How can we restore meaning to the word humanism? (Beaufret to Heidegger 1946).
Abstract
At times, an individual in modernity can feel dehumanised by work, by administration, by technology, and by political power. This experience of being dehumanised can take the individual to an existential awareness of the priority of existence over essence. But what does this existential experience mean? Are there ways in which this experience can reconnect the individual to her being human, or to her being part of humanity? Any such reconnection is further complicated by the suspicion that universal presuppositions concerning ‘humanity’ or ‘human being’ or ‘humanism’ carry pretensions of imperialist grandeur that must be challenged. How, then, might one proceed to connect existential vertigo with a culture of humanism that, while resisting such pretensions, nevertheless can find meaning for the dehumanised individual? In what follows I argue that a concept of modern metaphysics, with an aporetic (Hegelian) logic of subjective experience, can carry this reconnection of the I and the We, offering meaning not in the resolution of their opposition, but in learning that the meaning of their opposition, and the meaning of humanity, is learning, is our education. I argue that it is only within modern educational metaphysics that humanity and the individual Know Thyself.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
See, for example, Althusser’s (1984) powerful statements on ideology in Essays on Ideology.
From part 3 of Zizek’s (1996).
See Benjamin (1994).
Qur’an 5:33; Sanhedrin 4, 5.
This would not be news in the higher education systems of many countries, but it was the first undergraduate liberal arts degree in England for many years; http://mla.winchester.ac.uk.
Sometimes translated as ‘Existentialism is a Humanism.’
Sartre uses the term “relative-absolute” in Being and Nothingness (1969, p. xxii) to describe the phenomenon that is relative to experience yet absolutely indicative of itself in doing so (see also 1969, p. xxxii).
This resonates with the life and death struggle in Hegel, and indeed with Zizek who argued recently that “the fact that cultures are different, that each culture possesses its own irreducible specificity, is a factum brutum, a banality that lacks the dignity of an object of thought; the problem, on the contrary, is to explain how, in spite of their differences, cultures none the less interact; how a certain (poetic, ideological, etc.) theme have universal repercussions and cross the barriers that separate different cultures” (1996, p. 216).
Beaufet’s note also refers to Sartre’s lecture.
Raphael illustrates this for Plato and Aristotle in his School of Athens, with Plato pointing up to a transcendental essence and Aristotle forward to a lived existence.
Kaufmann (1921–1980) is a translator of Nietzsche and a self-avowed existentialist.
I have described how this logic was the first principle of cultures of error in the history of Western philosophy (Tubbs 2009).
And there are moments in Levinas when the unassimilable Other sides with a genuine face-to-face against a violent third party, e.g. on the massacres at Sabra and Shantila. Here it is the Palestinian who is wholly Other, against a knowable infinity of a particular face-to-face; see Caygill 2002, pp. 191–194.
References
Althusser, L. (1984). Essays in ideology. London: Verso.
Aristotle. (1984). The complete works of Aristotle. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Benjamin, W. (1994). The origin of German tragic drama. London: Verso.
Caygill, H. (2002). Levinas and the political. London: Routledge.
Heidegger, M. (1993). In D. F. Krell (Ed.), Basic writings. London: Routledge.
Kant, I. (1968). Critique of pure reason. London: Macmillan.
Kaufmann, W. (1959). The owl and the nightingale. London: Faber and Faber.
Kierkegaard, S. (1998). The point of view. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Levinas, E. (1998). Otherwise than being. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Sartre, J. P. (1969). Being and nothingness. London: Routledge.
Sartre, J. P. (2007). Existentialism and humanism. London: Methuen.
Tubbs, N. (1997). Contradiction of enlightenment. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Tubbs, N. (2004). Philosophy’s higher education. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Tubbs, N. (2005). Philosophy of the teacher. Oxford: Blackwell.
Tubbs, N. (2008). Education in Hegel. London: Continuum.
Tubbs, N. (2009). History of Western philosophy. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Zizek, S. (1996). The indivisible remainder. London: Verso.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Tubbs, N. Existentialism and Humanism: Humanity—Know Thyself!. Stud Philos Educ 32, 477–490 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-012-9354-z
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-012-9354-z