Permanently Deleted
I've actually read a decent bit of the book and some related philosophical and anthropological texts so:
While the problem of humanization has always, from an axiological point of view, been humankind’s central problem,
Human beings tend to be concerned with the components of a person that make them human. Is it a soul? A body? A brain? Consciousness? Sentience?
Many indigenous cultures believe that humanity is a thing you grow into over time. Western culture believes that humanity is a thing you simply are, and that with enough taxonomy you can describe your humanness to the degree you understand what's already there.
it now takes on the character of an inescapable concern.
In the time period Freire was writing in, WW2 had extinguished communism in the West and new communist movements were sprouting up in South America. Because of Communism's humanism, and the answers it proposes to the question "what does it mean to be human?" this more or less means that the power struggle between Communism and Capitalism is fundamentally about the path human history will take. In Freire's mind, communism is the path toward humanization and capitalism is the path toward dehumanization. And so if capitalism "wins" then the peoples of the world will be effectively alienated from reality by a filter of fascist ideology. For Freire, and most modern communists, this is an existential and likely self-destructive threat to the species.
Concern for humanization leads at once to the recognition of dehumanization, not only as an ontological possibility but as an historical reality. And as an individual perceives the extent of dehumanization, he or she may ask if humanization is a viable possibility.
This is more or less a fancy way of saying "if it's possible to become human then it's possible to unbecome human." Freire takes the same view as a lot of indigenous cultures in his perception that humanity is not an automatic given (nor is it earned), but is actually built through a person's interactions with their physical and social reality. "Feral children" studied by psychologists, for example, lack the social component, where someone plugged into VR or super-rich-yacht-club culture lacks the physical component. One is alienated from the superstructure of society and the other is alienated from the base. One is alienated from birth and never fully develops, wheras the other can have an "unbecoming" as they unlearn the reality of labor and prosociality. I don't think Freire uses these as examples, but I think they can work as a handy illustration of extreme dehumanization. Freire considers the bourgeoisie, in particular, to be extremely dehumanized.
Within history in concrete, objective contexts, both humanization and dehumanization are possibilities for a person as an uncompleted being conscious of their incompletion.
Here, he's referring to the possible directions one can take as they achieve class consciousness (as @Theblarglereflargle pointed out), they can either become revolutionary or reactionary, constructive or destructive. To kindle revolutionary energy within oneself is to desire humanization. Every communist feels they are missing a certain part of themselves. We want community, fulfilling work, and a healthy relationship with the Earth. These are things capitalism cannot give us, and without which we feel depression, anxiety, and a whole other host of disorders. Similar to how accepting transition decreases dysphoria (and turns transness from a mental disorder to a normal part of life), accepting other elements of humanity will decrease our alienation in these various spheres. But if we choose reaction, instead, as our method of allieving alienation, we will only find ourselves in a dehumanizing feedback loop, similar to a person with dysphoria rejecting trans identity and thus everyone else who is trans (something fairly common in reactionary lgbt spaces). It doesn't allow them to grow as a person but instead stiflea them and further alienates them.
“Feral children” studied by psychologists, for example, lack the social component, where someone plugged into VR... lacks the physical component. One is alienated from birth and never fully develops, wheras the other can have an “unbecoming” as they unlearn the reality of labor and prosociality.
I feel like a large part of what is wrong with me is that I have not-insusbstantial portions of both of these problems baked into me, on account of how I grew up.
IDK that there's a realistic path wherein I become a "fully self-actualized human being" on my own accord.
I mean, it's not something you're meant to do alone. "Humans are social beings" as they say. Getting better often means experimenting with the social world around you to see what works for you (and them) and what doesn't. People who get overwhelmed and recede into themselves are avoiding learning experiences because they fear failure, but most of what understanding what people are, what their needs are, and how you fit into everything means experiencing that social world for yourself (in its own way, it's a kind of Practice). And, in turn, the hope is that those people will also support you. This unspoken communal giving-back has helped humans survive fpr millions of years, so it should be innate to us. But capitalism has broken down such 'outdated' sensibilities, so finding the right people to provide a sense of community is much more of a struggle now.
TL;DR: Human growth is dialectical. You can't grow alone, but by understanding the way you respond to actual social interactions.
I mean, it’s not something you’re meant to do alone. “Humans are social beings” as they say. Getting better often means experimenting with the social world around you to see what works for you (and them) and what doesn’t.
The thing is you're right, but the only thing that seems to "work" for me & others is my general isolation from all social life.
I dunno; 30 years is short historically, but it's a lot of life to live for one person, very close to half the total life expectancy of most the world. And in my case, for as much of my life as I can honestly remember, the answer to the questions of "Where do I belong?", and "What should I be doing with myself?" have been very explicitly given to me. Those answers in order are, "Somewhere away from everyone else where you will not bother them.", and "Whatever the people who are in charge of you are telling you to do."
