Humanistic Geography

Humanism is a term that encompasses a variety of philosophical positions that go back to the Renaissance, when 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 became extended to include the multiplicity of meanings inherent within all literary texts and social actions.

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. 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, between the sacred and the profane, between ethics and pleasure. Edmund Husserl (1859–1939) formed 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. He argued that objects do not have meanings in and of themselves; rather, meanings are constructed by the human mind. Husserl called for a science of phenomenology that would strip away the biases that the mind creates in its perceptions of the world in order to see essences—the reality of things in themselves. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) asked the[Page 233] 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 of 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 that people give to it. Thus, human subjectivity is not a barrier to understanding the world but rather the only route to knowing 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.

Thus, the project of a humanistic social science was to put people back in the center of social analysis, that is, to reveal the things that make people human (i.e., consciousness). Social science has long had a poor conception of the human subject—a flaw that 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 the sterile models of human behavior such as Homo economicus to 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, anticipations and expectations.

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