Rehumanization: Between Utopia and Reality. A Dialogue with the works of José Luis Cañas-Fernández

by Emiliano Vera

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Rehumanize International was founded in the United States in 2011 with the mission to “ensure that the life of every human being is respected, valued, and protected.” But we are not the first to use the concept of rehumanization. The Spanish personalist philosopher José Luis Cañas Fernández has dedicated numerous works to this topic, tracing the term to the first instance of its use in 1946 and further back to its conceptual roots. Above all, he proposes rehumanization as the way to overcome, “the existential emptiness and loss of meaning in life [which] are the main cause of dehumanization and despair,” manifested in violence and addiction. 

Throughout this article I cite six of his works on the subject, which are: The Idea of Rehumanization, Existential Key to the Philosophy of Future History (2000); From Dehumanization to Rehumanization (The Challenge of Becoming a Person Again) (2010); Is the “Utopia” of Rehumanization Utopian? (2014); Rehumanizing Personalism (2020); Rehumanize: A Personalist Ethical Vision in Light of the Current Pandemic (2020); and Rehumanization and the Future: The Crisis of Contemporary Philosophy and the Idea of Rehumanization as a Project for a Philosophy of Life to Come (2022).

Rehumanization in the thought of Cañas Fernández

Cañas Fernández begins his analysis from two problems that he identifies as manifestations of dehumanization in the modern world: violence and addiction. The 20th century was marked by both, in the first half by the violence of the two World Wars, and in the second by the proliferation of addictions, with both mainly and tragically affecting young people. This dehumanization is experienced from the most highly organized levels of human society in the form of war, to the most personal in the case of addictions and “violent attitudes,” which lead to existential slavery and the loss of a meaning in life. Dehumanization has been intellectually reinforced by the tendency toward abstraction in Western sciences, objectifying the human being as a simple mechanistic being composed of observable qualities, available to manipulate like any other variable for scientific, political, or ideological purposes.

The task of rehumanization, then, is “the recovery of the meaning of life” through hope, enabling “the reconstruction of dehumanized people” to achieve “the abandonment of violent attitudes and… a return to life for formerly addicted people” to live “without slavery of any kind.” In other words, “it is equivalent to 'becoming a person again' or 'being born again.'” The rehumanization process has to respond to the particularities of each person, imagining it as “an educational practice and a structured therapeutic action, which always prioritizes the person before all else.” In the field of addictions, he proposes “replacing the worn-out concept of rehabilitation [defined as ‘giving up substance use or changing addictive behaviors, without further ado’] with that of rehumanization.” At the same time, he affirms that rehumanization is not only an individual task, but fundamentally relational, since the human “is a being of encounter and without communication and relationship there is no possible encounter.” Along with the rehumanization of people, he proposes rehumanization as “a hopeful horizon for current philosophy and science,” to reevaluate the pessimistic proposals of human nature coming from philosophers such as Kant, Nietzsche, and Freud, among others, who have formed the basis of modern ethical philosophy. He continues, “the philosophy that underpins a theory of ‘rehumanization’ would offer a new existential key to understanding the history of the present and the past, applying it to any violent and addictive reality that enslaves individuals and peoples.”

Cañas Fernández supports his ideas by referencing the history of the term “rehumanization.” He traces it to “Viktor Frankl's theory of logotherapy first published in 1946, in an epigraph titled 'Rehumanized Psychiatry' that its author placed at the end of his well-known work Man's Search for Meaning” (although he laments that “he didn’t reap the great harvest that the concept encompasses”).  Frankl was a Jewish Austrian psychoanalyst and survivor of the concentration camps of the Nazi Holocaust, who suffered the death of most of his family, including his parents and wife, from illness, hunger, murder, or, in the case of his unborn child, forced abortion. He emerged from the war with doubts about Freud's psychoanalytic method that focused on the carnal impulses of humans, awakening a deep desire to explain the different behaviors in the concentration camps in which "some of our comrades acted like pigs while others behaved like saints,” and how in his practice he could attend to these people who had been so viscerally dehumanized. From these reflections he developed the foundations for the term “rehumanization”.

