CONFERENCE AT THE SORBONNE
NEW HUMANISM
by Dr. Salvatore Puledda
Saturday 29 May 1999 – Descartes Lecture Theatre

Conference talk on Interpretations of Humanism.
What is New Humanism?

I should like to thank my friends of the French Humanist Movement for organising this conference, and all those of you who are present today. I should also like to thank the academic authorities of the Sorbonne for allowing me to present the basic ideas of New Humanism in the Descartes Lecture Theatre, a symbolic place of European culture.
It is in this same theatre, that on 23 and 25 February 1929, Edmond Husserl gave two conferences entitled Introduction to transcendental phenomenology. He wished to explain to the French public the purpose and essence of his philosophy. It is known that these conferences, revised and extended by the author, were published in 1931 with the title Cartesian Meditations. In this work, Husserl went into greater depth on the themes of transcendental subjectivity and its relationship with the world and other forms of subjectivity, so taking up once more the thread of the discourse begun three centuries earlier by Descartes in his Meditations.
I have evoked this event, since the thought of New Humanism owes much to Husserlian phenomenology, not only as regards many of its ideas but also in respect of its method of philosophical investigation, but this will become clear in the following part of my talk. One could even say that, in some respects, New Humanism is an application of the phenomenological method in the fields of psychology and sociology, which are today still dominated by a set of naturalistic ideas dating from the 19th century.
But let us talk about the contents of this conference. Above all, I shall seek to present the main aspects of my work Interpretations of Humanism, in addition to what motivated me to write it, and the number of conclusions at which I arrived on completing my historical and philosophical investigation. This will serve as a preliminary to understanding the subject of this conference, which basically seeks to answer the following questions: what is New Humanism? What is the sense of its appearance on the philosophical and political scene? What are its basic conceptions of the human being and society? What are its responses to the general situation of crisis that we are experiencing? And what are its propositions for building a global civilisation in this new millennium. I shall strive to use simple language as much as possible. However I am aware that this choice might be at the expense of the preciseness of the ideas I shall expound. I should like to apologise in advance for this inconvenience.
Firstly, we may ask ourselves: why talk about Humanism today? What is the sense of dealing with this subject? Before answering these questions, it is necessary to clarify the meaning of this word in today's language. If we consider it for a moment, we reach the conclusion that the term humanism now indicates a generic attitude, a tendency to concern oneself with human life; this human life which is afflicted by all the problems posed by the social organisation, the uncontrolled development of technology and the lack of "purpose". But with such a vague and unclear meaning, the term may be understood in the most varied and contradictory ways. So to talk correctly of humanism, it is necessary to accurately reconstruct the many interpretations that this word has had throughout history – or at least the most important. It is necessary to explain why we have arrived at such an imprecise meaning thereof.
But why launch oneself into this investigation which should be left to those who specialise in the history of philosophy or culture? What importance can this have for us ordinary people. This is important, for if we look closely, each interpretation of humanism tells us – whether explicitly or not – something that interests us all as human beings. Indeed, each interpretation of humanism is also an interpretation of the human essence, the construction of a conception of Man and a discourse on who or what human beings are. In short, studying the different interpretations of humanism in European culture – from the late Middle Ages to the present day – has meant studying the different images that European Man has constructed of himself over these past six hundred years. Carrying out this investigation was like entering into a hall of mirrors which reflected an ever-new image of a unique object: the human being. But the experience was more complex, for this protean image, as changing as quicksilver, brought with it in its transformation the landscape from which it emerged. Indeed, the human being still lives in a natural world, the image of which is necessarily linked, not to say correlative, to the one he constructs himself.  It is as if the features, tones and personalities he finds within himself, extended to nature and modelled it. Furthermore, the appearance of a new image always showed the end of an era and the impulsion towards the construction of a new culture. Inversely, the crisis of an established image could be considered as one of the most reliable indicators of the crisis of the culture to which it belonged. For a time, the old and the new conception would fight for supremacy, and their conflict could move out of philosophical circles and into the street.
