Critical Humanism

Historical Roots

It was within this broad movement that perhaps the key principle of what one can call “critical” humanism emerged. This principle was best expressed in the work of the neo-Platonic thinker Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. He espoused a doctrine of syncretism—the belief that the truth is a transcendent unified order that manifests itself in different concrete forms in different historical and cultural contexts. Hence, although essentially a neo-Platonist, Pico was well read in Persian, Egyptian, Islamic, and Jewish thought. His arguments exemplify the contribution critical humanism can make to the qualitative study of society. Instead of simply accepting different cultural interpretations of the truth as given facts, Pico tried to explain them as different responses to the same problems. He neither denied the reality of differences (as a reductionist approach would) nor accepted them as ultimate (as a relativist might). The principle that he asserted is essential for the development of a critical humanism is that the distinctiveness of humans lies in their self-creative nature. In a retelling of the Judeo-Christian creation myth that commences his most important work, Oration on the Dignity of Man, Pico argued that what distinguishes humans from other living species is that the human form or essence is not a determinate predicate, such as rationality or bipedalism, but rather a general capability to create and change the essence of humans. This principle is implicitly critical because it enables philosophy to think about human identity without needing to rely on falsely universalized cultural assumptions. The standard of “truly human life” is identified not with any [Page 156]particular culture but rather with the practices of cultural world creation found at the basis of all human societies. That which makes humanism critical is precisely the historical focus on the different practices by which different possibilities encoded in human organic social nature are repressed or developed in different institutional forms.

Hegel and Marx

Of course, Pico did not develop this insight with any sophistication. Its subsequent development traces a line through Giambattista Vico and Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel to Karl Marx, arguably the most important contributor to the development of critical humanism (although he never used the term). Marx took up and developed the core insight of Hegelian philosophy that human self-consciousness is the realization of universal rationality. Hegel meant that human history is a complex and contradictory series of struggles for self-understanding. He did not reduce human nature to a single exclusive property but rather claimed that it is variously expressed in the general practices of world building and world transformation. Each shape of human social life is a real expression of one aspect of human being. The whole truth of humanity is found not in some particular set of institutions but rather in the understanding of the general truth made manifest in human history—that humans are not the object of external determining forces but rather the collective subject, the active creators, of their own reality.

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