But Cañas Fernández does not stop his research with the origins of the exact term, rather he continues by seeking its conceptual roots. He finds them, among others, in the philosophy of the French existentialist Gabriel Marcel, who experienced an encounter with a sense of humanity as an auxiliary during the First World War with “the drama of the relatives of missing souls [who] could not be satisfied with the mere information provided by the 'objective data' contained in the missing persons files he was responsible for," seeing, "that human beings who manage to free themselves from the despotic slavery of violence regain a hope in living because they can reaffirm that, maybe even for the first time in their life, they feel that they are persons in the depths of their being.” And so on back through history of human thought, finding more roots of a rehumanizing philosophy, down to “the Greek idea of perfection, together with the Christian idea of hope applied to the 'future-present' – as Saint Augustine would say – all of this made possible the advent of the idea of Rehumanization.”

Rehumanization, for now, has remained in its initial phase, both in its philosophical formulation and in its real-world realization: “Rehumanization, in short, would respond to the highest utopian aspirations of the historical ideal of the unity of humanity.” Although Cañas Fernández might conceive of rehumanization as a utopian ideal, nevertheless he sees it as a utopia towards which we can always move closer. He describes that the “challenge of the new millennium is a challenge of rehumanization across cultures, based on the meaning of life — not on the violence of wars or the absurdity of addictions associated with nihilistic meaninglessness — on interdependent tolerance that overcomes conflicts, and oriented towards an education that prepares us for tolerance and solidarity.”

Rehumanization: Towards Utopia, from Reality

So the question for those of us who have committed ourselves to helping humanity achieve this “utopia” of rehumanization is to see how to put it into practice, if we are not satisfied with leaving it as some misty hope in the minds of philosophers. Certainly, it is the task with which we have assigned ourselves at Rehumanize International. To expand and enrich the concept of rehumanization that Cañas Fernández has helped so much to develop, I see it as relevant to suggest some aspects which researchers should continue studying, through the various fields of rehumanized sciences and philosophies.

As a student of economics, I care a lot about the material foundations that give the most basic possibility of existence to a human’s bodily being, which are their means of subsistence, and the social structures within which humans produce and distribute what they need to live. Although he briefly refers to hunger in some of his works, it is essential in a discussion of rehumanization to dedicate more space to consider this most basic of factors that enables the mere animal existence of the human being, a condition without which rehumanization cannot be conceived of in any way, given that “the right to life is the supreme right from which no derogation is permitted.” Hunger is not just a problem “not yet solved”, but one that is now getting worse in both its absolute and relative quantity. Hunger, and all other forms of deprivation of the basic needs of life, such as the lack of access to water, healthcare, and housing, are no longer biological issues but essentially economic and political, since we produce enough for all humans in the world to live at a relatively comfortable level, yet the social mechanisms for the distribution of these goods do not allow them to reach those who need them.

This speaks to the supreme violence faced by the majority of the world today, even surpassing war in its number of fatalities, in the form of poverty. In a world where a tiny handful of billionaires have accumulated more wealth than almost all of the rest of humanity combined, while this same humanity dies by the tens of thousands every day due to this deprivation, then surely this represents the most outrageous possible expression of violence and requires a scathing critique of the systems that allow it. Faced with the existence of this massive violence suffered systematically and daily by the vast majority of humans, it should put into perspective the many smaller and more limited violences of resistance and survival by those who fight against this oppression, raising an important question about the basic instinct that many of us hold, well-intentioned though it may be, that “There is no good violence and bad violence…reactionary violence and progressive violence.”

This abstraction of the reality of violence is also reflected in Cañas Fernández’s works in how he conceives of war, as something that arises from the “violent attitudes” of individuals or “the fanaticisms and extremist and terrorist ideologies of the 20th century.” If we want to infuse the spirit of rehumanization into the study of history, then to begin it’s enough to mention that war is not a particular invention of the 20th century, and that while ideology and religion can give a different flavor to wars, most wars find their origin not in the irrational passions of the masses, but in the very rational and calculated machinations of groups in power acting in their own interest. Furthermore, while poverty is the main manifestation of violence today, war is not a violence restricted to the past, in the first half of the 20th century. In fact, “the last two years have seen the greatest number of conflicts since the end of World War II.” This is in the absence of the “totalitarian ideologies” supposedly left behind in the 20th century.

Likewise, we can concretely find the roots of the current addiction crisis faced throughout the Western world, and most acutely in the United States. First, it should be said that the first widespread addiction crisis did not arise in the West in the second half of the 20th century, but in the Qing Dynasty of China in the 19th century. While we can certainly find evidence for a loss of a sense of life-purpose in an empire torn apart by civil wars and the dissolution of traditional society, the immediate cause of both this social dissolution and the introduction of opium was directly the result of British imperialism, using this highly addictive drug as a weapon of war against the population. The Qing Empire's attempt to restrict the import of opium was the cause of the two Opium Wars in which the United Kingdom forced open Chinese markets to Western trade, flooding the country with not only opium, but also cheap fabrics which destroyed local industries and launched millions of small handicraftsmen into poverty and propensity for addiction. If that was not enough, the opium sold by the British was obtained by converting agriculture in their colonies in India from food production to the production of cash crops, such as opium poppies and cotton, resulting in recurring famines throughout its occupation of the subcontinent, with more than 100 million deaths.

