A planetary humanism made to the measure of the world

Qeios

A research project coined “Humanism in the era of Globalization” developed fundamentals to an elaborated form of humanism capable to bridge the borders between the world civilizations and to overturn their competitive or sometimes hostile manners. This new intercultural humanism must evolve as result from international debates incurring participants from every continent and culture of the world. This intercultural humanism envisages to supersede the present-day modern humanism as it originated in the Western world of the 18th and 19th centuries. While the modern humanism entailed a great bulk of appropriate ideas and values, it still suffered from some shortcomings such as ethnocentrism. It is therefore necessary to formulate a higher developed form of humanism – the intercultural humanism – to have a basis available to address and to surmount the many tensions and conflicts that exist today between the divergent civilizations inhabiting the current world.

Phainomena, International Issue, 15, 59, 2006

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”.

Leonardo Da Vinci has provided the classical definition of Humanism in the form of ‘ideal’ Vitruvian Man and there has been numerous efforts into making it work in a universal context, to make an ideal definition to represent all of the Humanity in one point. This effort has lit a fire of dispute among the scholars and has given birth to different opinionated sub-divisions in context of critique, analysis and further discoveries. Humanism has travelled from Eurocentric, imperialistic concept with massive opposition and critique on individualism, superiority over ‘others’ in a path of Anti-Humanism and finally we are standing with the concept of Post-Humanism where the scholars are trying to find another way to reach the definition in an ‘Affirmative” way. From Rosi Braidotti’s text “Post-Human: Life beyond the Self”, we see that to reach a proper definition of Humanism, it is so far has been proved that none of the classical concepts are enough to build the definition of Humanism. Rather, in different contexts, we have to go back to some dissected ideologies and build our argument over their ashes while the previously contradicted ideologies are rising as Phoenix over and over again. Coming from the Anti-Humanist background, Braidotti is convinced that the classical definition of Humanism is not satisfactory and her years of experience along with her ethical, political and scholarly efforts in Anti-Humanism, she has reached a point where she is more convinced to Post-Humanism from a critical point of view. Posthumanism deal not only with the concept of ‘Self’, but also it takes into account the ‘Other’. Where the ‘Other’ does not belong to the boundary of species. In this point, the identity of species enters the argument. This text will shed light on this point with the help from Donna Haraway’s text “When Species Meet”. The discussion will follow the journey Humanism took to evolve throughout the passage of thoughts, time and history while trying to figure out a way to define identity of the actors involved. A brief discussion on ‘Identity’ will be a part of this paper. Moreover, how our perception of the world and how the elements define our communication with other species are also discussed briefly.

Journal of Posthumanism, 2022

It is high time to explore the meaning of being human in this globalized world. While exploring the meaning of being human or relearning to be human in global times, this paper will try to interpret how to sustain our cultural identities in this democratic, technologically overpowered world. In between the divinization of the human as the centre of the world and her rejection by anti-humanism lies a third paradigm, explored by Emmanuel Levinas. We can relearn our position of being human from a new perspective that allows us to keep our uniqueness in terms of culture and values as individuals and to protect our cultural identities.

American Anthropologist, 2008

Anthropology and Humanism concerns the central question of the discipline: What is it to be human? As the journal's mission statement states, Anthropology and Humanism welcomes articles from all major fields of anthropology and by scholars in other social sciences and the humanities. It seeks to bring out the intricate and contradictory processes of life in other cultures-including those of the anthropologist. Whether working with life histories or demographics, disability studies or nutrition, and using even fiction and creative nonfiction, poetry, drama, and photo essays together with basic scientific writing, this journal strives to maintain a focus on the human actors themselves. Anthropology and Humanism publishes writing that delights, writing that outrages, writing that evokes the human condition in all its messiness, glory, and misery, and writing that reveals the blockages that are deleterious to our social and physical environment. The journal is thus able to promote cross-cultural understanding. We like to see anthropological writing, the communication of human activity, done in the way music is communicated: that is, in such a way that the medium itself, writing, is alive, instantly connecting with the reader, even saying the unsayable, just as music is alive. This ideal, of course, cannot subsume all of anthropology; nevertheless, anthropology may die if it has none of it. Through reading the pages of Anthropology and Humanism, anthropology's public as well as members of the discipline may empathetically reach, participate in, and experience many of the different levels and circumstances of human life that they would not otherwise encounter, because such writing corresponds to the way a human being is articulated. Humanistic writing does not come in the form of logical constructs. It has the capacity to show the very "heartbeats," as it were, of a society, and even how that heart beats. We point out that humanistic anthropology is neither novel writing nor journalism, though it may look like one or the other at times. A culture, an entire society, is the protagonist, not some individual romantic hero. The aim is therefore deeply serious: it is understanding.

Ethics & the Environment, 2005

Free Inquiry, 2018

In 2015, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari published Sapiens, a sweeping and widely acclaimed history of humankind. In it, he discusses a phenomenon he calls humanism. Humanism, as he defines it, is a family of “religions (that) worship humanity, or more correctly, homo sapiens.” This worship of humanity, he argues, has made modernity “an age of intense religious fervor, unparalleled missionary efforts, and the bloodiest wars of religion in history.” The crimes of genocidal Nazism, Stalinist communism, and environmental destruction, he argues, can all be traced to the central tenets of humanism. In this published exchange of letters, philosopher Andy Norman and historian Yuval Noah Harari debate the meaning and legacy of humanism.

Rhetoric Society of America Conference, 2022

The “end of the World” trope can be crushingly rote in apocalyptic discourses, but its critical deployment is not, and it goes to the heart of rhetoric’s self-concept. My starting point is obvious and well-marked: world is not severable from Man, so the end of the world is about the end of Man. Etymologically, the term “world” derives from Germanic languages and refers to the life of mankind, being a compound term of “man” and “age” with the literal meaning of “age of man.” Unsurprisingly, the “end of the world” invoked by many feminist, post-structural, and posthuman theorists, as well as by Black, decolonial, and science studies scholars is often a comment on the death of Man’s entitlement as the organizing matrix for life on earth. I’ll pull at three threads of “end of the world” troping, all of which revolve around diffracted conceptions of world and, concomitantly, humanity. Then I pose two questions raised by multi-world ontologies for the potential of humanism in rhetoric: First, how do diffracted ‘worlds’ impact rhetoric’s know-ability? Second, can co-extensive being function as an orienting heart of ‘worlds’ without contradicting a logic of diffraction?

de Gruyter, 2023

How can universality be addressed after the necessary epistemic and ethical critique of Western universalism? Building on such concepts as materiality and reparation, narration and translation, the series Beyond Universalism seeks to understand how contemporary cultural and social practices are producing a new consciousness of universality-experiences, refl ections, and agencies of a shared humanity. | Comment aborder l'universel après la nécessaire critique épistémique et éthique de l'universalisme occidental ? En s'appuyant sur des concepts tels que la matérialité et la réparation, la narration et la traduction, la collection Partager l'universel cherche à comprendre comment les pratiques culturelles et sociales contemporaines produisent des expériences, réfl exions et agentivités qui contribuent à faire émerger une humanité partagée.