How Could Humanists Become Solidary with the Non-Humanist World? Towards an Anamnestic Humanism

Abstract

This chapter is written by German political theologian Jürgen Manemann and is titled “How Could Humanists Become Solidary with the Non-Humanist World? Towards an Anamnestic Humanism.” Here, Manemann is interested in what humanism is in the deepest sense, and turns to Jean-Paul Sartre to offer the idea of an “anamnestic humanism,” as in amnesia. That is, humanism might just involve the remembering of things forgotten, the stories that bind us to the past. These stories, as Manemann effectively demonstrates, are always rooted in death and remembering that what connects humanism to humans across all of time is our shared mortality.