Literature:

• Patrick R. Frierson, Kant's Questions: What is the Human Being?, Routledge, 2013.
• Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense and other political writings, Oxford
World Classics, 1985.
• Tony Davies, Humanism, Routledge, 1997.
• Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism, Humanist Press, 1997.
• Kant, What is Enlightenment ? (1784)
• Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, M.J. Gregor (transl.),
Martinus Nijhoff, 1974.
• Ernst Cassirer, The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, University of Chicago Press,
1956.

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“Humanism”. A controversial notion
• For some: synonymous with “culture”
• Secular and rational projects of European civilisation
• Democratization and freedom
• Protection of the individual and its rights
• For others: synonymous with cultural imperialism
• Self-mystification of modern society and culture
• Marginalisation and oppression of minorities
• Related to fascism, imperialist wars & colonialization
• Target of Critical Theory, Race Studies, Feminism and Anti-colonial studies
• Enlightenment’s promises of liberation and freedom were not fulfilled
• Political & social privileges reserved for a minority of white, male, central and west-
European individuals

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• Widespread philosophical, political, social & educational use of ‘humanism’
in the 20th century:
• French Catholic philosophers: Jean-Yves Calvez (1927-2010) and Pierre Bigo
(1906-)
• Existentialist philosophers: Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Albert Camus
• USSR Communist Party Doctrine of 22nd Congress (1961): Khrushchev’s
Party programme = ‘a document of true Communist humanism’
• USA Socialist & Civil Rights Movement
• Corliss Lamont (1902-1995):
• “To define twentieth-century humanism briefly, I would say that it is a philosophy of
joyous service for the greater good of all humanity in this natural world and
advocating the methods of reason, science, and democracy.” (Lamont, The
Philosophy of Humanism, 1949)
• “Humanity” & “Man” become autonomous historical & political agents
• Each individual as a realization of the man’s essence

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“Humanism” implies (Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism, 1949) :
• Freedom: humans “possess genuine freedom of creative choice and
action”
• Cultural optimism: “Ultimate faith in humankind”: “human beings
possess the power or potentiality of solving their own problems,
through reliance primarily upon reason and scientific method”
• Naturalistic metaphysics: nature ”as a constantly changing system of
matter and energy which exists independently of any mind or
consciousness”
• Ethics: “the individual’s pursusit of a good life contributes to the
welfare of the community”
• Secular: ”as an inseparable unity of body and personality we can have
no conscious survival after death”

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Humanism’s origins in the 19th century
• “Neo-humanistic” (neuhumanistisch) movement and educational
reformers in 19th century Germany:
• Immanuel Niethammer (1766-1848)
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
• Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1831)
• “Humanismus” (coined by the educationalist Niethammer) =
• university curriculum based on Greek & Latin classics
• Middle Ages: “humanitas” as opposed to “deitas”

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• Aim: civilise the practical and chauvinistic ethos of the northern
German ruling and middle classes
• “Our study of Greek history is a matter quite different from our other
studies . . . Knowledge of the Greeks is not merely pleasant, useful or
necessary to us – no, in the Greeks alone we find the ideal of what we
should like to be and produce.” (Humboldt)
• Return to the hellenic ideal for shaping Germany’s future nation
• Nation-building in 19th century
• “Humanism” = Germany’s future cultural identity

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• (Neo-)Humanism = ‘rebirth’ of Greco-Roman civilisation in 19th
century Germany
• association with Renaissance period
• “umanisti” = renaissance scholars and intellectuals of fifteenth-century Italy
• Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897)
• The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860)
• Vol. II: ‘The Development of the Individual’
• 15th century Italy: “the discovery of the world and of modern man”

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• Uomini universali: Sforzas, Borgias and Medici:
• Expression of the universal capacity to think of oneself as an autonomous
individual
• Constitutive tension of renaissance “man”:
• between individual energies (political or artistic) and the synergy of state and
citizenry
• Between the singular and the universal
• Between egoism and communitarianism
• Arthur, Comte de Gobineau: The Renaissance (1877), Essay on the
Inequality of Human Races (1853)

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The myth of essential man
• Enlightenment’s discovery of universal "man”:
• As something that is everywhere and always the same
• Unconditioned by time, place or circumstance
• Political origin of universal man in Enlightenment:
• revolutionary discourse of inalienable rights
• Creation of essentialist humanism in revolutionary and bourgeois
movements of the eighteenth century:
• from the ‘empirical plurality’ to the abstract singularity and universality of
Rousseau’s and Paine’s ‘Man’
• ‘all men naturally were born free’ (John Milton, Tenure of Kings and
Magistrates (1649))

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• “Siècle des lumières”, “age of illumination”:
• Universalising notions dissolve particularities as race, sex and class
• Humanity, the humanistic ‘Man’: always singular, always identical,
always in the present tense
• inhabits not a time or a place but a condition, timeless and unlocalised
• Man as a “transcendental principle”, an expectation, a “norm”
• “L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.” (‘Man is born
free, but is everywhere in chains’) (Rousseau, The Social Contract
(1762))
• distinction between an abstract ‘Man’ (defined by an essential freedom) and
actual ‘men’
• Between the constitutive (transcendental) and the empirical level
• “Natural rights”

