Premium
The Caterpillar’s Question: Contesting Anti‐Humanism’s Contestations
Author(s) -
Porpora Douglas
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
journal for the theory of social behaviour
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.615
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1468-5914
pISSN - 0021-8308
DOI - 10.1111/1468-5914.00036
Subject(s) - humanism , alice (programming language) , subject (documents) , consciousness , denial , unitary state , epistemology , sociology , caterpillar , psychoanalysis , philosophy , psychology , law , art history , theology , art , political science , computer science , ecology , lepidoptera genitalia , library science , biology
The caterpillar’s question is the question Wonderland’s caterpillar posed to Alice: Who are you? This is a question Alice finds she cannot answer. According to postmodernist anti‐humanism, Alice cannot answer the question because there is no coherent Alice there to answer it, no unitary subject of consciousness. This paper contests the anti‐humanist denial of a coherent subject of experience. While it is conceded that phenomenologically, we may have difficulty today identifying who we are essentially, it is argued that, conceptually, we cannot do without the ontological category of the person as a unified center of consciousness.