Introduction

Abstract

Has humanism outlived itself? Humanism can be characterized as an attitude to life based on reason, autonomy and self-knowledge of the human individual, recognition of universal human rights and values, and the belief in the betterment of the human being, mostly on the basis of its own efforts. While it arose in the Renaissance, it received much of its substance from the Enlightenment. There is a disenchantment, a disappointment and a scepticism born of the inequities of the imperialism of the nineteenth century and the horrors of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century; and there is even a stream of anti-humanism. What remains of humanism if, in spite of the Enlightenment, or perhaps even partly because of it, humans turn out to remain capable of excesses of inhuman behaviour? The Holocaust and the Gulag were shocking not just for their scale of murder but for the systematicity and design of it — as parts of grand, idealistic projects to improve humanity. According to the well known saying of Lyotard, the disillusion from this put an end to our ‘grand narrativesֹ’. And how humanistic are neo-liberal market economies? Most extreme in his denunciation of humanism and the Enlightenment was Theodor Adorno, with his saying that ‘in the inner abode of humanism, as its very soul, rages a locked up tyrant, who as fascist turns the world into a prison’ (2003, p. 100, my translation). Adorno’s criticism is grossly exaggerated; however, answers are required to justified criticism of earlier humanism.