Similarly, the high availability of addictive narcotics today is directly linked to the power games of the main imperial country's hegemonic interests. In this case, the covert actions of the US government put in motion by the CIA and the Reagan administration in the so-called Iran-Contra Affair promoted the trafficking of crack cocaine into the inner city, the proceeds of which went to financing right-wing paramilitaries with the mission of overthrowing the revolutionary government of Nicaragua. The resulting crack crisis decimated communities across the country but in particular stigmatized inner-city black communities, providing the justification for the War on Drugs that has seen the incarceration rate in the The United States shoot up to the highest in the world, rendering a population of humans permanently robbed of their normal lives and murdering “even its own people.” US imperialism is also the immediate cause of the resurgence of opium production in Afghanistan (which before, and now after, the invasion had been all but eliminated by the Taliban) that has so strongly affected addictions in Europe, while the DEA maintains an active role in drug trafficking and paramilitary violence in Latin America. In the current opioid crisis, including fentanyl, we already know very clearly the role of the powerful pharmaceutical industry, particularly the billionaire Sackler family, in creating completely legal addicts through its aggressive marketing of Oxycontin and the effective bribery of regulatory agencies.

These examples teach that, while we must always recognize the risk of the dehumanizing potentials of the modern sciences, a careful application of the material study of history, political economy, and sociology helps us reveal the causes of dehumanizing events and illuminate rehumanizing solutions, removing the mysticism of an idealistic bias prone to being manipulated and deceived by hegemonic ideologies that operate in the depths of our consciousness without us being aware of them. It turns out that, when well analyzed, we can find the causes of many of the supposedly inexplicable aspects of people's inner lives, such as the loss of meaning, which are the causes (or effects?) of violence and addiction. It is critical to remove this bias from our minds, especially those of us who live in the West. Cañas Fernández wrote the first of the works cited here, The idea of rehumanization, an existential key to the philosophy of future history, in the year 2000, at the peak of American hegemonic power, with the faithful obedience of the European members of NATO, (including Spain, the country of Cañas Fernández), almost a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union and the declaration of the “End of History,” with a millennial exuberance still at that time not broken by the attacks of September 11. Perhaps we can forgive in retrospect his flattering words about “the fall of totalitarian regimes” that marked a “history [that] has begun its ascent toward new horizons.” Now, we don't have the luxury of that illusion. The mask of the dominant neoliberal regime imposed by the United States, with its empty discourse of human rights that itself is constantly violated by its supposed proponents, is irreparably broken and looks more and more shattered every day.

To free ourselves once and for all from this bias, it is appropriate to close this article with a look at the conclusion of this first work by Cañas Fernández, where he quotes Shimon Peres, former Prime Minister and President of Israel. This man, cited as a spokesman for peace in the new millennium (and certainly, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize), was for 70 years one of the architects of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, from the Nakba of 1948 to the violent repression of the Intifadas in the nineties to 2005 and the subsequent bombing of Gaza in 2008. His words, beautiful and inspiring as they are, are proclamations of an unjust peace of the conqueror, imposed by disproportionate violence, which today are overshadowed by the current events of the genocidal “war” in Gaza led by Netanyahu, who began his first term as Prime Minister under Peres’ presidency, showing precisely a society “on the threshold of self-destruction.”

In conclusion, Cañas Fernández's work is an important beginning in the construction of the theoretical framework of the concept of rehumanization as "an experiential paradigm of hope" that seeks to generate "a profound change of mentality in society" stating that "people, no matter how dehumanized they are, can always be reborn” and imagining a renaissance in science and philosophy directed toward serving the common good of humanity. But to achieve this, it is pertinent that we who have committed ourselves to this great idea of rehumanization take advantage of the knowledge of the sciences available to us in order to remove in ourselves the ideological biases that, far from having been defeated in this new millennium, blind a large number of the thinkers in the countries that have emerged as the victors of the current order, that itself is committing new atrocities every day against the vast majority of humanity, and that still keeps us far from the utopia of rehumanization.