Salvatore Puledda, Rome 18/4/96
I wish to thank the University of Rome and the Forum of Humanist Students who have organized this seminar and invited me to speak on the crisis of traditional humanism and the new tendencies or currents in recent years that seem to be shaping a new idea of Humanism. This whole area is, as we are all aware, a subject of vast scope, and one moreover that does not lend itself well to generalizations. Both for this reason and the brief time available to us on this occasion I will limit myself to presenting a few ideas that will certainly require further development and more rigorous language, but that will in any case illustrate to a first approximation the problematic of Humanism in today’s world.
First I will point out that at present the concept of Humanism is in a most contradictory and ambiguous state. The meaning of the word "humanism" appears lost today, as with the Tower of Babel, in a confusion of tongues and interpretations. And so, before proceeding, we first need to reconstruct and to clarify the various historical manifestations of Humanism, or at least the most important ones. But we should point out that the focus of an investigation of this type cannot be restricted to a specialized or academic discourse, as though we were merely giving the solution to some historical curiosity. This is because each "humanism" entails, some more explicitly than others, a definition or image of human "nature" or the human "essence." Each humanism asserts things through such definitions that relate to other topics such as how human beings "are" and how they "should be." In other words: each humanism contains a "normative" aspect or a "project" that is to be put into practice. If we analyze this theme in a little more depth we will see that each person, that each of us has our own image – which may be more or less clear, more or less coherent, or may perhaps be tacit or a bit confused – of what the human being is or should be, and it is on the basis of this image that we try to carry forward, or we justify certain behaviors, or we try to avoid others. It is also clear that such images are not individual, personal, but that they originate, so to speak, in the cultural "substratum" in which each one of us has been formed. For this reason, we need a preliminary discussion to try to clarify the concept of "humanism."
We will turn now to the various interpretations of humanism and to the various associated "images" of the human being that have been proposed. The first humanism we will consider is that humanism by antonomasia, the Renaissance. Certainly, we all know that the Renaissance is a vast and complex cultural phenomenon, which presents aspects that are highly diverse and, on occasion, even quite contradictory. Nevertheless, with respect to the image of the human being, there are certain characteristic outlines, we could say, that appear at the beginning of the Renaissance and remain throughout its development. I would summarize them thus: 1) The exaltation of the dignity and freedom of the human being; 2) The recognition of liberty regarding the human essence or human "nature;" in other words, the human being does not possess an essence that is fixed once and for all, but is a free and self-constructed being. This idea is found expressed with particular clarity in On the Dignity of the Man by Pico della Mirandola, which can be considered a real and appropriate "Manifesto" of Renaissance humanism; 3) The conception of man as a great miracle, as an infinite being who, in being a microcosm, reflects within himself all the properties of the universe or macrocosm. This conception implies that the universe is not simple inanimate matter, as in the modern vision, but is in its own way a sentient and living organism, a sort of macro-anthropos. This conception, for we who are immersed in the modern way of thinking, in the system of truths commonly accepted today (in the modern episteme as Foucault would say), it is extremely difficult to grasp this view, despite its having been the unquestionable truth for the most important figures of the Renaissance such as Leonardo da Vinci, for example. By the end of the Renaissance, with the birth of experimental science and the development of rationalist and mechanistic philosophy, the human being came to be interpreted as a purely natural phenomenon. This started the decline of humanism as a philosophical vision that restores a central position or uniqueness for the human being in the world of nature. By the nineteenth century, with idealism and positivism, the word "humanism" has completely lost its Renaissance meaning and, when it is used, as in Feuerbach, it is to propose the use of the word humanism in a rigorous manner within an interpretation of the human being as purely and simply a natural being.
