Humanism

Empirical Horizon

Empirically, humanism addressed the growing knowledge about human culture globally and emphasized the variety and multifariousness of human cultural forms in space and time and in their historical changeability. The growing number of travelers and their accounts of new lands and cultures produced an enormous increase in knowledge about cultural difference, and this knowledge demanded new frames of understanding and interpretation. The normative impact of this knowledge gave rise to a new awareness of a universal and fundamental equality in being human, expressed by the term dignity. Immanuel Kant has described dignity as an ontological qualification of humanity attributed to every human being. He argued that a human, as the subject of a moral reasoning about his or her own life and doings, has an extremely high value. This means that every person (and every social unit as well) is principally more than a means for achieving the purposes of other people, or even for those of him-or herself, but is to be recognized as a purpose within him-or herself. Kant calls this the dignity or absolute inner worth of every human being.

Attributing dignity to each and every human being could be a general definition of humanism. In its modern version, humanism emphasizes four principles of human life: (1) human reason as the ability to make one's own ideas plausible by argumentation; (2) freedom of one's own will in guiding all activities of social life; (3) creativity in bringing about particular societal forms within a broad spectrum of difference and change; and (4) intersubjectivity in negotiating these differences under the rule of mutual critical recognition.

Modern humanism is rooted in different historical traditions. The basic development, though, was a “transcendental breakthrough” in the so-called axial time, which occurred independently in different advanced civilizations at different times. Its paradigm is the Jewish prophecy, but it happened in other forms in different cultures like China, India, and the Mediterranean as well. It opened the perspective of human thinking toward a transcendent divine dimension apart from the inner world of human life. Ever since, cultural orientation has been involved in a complex interrelationship among three separated fields of thought and experience: the human self, the outside world, and the divine. In this complex interrelationship, humankind acquired a universal status; thus, the constraints of an ethnocentric restriction on the qualifications of humanity were broken. Being human was no longer limited to one's own group but, in principle, was extended to all members of the human race.

...