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• “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens”, National Assembly
of France (1789):
• II. The end of all political association, is, the preservation of the natural and
imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are liberty, property, security,
and resistance of oppression.
• Thomas Paine, Rights of man (1791/2)
• “for whatever appertains to the nature of man, [it] cannot be annihilated by
man” (Rights of man)
• “Rights of mankind” belong not to this or that group of ‘men’ but to ‘Man’ in
general

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The Kantian Constitution of Universal Man
• Kant’s 4 questions:
• What can I know?
• What should I do?
• What may I hope?
• ››› all lead to: What is the human being?
• Universal Man = man endowed with transcendental powers
• 3 powers of legislation: nature, action, beauty & empirical research
• Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, Critique of Judgment:
investigation into 3 transcendental, normative powers
• Kant’s anthropology: between transcendental and empirical anthropology
• Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1791): reconcile the empirical with
the transcendental level

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• Quid juris vs. quid factis
• Justifying the validity of a concept/action vs. showing the empirical genesis of
facts/concepts
• Transcendental anthropology at odds with empirical anthropology
• “Women are incapable of true virture because they cannot act from
principles.”
• “Black skin is sufficient proof for stupidity.”
•…
• Only transcendental man is the measure of all things.

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• Nietzsche, Human All Too Human (1880),
• Family failing of philosophers. All philosophers involuntarily think of ‘man’ as
an aeterna veritas, as something that remains constant in the midst of all flux,
as a sure measure of things . . . Lack of historical sense is the family failing of
all philosophers; many, without being aware of it, even take the most recent
manifestation of man, such as has arisen under the impress of certain
religions, even certain political events, as the fixed form from which one has
to start out . . . But everything has become: there are no eternal facts, just as
there are no absolute truths. (Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, transl.
Hollingdale, 1973, 60–1)

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Renaissance humanism: lack of a coherent
intellectual programm
• Middle Ages: distinction between:
• Divinitas: Study of holy scripture
• Humanitas: Studies related to practical affairs of secular life; texts from
Roman & Greek antiquity
• Renaissance umanisti = experts of antique texts:
• including rhetoric, logic, mathematics and the study of Greek and Roman
authors (Cicerone)
• Humanism, a question of language
• central preoccupation is eloquence & rhetoric
• man = speaking animal: exists most fully in the communality of linguistic
exchange

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• Johnson’s Dictionary (1775): “humanist” = “a grammarian; a
philologer”.
• 15th century humanists: informal network of students, patrons, publishers
• “Humanism” in 15th & 16th century: no consistent meaning, no
linguistic existence, no common programme of interests or objectives
• Printing shop as the key humanist institution:
• invention of movable type (1450 by Johannes Guttenberg)
• Ernst Cassirer, The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (1948):
• “during the Italian Renaissance the term ‘Humanism’ denoted primarily a
specific intellectual program and only incidentally suggested the more general
set of values which have in recent times come to be called ‘humanistic’.”
(Cassirer 1948: 2–3)

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• No programm; only an informal curriculum, the studia humanitatis
• reading of ancient Greek and Roman authors and the application of Platonic,
Aristotelean and Ciceronian ideas and values to contemporary life
• Niccolo Machiavelli (1486-1527):
• On the coming of evening, I return to my home and enter my study; and at
the door I take off the day’s clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on
garments regal and courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient
courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that
food which only is mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to
speak with them and to ask them the reasons for their actions; and they in
their kindness [humanita] answer me; and for four hours of time I do not feel
boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened
by death; entirely I give myself over to them. (Machiavelli, Letters, 1961:142)

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Early Enlightenment: no universal
understanding of man
• Latin lacks definite and indefinite articles:
• distinction between ‘a man’ (any), ‘the man’ (particular) and ‘man’ (universal) is
grammatically indifferent
• Renaissance humanism & early Enlightenment: entangled in the problems
of sexual difference
• Francis Bacon (1561-1626):
• knowledge = “empire”, active conquest for practical ends
• Aristoteleans leave “Nature herself untouched and inviolate”
• Bacon sets out to ”seize or detain her [nature]”, compelling her into a “chaste, holy
and legal wedlock” from which the fruits of science will issue
• science = “temporis partus masculus” (‘the male progeny of time’)
• John Milton (1609-1674): ‘Laws are Masculin Births’
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Conclusion. Humanism
• Renaissance “humanist” values and characters:
• Not discovery of the future but recovery of the past
• No movement, no program, but shared passion of scholarly; itinerant
intellectuals
• Umanisti = friendship and intellectual exchange
• Importance of printing shop and books, not inalienable rights or political
programs
• Eloquence, rhetoric and language studies
• Conversational and communicational model of speech, public discourse, not
scientific normativity

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Conclusion. Humanism
• Humanism’s origin: 19th century German educators and school-
reformers’ twofold retro-projection:
• On Renaissance & Enlightenment
• Emergence of human normativity in enlightenment’s political
discourse & “natural rights” movement
• Idea of a transcendental-universal core in empirical man
• Tension between the a priori and the a posteriori
• Humanism = affirmation of men’s exception on the ground of a
normative (transcendental) level

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