In this century people have once again begun to speak, and with increasing frequency, of "humanism," and the term has now acquired new meanings. Important philosophical currents have defined themselves as humanist, and different people have spoken of Marxist, Christian, and Existentialist humanisms. But those currents of thought, although attesting to a new interest in humanism, give radically different interpretations to the term. Consequently, in our century we find ourselves not in the presence of a homogeneous, complex and articulated humanist movement, as in the Renaissance, but instead in a situation of conflict among various humanisms, since each of the three currents we have mentioned have a different understanding of the human essence. For Marx, on the one hand the human being is a natural being as Feuerbach understood it, yet at the same time human beings possess a uniqueness that characterizes them as "human," that is to say, as fundamentally distinct from all other natural beings, and this characteristic is human sociability, the capacity to form a society. It is only in society that human beings, by means of their labor with others, ensure the satisfaction of their natural needs (food, housing, clothing, reproduction, and so on) and transform nature, bringing it ever nearer to themselves, making it ever more human. Man, for Marx, ceases to be a human being when his natural sociability is denied or negated, as occurs in capitalist society, in which his work, which is a social fact, is appropriated by a minority. In Christian or Theocentric humanism, as developed by Jacques Maritain, the principal exponent of that ideology which emerged in the first part of this century, the humanity of man is conceived and defined in terms of his limitations with respect to God. Man is human because he is the son of God, because he is immersed in the Christian history of salvation. In Existentialist Humanism, as Sartre formulated it in 1946, man has no fixed essence, he is fundamentally an existence launched to the world, which is constructed through choice. The fundamental characteristic that makes man "human" is the freedom to choose and to choose how to be, to develop projects and to form himself. Man ceases to be "human" when he rejects this freedom and adopts behaviors that Sartre calls "bad faith," dishonesty, that is: giving in to codified and accepted behaviors under the routine of given roles and social hierarchies.
And as we know well, these various interpretations of the nature or essence of the human being have not remained limited solely to the philosophical realm, but have been launched into the political arena thanks to the creation of political parties that have struggled with each other to win power. In this way, the formulation of Christian Humanism may be viewed within the general movement of opening of the Catholic Church to the modern world, which had already begun in the past century. The intention was to constitute the ideological foundation of political parties of Christian inspiration that would contain the power of liberal and Marxist parties. Sartre, too, made an attempt to formulate his Existentialism as a Humanism in order to move in the direction of opening a third way in France between the Christian and Marxist parties.
Amid this confusion, amid this conflict among contrasting images, in this century the word "humanism" has become empty of meaning and has come to indicate some kind of generic concern with human life, subject as such life is to problems of all types, and even to the danger of global catastrophe.
This situation was lucidly analyzed by Heidegger toward the end of the ’40s in his famous "Letter on Humanism" which he sent to a French philosopher who had asked him how it would be possible to give meaning once again to the word "humanism," which had become subject to so many diverse interpretations. Heidegger examines with great acuity and depth the various historical humanisms, and finds in all of them a common, tacit assumption, which is the following: all modern and ancient humanisms agree, although they do not sufficiently specify this point, that the human being conforms to the age-old definition of Aristotle: man is the "rational animal." No one doubts the second part of that definition: that of animal, but the term rational takes on the variable character according to the different philosophies of intellect, soul, individuality, spirit, person, and so on. Certainly, Heidegger says, in this manner one may assert any of various truths regarding the human being, but in all of them the human essence is conceived in a very narrow way. The human essence is thought of from its animalitas and not toward its humanitas, and man thus remains reduced to a natural phenomenon, no different than any other entity and, finally, to a thing, forgetting that fundamentally the human being is the "who" that is posing the question on the being of entities, and regarding his or her own essence. This is a fundamental aspect of Heidegger’s thought, and must constitute as well a central point in any discourse on humanism, and so we will go into this a little more deeply. This examination will lead us to focus on another image of the human being, the one that currently prevails and in accordance with which the human being is a "biological machine," which is the image of the human being proposed by science or, that is, in the interpretations of science in the name of positivism or neo-positivism.
