What is Man? What, if anything, is fundamental in human nature? Why attempt to dissect the human condition at all? In this far-ranging, erudite survey, Mark Greif sets out not to answer these questions but to trace why and how they were asked and answered in mid-20th century America, and to analyse the effects of the surrounding discourse on intellectual history.
The Enlightenment anticipated that mankind would experience “ongoing, teleological and irreversible” progress; but when the atrocities of the Holocaust and Hiroshima threatened “the end or barbarisation of western civilisation”, thinkers sought to establish foundations for a “re-enlightenment” based on a renewed examination of man’s nature. The ensuing debate spawned a wide-ranging conversation across generations, from the conference rooms of Unesco and Eleanor Roosevelt’s Human Rights Commission to the desks of writers such as Hannah Arendt, Reinhold Niebuhr and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Greif, a literary critic and co-founder of the literary magazine n+1, puts fiction at the heart of his study, examining how Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor and Thomas Pynchon used the novel form to probe “the possibility of existence of any unmarked, universal moral core to man.”
A nuanced final section traces the cultural shifts that ultimately signalled the end of the “crisis of man” discourse: African-American and second-wave feminist activists spoke up for those whose race, gender, class or religion prevented any identification with abstract, universal “man.” While somewhat dense, this is a learned exploration of an important debate, which still reverberates in many forms today.
