What is the human? : Eric Gans and the structure of the hypothesis

Generative anthropology, the humanities and the human. First things first: let us look at the name, generative anthropology. It is anthropology because it concerns, above all, human being. But why a generative anthropology? The word ‘generative’ implies both the question of generation (processes and orders of generation) and of genesis (the origin of things). In this respect, we say, Gans deploys an approach that uses the resources of the present to generate hypotheses about the origin of ethics, language, and ultimately of the human as such. He does this by surveying the present and generating an ‘a posteriori’ reconstruction of its origin. Unlike Foucault’s version of the ‘history of the present’, Gans’ work is not empirically historical in the straightforward sense of the term, seeking instead to work analytically with as small an empirical footprint as possible. It is our contention – and the contention, no doubt, of other thinkers in this volume – that his work offers profound new insights into what it means to be a humanities scholar, especially in how it furthers the horizons of what such scholarship can legitimately claim as its terrain. In this chapter, we explore aspects of the single most important innovation Gans has developed: the constitution of a new form of hypothetical inquiry in the humanities, affording for the first time, a variety of knowledge that goes beyond traditional notions of critique and interpretation.