is “wrong” expect by the standards which the
human imposes upon it by the culture and natural inclination to law. The animal has no such
inclination and at the turn of the century the modernist world took from man a natural layer
beyond the physical that connected all people together. People can connect with other countries
and find they hold similar traditions or rituals because they are intrinsically human. This is not
true for any animal. Dogs act in one way but cats act in another, domestic dogs eat one things but
wild dogs eat another. The only things that they hold in common are the natural appetites and
even those could have been nurtured differently. But man cannot be broken up in such a way,
and that is what Lévi-Strauss and Geertz are getting at the beginning of this discourse.

Though stripping the human down to one aspect is difficult and does not allow for a well-
rounded view of the person, breaking away from separating the different layers of man is a
difficult task to undertake. There is benefits to breaking man down into one or two layers
because, as a whole, it is too difficult to understand everything about the human person.
Allowing the approach of stripping away the layers and using them one at a time, though it can
animalize the human, can help put the task of understanding the human in more manageable
pieces. Keeping this in mind people proceed to understand in this way, but they get lost in their
approach and become adamant that their approach is the best for the understanding of the human
person. Humans are extremely complicated beings and even one aspect of the person is too much
to be understood on its own. Study has to be done in conjunction with other fields, it has to be
done in a way that allows other perspectives to inform each other if it is to give a complete
knowledge of man.

Agamben and Geertz both address an interesting aspect of the modern approach to the
human person. There are many ways to approach and understand personhood but at the turn of
the century there was a shift from thinking of man as one being with many facets to the thinking
of the individual aspects and, as a result, reducing man to animal.
 Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal, Edited by Werner Hamacher. Translated by
Kevin Attell. Standard University Press, 2004.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books Inc., 1973.