Humanism and technology

The Rise and Fall of Moderrn Man, 2017

„The rise and fall of the modern man” is a philosophical anthropology essay meditating about who historically modern man was and is, especially in terms of modern man’s self-knowledge and its connection to these specifically modern inventions made by humanity that have been from ca. 16th Century up until now science and technology. It is a brief history of the idea of man as a subject of self-knowledge in the modern era. Self-knowledge is understood both as a concept of human nature that guided human endeavors and the resulting universal history, and also as individual self-consciousness made possible by the idea that each and every human being is an autonomous rational agent, an independent atom of humanity, or a self-reliant monad. The main track of the essay’s meditation is a narrative that shows how this initial assumption about modern humanity (coined in the rational age of enlightenment) and the resulting belief in man’s individual skill, potential, and power (properties that enabled what could be called anthropocratic era after theocratic middle ages) was shaping history between 16th and 21st Century, and how it later was itself reshaped, or even questioned and ultimately falsified by the events of a more mature, post-enlightened modernity, beginning in the time of French Revolution, and ending in the calamities of the 20th Century. Modernity began as a self-elevation of man and his taking over of many of previously God’s exclusive faculties – the primary being infinity (of knowledge, power, earthly time, space). This general event made man a solitary ruler of the world, an event described in the modernity’s best selling book ever, Robinson Crusoe (second only to the Bible in the number of editions and copies). As modern history evolved, run to a large extent by a new dynamics provided by scientific achievements and resulting technological inventions that kept constantly changing the face of earth in a pace unprecedented ever before, human self-knowledge gained new experiences and developed as much towards more rational approach as it also became more and more self-conscious of the man’s irrationality, and inner vulnerability. Nietzsche’s overman is an illustration of the exhaustion of the idea of man’s self-mastering and self-improvement that had been actually first exposed by Pico della Mirandola already in the 15th Century; the more the German philosopher attempted at reshaping the concept of the super-human, the more it entangled in an infinite complexity that resulted finally in a deconstruction of the very idea of super-human (as “Thus spoke Zaratustra”, to give an example, has no ultimate sense). Modern era, with its original promise of emancipation and individual prosperity for all human beings on earth, a promise that could not have been ever made by any other age, ultimately led to the anthropological catastrophe of the 20th Century, an event that still defines our late- or post-modern self-understanding as humans. The essay ends with an attempt at depicting the condition of humanity now, in the beginning of the 21st Century, especially by reference to the contemporary status of subjectivity and self-knowledge. We live in the post-modern graveyard of the modern ideas – e.g. Man, Reason, Subject, etc. – a landscape in which the old known uncertainty of the future was replaced by a newly recognized certainly worse tomorrow. Still however some individuals have the opportunity to long for being themselves and knowing themselves, however this longing might seem elusive, wishful, privileged and unimportant. How can one ask the question “Who am I” in an age when this seems perhaps particularly old-fashioned, based on questionable premises, and also an elitist luxury? How can one not ask this question – and also its derivatives like “what do I want?”, “what is best for me?”, “where am I going?”. Some of us still feel that we have a moral right to ask these questions, that is to self-knowledge which seems something universally needed, even if the contemporary course of world events, with its constantly growing obscurity, is still more cruelly disavowing all sorts of pretence that hide behind anybody’s striving for deeper self-awareness. The feelings of alienation, humiliation, diminishment and anonymity are experiences that almost inevitably in most cases accompany the exercise of an introvert egocentricism and self-contemplation (that first word being already charged in everyday use shall be re-read by the reader to mean something neutral, self-orientation of thought) – the exercise that ceaselessly oscillates between guilt (of “narcissism”) and an even worse than guilt feeling of a certain powerlessness and idiocy of such an activity (by many not recognized to be an activity at all). In such conditions the ancient motto “Know Thyself” may seem a noble but ridiculous anachronism, however the whole essay is trying most sincerely, even if provocatively, to defend it as the most human of activities.

Philosophical Investigations, 2006

A defining term for the Renaissance, " the human " is today a perilous term. But is it still a useful one—or is its intellectual history in early modernity too fraught, too deeply implicated in critiques of anthropocentrism? This essay argues for a reap-praisal of " humanism " as a philosophical tradition and suggests how the history of " the human " in the early modern period already contains its postmodern and posthumanist unraveling. As a humanist's humanist, Spenser plays a key, emblematic role in this history as his careful and sparing use of the term " human " in its various forms points to the idea of humanity as a boundary condition, a description of a limit. The essay concludes with a reflection on the continued importance of humanist modes of reading through an understanding of the text's own agency.

In addition to the frequently invoked requirement of a "new" humanism, today's philosophy includes projects recommended as anti-, meta-, post-and transhumanistic. Can today's proliferating "humanisms" offer solutions to crises that are threading more and more virulent ? Which of these more faithfully reflects the present realities ? Are the premises and solutions proposed by everyone realistic ? Do they offer optimal resolutions, in line with today's expectations ? This paper draws attention to the main humanistic philosophical scenarios. Of all this, it would be important that man, in the effort to naturally increase his qualities and possibilities, keeps that something of essence level, meaning "humanity" or "humaneness," in forms -as far as possible -unaltered, strangely and dangerously unhybridized. Otherwise, once opened, the Pandora's box will release monsters.

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...

Cultural Politics an International Journal, 2010

"Jean-Hugues Barthélémy argues for a reading of humanism and Enlightenment that strips them of their scientistic and Eurocentric implications and makes the values of both available for contemporary appropriation. Drawing on the work of Gilbert Simondon and mobilizing his conception of the relationship between human beings and technology against the conception implicit in Marx, he seeks to establish a ground for an encyclopedist humanism - a genetic encyclopedism - that lies beyond both the humanism combated by Heidegger and that philosopher's own anti-anthropological positions" (Cultural Politics)

Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism brings together scholars working in prehistoric, classical, medieval, and early modern studies who are developing, from longer and slower historical perspectives, critical post/humanisms that explore: 1) the significance (historical, sociocultural, psychic, etc.) of human expression and affectivity; 2) the impact of technology and new sciences on what it means to be a human self; 3) the importance of art and literature in defining and enacting human selves; 4) the importance of history in defining the human; 5) the artistic plasticity of the human; 6) the question of a human collectivity—what is the value, and peril, of “being human” or “being post/human” together?; and finally, 7) the constructive, and destructive, relations (aesthetic, historical, and philosophical) of the human to the nonhuman. This volume, edited by Myra Seaman and Eileen A. Joy, insists on the always provisional and contingent formations of the human, and of vario...

A New Humanism Conference at Sacred Heart University, Connecticut, Mass. 1997 Mendo Castro-Henriques Universidade Católica Portuguesa [email protected] The geopolitical situation we live in, at the beginning of the 21st century is unprecedented; we are travelling in unchartered territory. The fact is that humanity feels again the frailty of its situation in cosmos. This experience is aggravated by a variety of uncertainties about ourselves; we are self-threatened in our original nature and historical destiny by the forces we unleashed. Such existential uncertainty of contemporary humanity reproduces writ large, the same anxiety of survival of archaic man (Arnold Gehlen). There is a growing belief of a catastrophe of global proportions that requires, as in ancient societies, the practice of rituals of renewal (Mircea Eliade).We know that historical man is free to respond to the divine ground of being and to struggle against the mystery of iniquity. This is our ontological security. To admit that we accept and respond to the divine presence subverts the utopia of those who strive to transform the search for truth into a historical accomplishment of the “perfect society”.