For liberal humanists such as Immanuel Kant, the universal law of reason was a guide towards total emancipation from any kind of tyranny.
Max Stirner expressed a similar position in his book The Ego and Its Own, published several decades before Nietzsche's work.
Nietzsche argues in Genealogy of Morals that human rights exist as a means for the weak to constrain the strong; as such, they do not facilitate the emancipation of life, but instead deny it.
[7] The young Karl Marx is sometimes considered a humanist, as he rejected the idea of human rights as a symptom of the very dehumanization they were intended to oppose.
For Heidegger, humanism takes consciousness as the paradigm of philosophy, leading it to a subjectivism and idealism that must be avoided.
[13] This view holds that society operates according to general laws that dictate the existence and interaction of ontologically real objects in the physical world.
Though the positivist approach has been a recurrent theme in the history of Western thought,[15] the concept was developed in the modern sense in the early 19th century by the philosopher and founding sociologist, Auguste Comte (1798-1857).
[17] Humanist thinker Tzvetan Todorov (1939-2017) identified within modernity a trend of thought which emphasizes science and within it tends towards a deterministic view of the world.
[21] It drew on the systematic linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure for a view of language and culture as a conventional system of signs preceding the individual subject's entry into them.
Linguistic study must abstract from the subjective physical, physiological and psychological aspects of language to concentrate on langue as a self-contained whole.
[25] The structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss proclaimed that the goal of the human sciences was "not to constitute, but to dissolve man".
The structure of this system was not devised by anyone and was not present in the minds of its users, but nonetheless could be discerned by a scientific observer.
Jacques Lacan's reformulation of psychoanalysis based on linguistics inevitably led to a similar diminishment of the concept of the autonomous individual: "man with a discourse on freedom which must certainly be called delusional...produced as it is by an animal at the mercy of language".
[34] This essence does not exist: it is a formal structure of thought whose content is determined by the dominant interests of each historical epoch.
[2] Post-structuralist Jacques Derrida continued structuralism's focus on language as key to understanding all aspects of individual and social being, as well as its problematization of the human subject, but rejected its commitment to scientific objectivity.
[38] He claimed that the fundamentally ambiguous nature of language makes human intention unknowable, attacked Enlightenment perfectionism, and condemned as futile the existentialist quest for authenticity in the face of the all-embracing network of signs.
[40] He rejected absolute categories of epistemology (truth or certainty) and philosophical anthropology (the subject, influence, tradition, class consciousness), in a manner not unlike Nietzsche's earlier dismissal of the categories of reason, morality, spirit, ego, motivation as philosophical substitutes for God.
The methodology of his work focused not on the reality that lies behind the categories of "insanity", "criminality", "delinquency" and "sexuality", but on how these ideas were constructed by discourses.
[46] However, with greater life-experience, she comes closer to accepting that post-structuralism is an intriguing philosophical game, but probably meaningless to those who have not yet even gained awareness of humanism itself.