A HEIDEGGERIAN EVALUATION OF HUMANISM IN MORDECHAL RICHLER’S «THE STREET ».

One of the concerns of Mordecal Richer's work is describing the lives of Jewish families in their struggle for a better life. This vision by necessity leads to a humanist stance, which embraces all of humanity, and seeks to eradicate difference that engenders prejudices, hatred and racism. Noble as this endeavour is, there are inherent problems which stem from the flaws within humanism itself. One of the best critiques of humanism in our time has been rendered by Martin Heidegger in his life-long thinking on western philosophy. In this paper, it is my intension to use some of Heidegger's concepts in order to bring critical focus upon Richler's humanism as it is manifested in his short story "The Street". First of all, let us briefly contextualize humanism.

Fundamental to humanism, be it a religious doctrine, a scientific theory or an ethical code, is the "human being", his dignity and freedom, which Heidegger calls, "Man freeing himself to himself '1. A voyage backwards to the roots of humanist thinking, i.e., where the world changed into a doctrine of man, leads inevitably to the modern representation of the world as "thing". To represent here means to "bring what is present at hand before oneself, by representing it, and forcing it back into this relationship to oneself as the normative realm"�. Man sets himself "as the setting in which whatever is must henceforth set itself forth, must present itself'�. Hence, the world is transformed into "object'Vpicture, and man into "subject". What is decisive here is the idea of man's centrality: "Man himself expressly takes up this position as one constituted by himself, that he intentionally maintains it as that taken up by himself, and that he makes it secure as the solid footing for a possible development of humanity'"*.

This representation of "things" reaches its pinnacle with Descartes, for whom "truth is determined and validated by certainty, which he locates to the world outside itself in an exploratory, necessarily exploitative way"�. This conception of the thing, for Heidegger, comes to define humanism as a "moral-aesthetic anthropology": "The name «anthropology» as used here does not mean just some investigation of man by a natural science. Nor does it mean the doctrine established within the Christian theology of man created, fallen and redeemed. It designates that philosophical interpretation of man which explains and evaluates whatever is, in its entirety, from the standpoint of man and in relation to man"�.