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Humanistic Geography

Humanism is a term that encompasses a variety of philosophical positions that go back to the Renaissance, during which scholars such as Erasmus and Petrarch offered views of the social world that put people in the center, in contrast to the prevailing religious interpretations. Closely associated with humanism is hermeneutics (from Hermes, the Greek messenger of the gods), which is essentially the study of meanings; originating from medieval attempts to find the one “true” meaning of the Bible, hermeneutics was extended to include the multiplicity of meanings inherent in all literary texts and social actions.

A Very Brief History of Humanistic Thought

Two closely related approaches to humanistic thought have characterized it over time, phenomenology and existentialism. Both are concerned with the shape of human experience, the nature of subjectivity, and there is considerable overlap. Whereas phenomenology tends to emphasize the nature of human experience and meaning, existentialism is more often concerned with the ethical conduct of life.

Several giants in the history of philosophy invoked these lines of thought. The Danish Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) offered a Romantic critique of the Enlightenment, claiming that objectivity is a myth and that all people faced an agonizing choice between faith and reason, the sacred and the profane, and ethics and pleasure. Edmund Husserl (1859–1939) propounded a transcendental phenomenology, noting that the view of science as an objective map of the outer world reduced the human observer to a passive receptor. Objects do not have meanings in and of themselves, he argued; rather, meanings are constructed by the human mind. Husserl called for a science of phenomenology that would strip away the biases that the mind created in its perceptions of the world to reveal the essence, the reality of things in themselves. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) asked the apparently simple question “What does it mean to be?” and offered a very complex answer. His view rested on the notion of the hermeneutics of “being” (Dasein)—the understanding of which meant an escape from abstract theorizing. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) attempted a merger of existentialism and Marxism, noting that in contemporary capitalism the human condition is depersonalized and alienated. Essentially, all these views maintain that objectivity is a hurdle to effective understanding and that there is no privileged conceptual vantage point; every view is a view from somewhere and is inescapably laden with biases. We cannot know the world except for the meanings people give to it. Human subjectivity is thus not a barrier to understanding the world but the only route to know it. Meanings are essentially arbitrary phenomena, and logic cannot inform our moral choices. Despite this predicament, as Sartre noted, humans are “condemned to freedom”—that is, they must make choices even if there are no firm grounds for doing so.

Central Tenets of Humanistic Thought

The project of a humanistic social science was thus to put people back in the center of social analysis, to reveal the thing that makes people human—namely, consciousness. Social science has long had a poor conception of the human subject, a flaw humanism attempts to overcome. It is consciousness that makes us subjects rather than objects—that is, allows us to be actors in the world with will and volition. Mapping human consciousness allows us to move past sterile models of human behavior such as Homo economicus and recover the sensuous nature of experience—the ways in which the self, the environment, and others are framed symbolically. This task involves some understanding of intentionality, our deeply human desires and motivations, and our anticipations and expectations.

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