That's how it was when I was growing up, and that's still how it's been turning out as an adult.
I'm sorry it's a lot of work to explain in detail what I mean by all these things & been sitting here for the last couple hours trying to articulate them, but I just can't seem to write it all down in a way that's both informative & concise.
Concern for humanization leads at once to the recognition of dehumanization, not only as an ontological possibility but as an historical reality
Another way to read this is prefiguring the work of Agamben on homo sacer. Basically, there are forms of life for humanity that are fundamentally inhuman. Just being born homo sapiens doesn't make one human - human life is more than mere animal life (zoe - "bare life" in Agamben's terms).
Basically, like Freire, Agamben looked to the Nazi concentration camps as a fundamentally inhuman thing - a really existing process of dehumanization. His project looks back to ancient Roman law to look at examples, but Friere obviously has a different archive and interest. Like @Ideology says in a post in this thread, "Humans are social beings." The things that make us human are more than biology. This isn't "woo woo" shit, but really existing social relations that make us human. Without those, you're not Aristotle's "political animal" (bios) but instead something closer to a mere animal.
Pretty much. The capitalist ideal of the lone wolf caveman is an extreme anachronism trying to sell the idea of "things have always been this way." Hermits existed but were never the mainstream mode of existence anywhere in the world. And they still had to come from a highly socialized society to even get the momentum to leave their place of origin.
I'd take as the author saying people should be concerned with whether other people recognize them as beings with the capacity for similarly complex thought and emotion (human) or whether they do not (dehumanizing them). Considering to what extent you're humanized by others should lead you to consider to what extent you're dehumanized, and in what contexts. And the first bit to mean that humanity's most glaring problem has been the lack of humanizing of other humans, I think. That makes sense to me at least. And that people have done both to varying degrees throughout history.
Maybe I'm wrong, this seems so obvious as to be inane but maybe they're just too verbose for my taste...
Not 100,% on their use of "un-" & "incomplete" though. Could mean a lot of things, and I'm not sure why someone would have to be conscious of this quality about their sense of self to wonder how much humanity they're considered to have by other people?
As one learns morality and empathy one becomes more aware of injustice both systemic and in history around them.
One can either use this knowledge to strive to better themselves and to call out injustices or to double down and defend the system and actions that cause them.
Think BLM vs thin blue line.
Incomplete being has to do with Freire’s belief that liberation based education creates full people
This looks like poor writing. I interpret "humanization" as something like "recognition of the other" as in, you know, "seeing people as people" rather than as "obstacles to my own enrichment" or "threats" or something else. Dehumanization is the opposite. That part is me guessing, but most of the rest of this I am confident about. My rephrasing, with "humanization" as "X" because I'm just guessing at the meaning:
A person concerned for X immediately notices that anti-X is not only something that can theoretically happen, but something that has been happening all through history up to this day. Because of the extent of anti-X, [the aforementioned person] may feel the task of replacing anti-X with X to be impossible. Despite this discouragement, it is still the case that either path is possible for people as changing beings.
I'm also just kind of guessing at what he means by "incompleteness".
a person as an uncompleted being conscious of their incompletion.
:warf-wtf:
You might need a better translation, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was originally written in Portuguese so there's a lot of work translators have to do obviously and they aren't all good at translating at the same time as communicating ideas
I haven’t read the book so I might be full of it but here’s my take.
I take humanization to mean human flourishing, hence why humanization is “axiologically” our central problem, i.e. it’s the problem of realizing what we are or are meant to be.
I think they’re saying that once you recognize the possibility of flourishing you have to recognize the logical/“ontological” possibility of it’s negation (dehumanization), and that in fact dehumanization isn’t just a possibility, it’s the norm in our society (historical reality) which raises the question of whether humanization is even possible in our historical situation.
Then they say that both humanization and dehumanization are possibilities if we are aware of our incompletion, which I guess means that if we are aware of this historical situation we can change it to promote humanization.
lets play a game called "was the author a pompous haughty academic doofus or was the translator"
i mean yeah, this shit is technically intelligible (see the explanations here) but the complication is probably exaggerated by an awful translation. portuguese speakers feel free to correct me but there had to be a bit more art to this shit in the original.
translation is an art, not a technical skill. ending up with extremely weird verbiage and syntax is not usually an indication of a decent translation. unless there's half a page in citation situating "humanization" and shit you are in unfriendly territory which you either have to be familiar with academic pedagogy or portuguese to fully understand.
The book was published in English originally, so I have to assume the author, though Portuguese-speaking, was pretty confident in it. Someone else translated it to Pt if I recall.
how strange the wiki made it sound like it was por first. :thonk-cri:
