A Brief History of Western Humanism

Generally, philosophies that fall under the category of Humanism claim that all human beings share common traits on the basis of which they hold a special worth and dignity. Although the specific content of ‘human essence’ advanced by various strands of Western Humanism may vary, some elements are consistently found across the board:

• An essentialism that identifies specific attributes that make up the ‘essence’ of human life — traits without which human life cannot be and that separate humans from non-human beings.
• A universalism that claims that these essential human traits are shared by all human beings.
• An exceptionalism that attributes a special dignity, worth, and importance to human beings and to exclusively human traits.
• Normative claims about how human beings must be or act in order to be faithful to their unique human constitution.
• An anthropocentrism on the basis of which the worth and dignity of non-human beings is assessed and hierarchized according to the extent to which they embody human traits or approximate ideals of human life (what Rosi Braidotti refers to as the usage of Man as the ‘measure of all things’).[1]
• An exceptional value attributed to distinctly human forms of mental functioning such as rationality and moral agency.
• A conception of human beings as uniquely capable of self-understanding, self-perfection or self-realization (either through their own efforts or with the help of God’s grace).
• The view that human beings have the practical and theoretical capacity to examine, criticize, and transform the world around them — and to produce, on the basis of this, more favorable conditions of existence.
• Understandings of animality and materiality as things that must be transcended for the human to be fully human (e.g. rational and autonomous).
• A general concern for questions regarding the status and conditions of existence of human life in specific stages of historical development.
• A view of human beings as makers of their own history.
• Normative claims regarding the direction in which historical development should be steered (according to the specific needs of human life).

These humanist ideas were developed during the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods of European history.

The Renaissance began to frame humans as autonomous beings capable of freeing themselves from the realities of the social world and from theological and philosophical accounts of human life. As such, human life and social reality began to be thought of in more secular terms, as the product of human activity as opposed to as dominated by Christian metaphysics. From this emerged an empirical conception of Man and a search for Man’s ‘true’ identity that led thinkers to inquire into the conditions under which his true existence is denied or affirmed. These lines of inquiry included searches for the truth about man’s social and political life, about the relation between social structures and human nature, about our empirical and metaphysical cognitions, as well as concerns about which forms of life are fit for the ‘true’ man.

Although the Renaissance saw an intellectual movement away from theological accounts of the world, it did not reject but only secularized the previous era’s dualisms (e.g. distinctions between the ‘heavens oriented true Christian Self’ and the ‘earthly bound untrue Christian Other’ were secularized in the form of ‘normal and rational’ human beings and ‘abnormal or irrational’ human beings). The main concern was no longer that of understanding the relationship between man and God or man’s difference and rightful place in the hierarchy of being, but that of understanding the relationship between the ‘real’ or ‘currently existing’ man and the ‘true’ man, of man and the man-made world, of man’s aspirations and nature’s impediments to their realization, etc. (The patriarchal underpinnings of such lines of inquiry being all but subtle).

In other words, this intellectual period sought to understand the various contradictions that make up the human world. Yet, it failed to grasp the wider social and material realities behind these conflicts, giving rise to a series of Utopian answers to social problems that placed a great deal of faith in science and technology’s capacity to subordinate nature for human ends, in revolutions’ capacities to create radically new relations between people, and in education’s potential to foster or bring forth people’s ‘true’ humanity.

These ideas about how to bring existing men into a state of full or true humanity and of man’s subordination to the product of his activities were further developed by Enlightenment thinkers whose strand of humanism retained the previous era’s empirical conception of man but moved away from Utopian aspirations, placing greater importance on human reason and emphasizing its role in the understanding and transformation of human life. The result of this was a more rationalist form of humanist thought, but one that continued to ground itself in anthropocentric and dualist frameworks that deemed human reason a key marker of humans’ difference and superiority to the non-human world.

Reason was here viewed not only as an exclusively human trait but as that which allows human beings to understand and rationally evaluate and transform their current situation (not in the Utopian fashion of the previous era but according to real possibilities available within objective reality).

This conception of human life demanded that some of the metaphysical assumptions about human essence that were upheld during the Renaissance (e.g., obscure capacities intrinsic to human beings such as love and communion) be discarded and that questions regarding human life be dealt with within the realm of human reason and human reality alone. Accordingly, Man was no longer conceptualized as an ahistorical, metaphysical entity with inalienable powers and features, but as a complex being who lives in a world that he both creates and criticizes — a world that cannot be explained by appealing to only metaphysics or only mechanistic accounts of historical progress.

Accordingly, the central question was now that of how it is that men choose a particular social realty despite their own reason, which in turn problematized humans’ previously unquestioned capacity for critical consciousness and ability to act in accordance with the dictates of reason. Thus, unlike the concept of Man that characterized the previous era, the Enlightenment period recognized an incompatibility between human reason and social reality, and between the correctness of speculated ideals and of ideals embodied in social institutions.

However, because human beings were now understood as capable of recognizing the contradictions of their world and to rationally think about ways of overcoming these contradictions, they were also able to recognize and reshape their conditions of existence, to bring about historical transformations, and to progress from one mode of existence to another; a form of progress that, if carried out according to the dictates of reason, would create for human beings more favorable conditions of existence — that is, a world better fit for human beings.

As such, the Enlightenment did not view human beings as tied to a specific metaphysics or as reducible to empirically available data, but as creating themselves in history through their own activity (activity that could be faithful to or reject the dictates of reason and, thus, either affirm or deny our humanity). A useful insight for going beyond reductive accounts of Man and for theorizing his potential richness and historical contingency was the understanding of Man as both creator and slave to his creations — an insight first put forth by Francis Bacon and later developed in Enlightenment theories of alienation like that of Ludwig Feuerbach (for whom Man was not just a thinking ego but a constantly changing relationship, the product of concrete social realities and practical human activity).[2]

Throughout the twentieth century, Marxist humanists, drawing on Karl Marx’s early writings, applied more critically these Enlightenment humanist tenets to challenge capitalist relations of production and its alienating organization of human labor — the central idea being that universal human emancipation and the production of a world fit for human beings depends on the successes of class-based anti-capitalist struggles and on the rational development of the productive forces (for human ends).

Yet, our current era is dominated by a very different strand of humanist thought: a liberal humanism that accompanies and legitimizes today’s capitalist order. This strand of humanism recognizes neither universal alienation nor universal emancipation, but only a universal and ahistorical vision of human beings as rational, self-interested, autonomous, and blameworthy individuals competing (endlessly and irremediably) for power and resources — a vision of human life to which capitalism’s organization of production and social life is supposedly faithful. Accordingly, this strand of humanist thought views human progress not in terms of the production of a new world better fit for all human life but in terms of inclusion into the existing order (e.g. of previously marginalized communities). The buzzword here is ‘opportunities’.

This ahistorical humanist narrative fits well within the existing capitalist order as it does not throw into question the conditions under which distributions and exclusions of human life are carried out or maintained in the first place. As such, this narrative helps downplay the importance of questions regarding wider social and political realities, of systemically problematic practices and institutions. Ultimately, this humanist narrative naturalizes a world of competing interests and limited resources, a world of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in which some must be sacrificed for the greater good of those who better embody these ideals of human life — a decision that is made on a daily basis both within and by rich Western nations (e.g. the killing and incarceration of black and indigenous individuals in the US and Canada and slave-like working conditions in the global South).

Under such conditions, the ones who are left behind are none other than those who, from the perspective of the existing capitalist order, are deemed unproductive, needy, or uncooperative. In other words, the poor, the elderly, the disabled, the undocumented, the homeless, the ill, the culturally or sexually incompatible, etc. The list goes on.

Within today’s capitalist order and its accompanying humanist narrative, these problematic groups have been relegated to the realm of sub- or non-humans and treated accordingly by the systems and institutions that organize and regulate our everyday lives. This rhetorical de-humanization and corresponding treatment of problematic groups is justified by their inability or stubborn unwillingness to transcend materiality and animality (and adopt, instead, the individualist and autonomous vision of human life that gives rhetorical validation to capitalist production and expansion). In the end, it is this very de-humanization that is mobilized by representatives of the existing order to justify in the eyes of the public the exploitation, exclusion, and killing of those who do not count or behave as ‘proper’ human beings or that challenge the existing capitalist order — which, as mentioned earlier, is supposedly already faithful to human nature and the best of all possible worlds.

Sources:

[1] Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity , 2013.

[2] Fromm, Erich, ed. Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1965.