Heidegger says: when human beings in their daily lives, or in scientific practice, are asked what a certain entity is, for example, what is a stone, a plant, an atom, they answer by saying: the entity is this, or it is that. For example, a stone is a mineral, a solid, and so on. They answer briefly, giving certain predicates, certain definitions always combined with the word is, to explain what the entity is. People discuss whether a given entity is this or that, but never ask about the word is. The clarification of being that is at the base of an understanding of the entity, remains totally forgotten. And not only this: the human being is studied and understood in all the human sciences such as biology as an entity, an object, like any natural phenomenon whatever, forgetting that it is the human being who poses the question about entities, who asks "What is it?" or "What or who is.…" In short, for Heidegger, there is a fundamental difference between the objects in the world (the entities) and the human being, an ontological difference that the modern view of the human being increasingly tends to overlook and reduce.
We have seen how the traditional humanisms have considered human beings starting with their animality, that is, as a zoological phenomenon but with "something more." In the era of technology, our own time, that "something more" tends to be ignored, to disappear, and the human being definitively acquires the characteristics of a "thing." In being reduced to a thing, in a technical sense, the fundamental aspect of the human being then becomes that of utility. Human beings are now "biological" or thermodynamic "machines," that is, the human being is no longer anything but a worker, a producer, a consumer. In this global phenomenon of objectification, of reducing people to "things," there is no possibility whatever of forming a basis for values that are not related to utility. The human being, like the world in general, loses "meaning" and life becomes dull, humdrum, banal… and the sense, the meaning of existence for the human being disappears. For Heidegger, this is the root of the nihilism and the immense destructiveness of today’s technological society.
The image of the human being as a "biological machine" is currently the dominant conception of the human being in the West, and that image is beginning to reach, or has perhaps already reached the level being "pre-logical," that is, it becomes part of the substratum upon which all our discourse is built and articulated, the substratum which is neither observed nor studied: this image then belongs to the world of facts on which there is a priori agreement, a world that is no longer discussed, of unconscious social truth as Foucault would say.
The action or influence of this image, however, produces a series of problems, some of which are serious. Let us consider one such problem related to the area of the environment, which we all consider to be crucial at this time. In the view of present-day environmentalist currents, it is the objectification of nature, treating nature as a "thing" and transforming it into a purely economic object, that lies at the root of the grave environmental problems now threatening to carry our planet to a catastrophe. Most environmentalists do not hesitate to locate themselves within a purely naturalist view of the human being: for them the human being is simply one more biological machine, subject to the laws of evolution in nature, but a machine that at this time is functioning badly – we do not know why – whether due to genetic reasons, due to some sort of intrinsic defect, or due to a series of extrinsic factors in their surroundings, the environment. Having eliminated in this narrowly naturalist vision all freedom and intentionality in the human being, there remains no other explanation for this defective human functioning than the iron determinism of the laws of nature. For those holding this vision, this leads to a sort of quiet desperation and a tragic and negative view of the human being, who has become the "villain," the bad animal who destroys all the other forms of life. Paradoxically, in this vision of the world it is then the animal world that ends up acquiring all the characteristics of natural goodness and kindness that Rousseau had once attributed to humanity. Thus, the animal world comes to possess those intentional psychic qualities which have been stripped from the human being: what follows is a sort of Disneyland image in which the ferocity, the aggression, the intrinsic violence of the animal dimension – to eat it and to be eaten – are attenuated until they are almost made to disappear, because in any case life maintains its balance and is preserved. In this paradoxical vision, the human being plays the part of a dangerous disequilibrating factor, as a result of which their eventual disappearance would not necessarily be seen as something entirely negative.
A second interesting case relates to the political currents whose roots lie in the Marxist tradition or, more generally, "the left," and that are opposed to neo-liberalism in economics, denouncing its inhumanity in the name of the higher human values of equality and solidarity. But in a narrowly materialistic vision of the human being such as held by the left, a vision that aims to be fully scientific, how then it is possible to establish values, which are, by definition, a-scientific? How can a human being – a biological machine that obeys mechanical laws – construct values? And how can the left object so strenuously to the market laws that neo-liberalism presents as the scientific mechanism of natural selection in the realm of economic activity? Why so many objections to these scientific market laws, if in the left’s view the human being is simply a biological machine that then has to be subject to the natural selection that occurs in its (in this case economic) environment? The neo-liberalism that is based on a sort of social Darwinism, notwithstanding its crudeness, is, therefore, more coherent than the position of the "left" we have spoken of. I say all this not to try to impart lessons to the "left" (another vague and confusing concept), but simply to show that a coherent position in these two areas, the environment and the economy – a position that opposes the destruction of nature and of humanity and at the same time opposes neo-liberalism – in order to be able to advance, this position will have to abandon its naturalist conception of the human being, will have to throw overboard at once this concept of the human being as a "biological machine" and the "rational animal" – and to be able to advance will now have to build a new image of the human being.
In recent years, that is since the ’80s, new movements have appeared in both the political and philosophical fields, as well as the physical sciences, that put the human being first, that restore a special and central position to the human being in the natural world, and that announce a new conception of humanism.
In the area of politics it seems to me that Perestroika, which the Soviet leadership initiated in the ’80s, constitutes an extraordinary occurrence that, viewed from the outside, is almost a "miracle." Dr. Zagladin has spoken of the positive results and the difficulties and shortcomings of Perestroika. But bringing the nuclear arms race to an end and reducing the threat of nuclear catastrophe clearly constitutes a true milestone in the history of the modern world, and for this reason I can say in all sincerity that all of humanity owes a large debt of gratitude to the Soviet leadership of those years for the choices they made, guided by General Secretary Gorbachev.
In the area of philosophy, the most recent entry is the New Humanism of Silo. Silo has reformulated the concept of humanism and placed it in a global historical perspective, which accords with the times we now live in, in which for the first time in human history we are seeing a planetary society beginning to emerge. We all of course know of the humanism that arose with such vigor in Europe during the time of the Renaissance, restoring the dignity and centrality of the human being that had been suppressed and devalued during the Christian Middle Ages. And Silo affirms that humanist expressions have arisen in other cultures, in Islam for example, and in India and China. Of course, such expressions were known by different names, since the references and parameters were distinct in the various cultures, but no less an expression of humanism than in the Renaissance was at times implicit in all these other cultures in the form of a human "attitude" and "approach to life." In Silo’s conception, then, humanism is not a culturally or geographically delimited phenomenon, a purely European occurrence, but has been born and developed in various parts of the world in various eras. And it is precisely this phenomenon that now makes it possible to build a unifying, convergent direction for all the different cultures of the world which, in a planet now unified by means of mass communication, are increasingly thrown, without choice, into conflict-filled contact with each other.
Silo places the human being in the dimension of the freedom. Following the phenomenological tradition, then, human consciousness for Silo is not simply a reflection or copy of the natural world, whether passive or distorted. Human consciousness is a fundamentally intentional activity, a ceaseless activity of interpretation and rebuilding of the social and natural world. Human beings, although they participate in the natural world inasmuch as they possess a body, are not reducible to a simple natural phenomenon, do not have a fixed and unchanging nature, a definable essence – each human being is a "project" of transformation of the natural world, and of himself or herself.
For Silo our collective human project is to humanize the Earth. This means to eliminate physical pain and mental suffering and, in this way, to eliminate all forms of violence and discrimination that rob human beings of their intentionality and freedom, reducing them only to things, to natural objects, to instruments of the intentions of others.
But for a planet that is today rapidly being unified, in which peoples are thrown together without choice, with distinct visions of the world confronting each other, with differing purposes and contrasting values – what can we find to serve as a common denominator to make possible a convergence, a uniting of the many peoples, the many cultures, the many religions? How can people come together to create a truly universal human nation? In Silo’s formulation this is possible through each culture’s discovering or rediscovering in its history those humanist historical "moments" in which their best productions and actions have been linked to the following parameters: 1) The central position of the human being as a value and concern; 2) An affirmation of the equality of all human beings; 3) A recognition of cultural and personal diversity; 4) The development of knowledge beyond that accepted as absolute truth; 5) The affirmation of the freedom of ideas and beliefs; and 6) The repudiation of violence.
Humanism as defined with this approach and attitude to personal and collective life is, then, not the heritage of one particular culture – it is the heritage of all the cultures of the Earth. And it is in this sense that such a humanism can be spoken of as a universal humanism.