Salvaging the Human to Liberate the Animal
- Carlo Salzani
- 29 minutes ago
- 3 min read
On November 11, 2025, Dr. Zipporah Weisberg – who teaches at the University of Ottawa and is a guest researcher at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna – gave a compelling talk at the University of Vienna’s Department of Philosophy. Her central message was both surprising and refreshing: despite decades of critique, the humanist tradition still contains valuable resources for the project of animal liberation. In fact, she suggested that we may need humanism more than its critics would like to admit, and today more than ever.
Weisberg’s main target was the rise of “post-” philosophies – postmodernism, posthumanism, poststructuralism – that have dominated much of the intellectual landscape since the late twentieth century. These movements often present themselves as radical breaks with the past, urging us to discard inherited categories and rebuild our conceptual world from scratch. Yet, Weisberg argued, they never entirely escape the structures they claim to transcend. Their very notion of “before” and “after” still reflects the teleological thinking of Western modernity. And in their eagerness to abandon humanism wholesale, they risk discarding the moral foundations that justice movements, including animal liberation, urgently depend on.
The fear, in short, is that by tossing out humanism, we may also toss out the tools needed to challenge domination.
Instead of rejecting humanism entirely, Weisberg proposed returning to – and reworking – a specific strand of it: the left humanist tradition. Rooted in figures like Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm, Freire, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Fanon, this lineage has been deeply concerned with liberation, the critique of domination, and the transformation of human beings into free, reflective, empathetic subjects. While this tradition has historically been anthropocentric – and many of its major thinkers explicitly dismissed nonhuman animals – Weisberg argued that its core commitments are not inherently tied to human exceptionalism. With some rethinking, the same concern for equality, anti-domination, and the fight against alienation can be extended to nonhuman beings as well.
A key component of this rethinking is the defence of the subject. For left humanists, resisting the dissolution or reification of the subject under capitalism has always been central. Weisberg suggested that this matters profoundly for multispecies liberation. The machinery of animal exploitation depends on a double alienation: humans become estranged from their own animality, and estranged from other animals as conscious, feeling subjects. Posthumanist approaches sometimes aim to dissolve the subject altogether, but Weisberg countered that what we actually need is an expanded, reimagined subject—one that understands itself as animal and that recognizes other animals as fellow subjects with their own projects, needs, and ways of flourishing.
Traditional humanism tied self-creation to transcending animality; the revised humanism Weisberg envisions ties self-creation to acknowledging and restoring it.
Her view is captured in two particularly striking ideas. First: “The self-transcendence of the human being depends upon allowing other animals to be involved in their own projects of self-transformation, whatever they might be, and however different they might be from our own.” And second: “The fulfillment and freedom of the human subject is never at the expense of the fulfillment and freedom of the animal other, but always depends on supporting the other’s self-development and self-fulfillment.” In this framework, liberation is not a competition but a mutually reinforcing process.
For Weisberg, the aim of reinventing humanism in this way is to cultivate what she calls a “politics of hope.” This is not the hope that everything will magically improve, nor the kind of empty optimism that ignores real suffering. It is the hope grounded in the belief that human beings already possess the capacities needed to live differently – that empathy, solidarity, and mutual flourishing are not futuristic inventions but long-standing, if often neglected, possibilities within us. As she put it, “The new human we are seeking does not emerge from the ashes of civilization. It was there at the founding of civilization and is there in every moment. The new man is an old man, an old woman.”
The politics of hope therefore begins by recognizing that the potential for a more compassionate, more interdependent, more just world is not something we must create from nothing. It is something we must uncover, cultivate, and extend – across species lines. In this light, animal liberation is not the rejection of the human but the expansion of what it means to be human. It invites us to embrace our animality rather than deny it, to recognize the subjectivity of other beings, and to build a future in which no creature’s flourishing requires another’s oppression. If we take up this challenge, humanism might become not the philosophy that limits liberation, but the one that finally helps complete it.
An interetsing Q&A and lively networking followed he lecture (Photo Credit: Oliver Hirtenfelder)