A Brief History of Western Humanism
By: M. Collao Quevedo
Tags: Humanism, History, Western, Capitalism, Philosophy

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]