A new Humanism

What’s New in the New Europe? Redefining Culture, Politics, Identity, 2019

RETHINKING THE HUMAN CONDITION IN THE AGE OF MODERNITY rom where does the anxious suspicion arise that the biblical eschatology of last things and end times is rapidly approaching? Apocalypse originates in the ancient Greek word apocalypsis, which means to uncover what you could not see before-to reveal. The biblical use of the word "apocalypse" means that which is revealed by divine intervention. For purposes of this paper I will adhere to the ancient Greek meaning which can be stated as simply taking note of that which has been overlooked. One thing that has not been overlooked is how European history is riddled with violence over religious beliefs. The modern response has been to diminish religious relevance. But that was followed by unparalleled nationalistic violence in the 20 th century. Today, 21 st Century Europe remains embroiled in religious conflicts despite its best efforts to avoid them. In the hope of pursuing a more promising path to peaceful existence, I offer some overlooked biblical and secular observations about the human condition. Modernity originates with Western culture; and that culture is overwritten with Christendom. To rethink the human condition begins with rethinking the biblical. But to that there is resistance. Europe has turned Christendom into a relic. It has turned away from entanglement in conflicts over dogma and moral certainty by embracing the materiality of an endless progress regulated by the modern equivalent to spirituality found in an enforcing of liberal Democracy. The belief in the endless amelioration of human conditions that is imbedded in the word "progress" has no last things or end time. Instead, progress is about endless change. Its relationship to eschatology seems clear enough: the eschatological tribute to last things has given rise to the modern answer of endless offerings through progress. But progress presupposes knowledge of human

2013

The article reveals that the main socio-philosophical doctrines: 1) approach social development mainly in an abstract way, regardless of human nature; 2) do not take into consideration the factors of vagueness and self-organization which are an integral part of human being’s vital activity; 3) do not adequately inquire into the role of cultural facts in a historical perspective. Cataclysms in the modern world, socio-economic, ecologic and other crises appear in a different light if considered in the context of conceptions about human nature. A move of society towards genuine humanistic existence depends, to a great extent, on the prospects of all round development of a human being, his/her personal moral qualities. It is highlighted that the inability to reasonably manage social processes, which are determined by the archaic human nature, causes danger to humankind. The human mind has its own history and many traces of the previous stages of development are imprinted into the psyche...

Brill | Schöningh eBooks, 2021

In the following essay I attempt to lay bare a certain perspective on the human condition, which must precede any approach to the question of humanism. The perspective I seek to develop here combines a highly specific understanding of the SACRED with a distinct conception of time and history. My aim is to unify the understanding of God, man, and time, and to this end I will cite excerpts and ideas from three of the most significant texts in human history -the Bible, Hegel's Phenomenology, and Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities. This project not only involves the three disciplines that are intertwined with these texts and the necessary dialogue between them but also three temporal eras (linked with specific regions). First, time from its beginning to its end (connected with the cosmos and heaven), second, Europe's history insofar as it extends to the Enlightenment and its distorsions and thus the present day, and finally, Austria or Vienna for the first half of the twentieth century (Freud, Schönberg, Gödel, Schrödinger, Klimt, Wittgenstein, etc.) as, what we will discover to be, a paradigmatic epilogue to history. All three approaches will be woven together through a category which I will refer to as transition. Together with the theme of the body (or a sphere formed by the body1), and the question of time, this will provide the key to a greatly enhanced understanding of God, history, and the human condition. 1 M. Merleau-Ponty captures this sphere wonderfully in his grandiose "Phenomenology of Perception": "It is a nexus of living meanings, not the law for a certain number of covariant terms." See M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of perception, London 2005, 175.

2011

The choice of the word "reconstructing" for the title of this presentation responds to a specific set of concerns. I could, after all, have used alternative words such as "rethinking", "reimagining" or "reinventing". The reason for my lexical choice is to put emphasis on, precisely, an issue of structure.

Saberes: Revista interdisciplinar de Filosofia e Educação, 2023

In Matrix reloaded a very emblematic figure appears to give meaning to the plot: the Keymaker. In this essay we bring Mikhail Bakhtin as this Keymaker, a man whose philosophy leads us to new ways of thinking and to the constitution of a new human being, full of alterity and surplus of seeing the others. Just like the Matrix Keymaker, who had a key for every situation that appeared to himself, he was held prisoner by a character who brought evil together or the monologic discourse, the Merovingian, and in the end, he is released by Neo to help saving humanity, a similar path to the one who Bakhtin follows. Bakhtin's works reveal a deep sensitivity to the issues inherent to the human being. They, like their author, were kept prisoners of systems by means of which individual freedom was persecuted. Fortunately, the dialogue rescued Bakhtin, and his thoughts have also been appropriated and disseminated, so that we are incited to think about new ways of constituting men and worlds, senses and signs, languages, and structures. Comparisons and abstractions aside, what we have to say, to conclude, is that Bakhtin's contribution to a new humanism is unmistakable. His thoughts help us formulate a more equal and different human being at the same time. If the language unites us, Bakhtin used it to propose a new human being, in a relationship in which, the differences are constituting and in contrast, the similarities and inequalities are the uneven ones.

History of European Ideas, 2019

Posthumanist and New Materialist thought attempts to undo the supremacy and distinction of the human being through accounting for the agential capacities of the animal and material world. New Materialism in particular constructs a vision of a vital natural world in order to turn us away from humanism and toward a more holistic understanding of nature, and political actants. In this article, I argue that there can be a humanist new materialist position that sees the vitalism of the natural world while maintaining the uniqueness of the human being. This position can be found in the natural science of the eighteenth century in the work of Georges-Louis LeClerc de Buffon and Charles Bonnet. Reminding ourselves of this alternative mode of thinking about a vital nature, and its vision of a self-regenerating human being in a vital and regenerative universe, is a path toward regenerating humanism itself in contemporary scholarship.

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

In this introduction to the special section, we revisit the case of humanism, including some challenges to its outworn and problematic metaphysical assumptions. We suggest that a new kind of humanism is demanded despite the many calls that humanism, of any form, should be jettisoned. The new humanism we propose rests on an ethnographically based philosophical anthropology which keeps in mind its reference to humankind while acknowledging the indeterminacy or inherent transcendence of human life in its sociocultural and ecological situatedness. We believe that there are ontological, epistemological, and ethical reasons to pursue the idea of a timely humanism, without which the social sciences and the humanities are at risk of losing orientations to their own domains as well as their political bearings.

“Now dogma is fast being replaced by rationality and reason,” explains Dharma Guru Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar. “Human beings with their developed brains, developed nerve systems and developed nerve-cells started thinking that we are not to do something for a particular tribe or a particular clan or a particular nationality; we are to do whatever we are to do, whatever we must do, for the entire humanity of the Cosmos.” “So ours is the age of Neohumanism – humanism supplying elixir to all, one and all. We are for all, and with everything existent we are to build up a new society, a Neohumanistic society.”. Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar (1921-1990) was a spiritual teacher in the tradition of Shiva and Krishna. He founded the international social-spiritual movement Ananda Marga (“Path of Bliss”).

2015