Inhumanity, that old ghost that philosophy has tried to exorcise since Plato, remains there, as alive as ever, perhaps more human than man himself and could even be considered his most enduring invention. The inhuman does not come from beasts or machines: it is the refined consciousness that has learned to justify itself. Philosophers knew this, each in their own way: the inhuman is not the other of man, but his most intimate truth and the one he prefers to look away from.
Nietzsche did not look away from them, although on the condition of affirming that inhumanity is a higher form of spiritual hygiene. Compassion, that invention of the weak, had to be purged from the modern soul, he said after throwing God out the window and redecorating the universe with stars newly created by himself. The inhuman, in Nietzsche, is not monstrous: it is a kind of freshness. The superman does not hate the other, he simply does not need him. The pain of others does not move him because he has learned to admire his own. The truly inhuman, for Nietzsche, would be to keep groaning under the weight of a sick and spectral morality. In his world there are no victims, only players who bet big on the roulette of history. The unsettling thing about that cosmic casino game is that the other disappears and only the echo of a laugh resonates in the abyss.
Heidegger, more somber, replaces joy with meditation. He does not sing inhumanity, he thinks it. According to his diagnosis, modern man is no longer the center of the world, but its resource manager. Technology has turned him into something perfectly replaceable: an instrument among instruments. It is the era of the “available background,” where everything: mountains, animals, people, is measured in terms of utility. But Heidegger is not too alarmed: the inhuman, he says, also belongs to Being and in the Black Notebooks he suggests that we must think of Being outside the human. What is important for him would be to listen to Being and poetically inhabit the earth with it. A task that seems increasingly unlikely with the future that awaits us.
Lévinas appears later as a moral prophet. Where Nietzsche wants to destroy compassion and Heidegger contemplates the abyss, Lévinas demands responsibility. Not metaphysical, not aesthetic: immediate, uncomfortable, visceral responsibility. His idea of the face of the other is forceful and explicit. The face of the other tells me “you shall not kill,” even when I have not thought of doing so. It is the presence of the other that constitutes me, limits me, accuses me. The inhuman is not cruelty but indifference. It is enough to look at the other and not see him. Hell is no longer others, as a misquoted Sartre said; hell is the comfort with which we stop seeing them.
Buber, more conciliatory, tries to save some humanity through dialogue. In his famous I and Thou, he proposes that man only becomes human when he says “You.” Inhumanity is not active cruelty, it is a distraction. Modern man does not kill the other; he simply turns him into empty information. Against the cosmic loneliness of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Buber insists that salvation lies in addressing the other with dignity.
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Derrida, for his part, distrusts even that binary relationship and suspects that humanity needs inhumanity as much as reason needs its errors. Every definition of “the human” implies a boundary: inside, us; outside, the others: animals, barbarians, automatons. Against that approach, Derrida formulates his morality of impossibility, based on forgiving the unforgivable, exercising hospitality without guarantees, and dissolving the boundary between men, animals, and machines.
Closer to Buber than to others, José Antonio Marina reminds us that inhumanity has a historical record and documented behavior, showing how man has perfected the art of forgetting the pain of others. Inhumanity does not arise from evil, but from ethical laziness. We are not monsters, he assures, just distracted, as Buber also said. Human intelligence becomes inhuman when it divorces itself from compassion.
Before some of the cited philosophers, Ortega y Gasset had said that “the tiger cannot stop being a tiger, it cannot detiger itself, but man lives in permanent risk of dehumanizing himself,” and therefore in permanent risk of falling into inhumanity. Marina also devotes excellent pages to the concept of dehumanization. And although inhumanity would be the absence of sensitivity towards the other, it is reached through the dehumanization of oneself and the other.
In the end, depriving the other of their human condition also implies depriving oneself of humanity. In this way, a world tending to dehumanize itself like the current one would be the most fertile ground to establish inhumanity, which would now tend to be global: the planet turned into a hell where everyone would revel in an incessant orgy of stupidity, triviality, dehumanization, and inhumanity.