Nothing illustrates this better than the crisis of the medieval world and the appearance, in Italy, of the first European humanism, that of the Renaissance. The first humanist philosophers, such as Manetti, Valla, Alberti and Pico della Mirandola strive simultaneously to demolish the conception of Man and of the world specific to medieval Christianity and to construct a new image therefrom. The medieval world contains the idea that the human essence is bad, degraded by original sin; the world here below is a valley of tears from which we desire only to flee, Man can do nothing for himself except hope for the grace and forgiveness of a far-off god who moves in mysterious ways. The first humanists placed in opposition to this conception the idea that Man is dignified and free, and even go as far as to say that he is "a great miracle", an infinity who lies at the centre of the universe and reflects all the properties thereof. Secondly, the universe is not the snare which imprisons souls in sin, nor is it a simple inert matter, it is a beautiful living being which, like Man, feels and vibrates. The universe is a macro-anthropos and Man who is the synthesis thereof – i.e. a microcosm – is the key which allows it to be understood. But the most radical idea that the humanism of the Renaissance brought us, and which has existed through to this century (with Heidegger and Sartre), is that the human being has no nature; that is to say that he does not have a fixed essence which is determined once and for all, like in the case of animals, plants or minerals, i.e. all other natural beings. The human being can be characterised by the lack of conditions, he is a free being who constructs himself, who is what he makes himself. He is situated in the middle of the scale of being and can, through his actions, either stoop to the level of the animal or plant world, or elevate himself to a higher level of consciousness, that of the superior being, that of the wise man. This is the central idea that appears in Discourse on the Dignity of Man by Pico della Mirandola, a work which constitutes a true manifesto Renaissance humanism.
But the breakthrough of this humanism petered out as early as the first half of the 17th century, and the image of Man as the centre and metaphor of the world - this image that the painting of the period has conveyed to us in countless versions - dissolved. With the Age of Reason, and later the Enlightenment, began the creation of the modern image which was to appear in all its clarity in the 19th century. It was then a double, hybrid image, a sort of monstrum in the Latin sense of the word, describing a being with disproportionate limbs originating from different species. Indeed, on the one hand Man lost his centrism and his specificity in the world and tended rather towards transforming himself into a purely natural phenomenon: his essence is thought of in a zoological or purely material dimension; he becomes the expression of a particular arrangement of certain molecular structures, subject to the blind, inflexible laws of physical determinism. On the other hand, through a strange twist of thought, this being finds itself in an upward movement of evolution and progress, he bears the responsibility of freedom and rationality with which he must transform nature and society by reordering them in his image. Nature which, during the Renaissance, were as if criss-crossed by a subtle network of psychic forces, is stripped of its soul, the anima mundi; subject to the reign of quantity, this nature is transformed into pure matter which, on the one hand, should be worked and transformed, and on the other evolves through mysterious inner dynamics towards ever more perfect forms.
This dual image of the human being – half Promethean figure bearing the light of progress, and half robot, biological machine – lasted for a major part of the 19th century. We can already observe here certain characteristics of the thought of Feuerbach, which he himself defines as a humanism. For Feuerbach, Man is a purely natural, material being, whose only horizon is life on earth. But to progress on this earth, humankind should free itself of religious superstitions, and should reappropriate all the attributes of perfection it had naively transferred to the divine by alienating itself therefrom. Attributes which in reality belong to the human essence. The image is clearer with Comte. For this author, Science should take the place occupied by religion, and the use of the scientific method should be extended from the natural to the social field. In this way, humanity would clarify the underlying laws of politics, economics and morality – still subject to superstition and prejudices – and could then move on to the "positive" stage of its evolution in which social organisation is based on scientific reason. Then, faith in a god would disappear, and the "Religion of Mankind" would arise, in which the idea of the divine is precisely substituted by that of humanity. It is through these channels that the curious phenomenon Foucault calls the "theologisation" of Man made its appearance during the 19th century. This theologisation has its roots in the loss of faith in the Christian god. With the death of god and the progress of faith in reason and Science, modern Man ended up appropriating the characteristics of the divinity which had disappeared. This transfer does not concern the individual, whose problematics are generally ignored by the thought of the period, but concern the whole of the human race. Thus was born the great eschatological myth of the Progress of Humanity according to which, thanks to scientific self-knowledge, i.e. biology, physiology and the newly emerging human sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc.), Man would succeed in liberating himself from his determinations and alienations to finally become free and independent, master of himself. But as Foucault had again observed, after killing god, man must account for his own finiteness and explain how he can be both the subject of knowledge and object of knowing; he must explain how he can, as a limited and conditioned individual, empirically build, piece after piece, the sciences of his own life, without having always possessed within himself this basis of knowledge that only the investigation of oneself can justify.
This sort of naturalistic humanism finds a new formulation in the first half of our century with the Humanist Manifesto, inspired by the ideas of Dewey. This is an extraordinarily optimistic text on the destinies of humanity, which was published in 1933, i.e. at the time of the rise of Nazism. It should also be said that the image of mankind on which this humanism is founded almost fell within the predialogic level – in Western consciousness – even though it was dual, circular and intimately contradictory. In fact, this imaged ended up becoming part of the substratum formed by unconscious social truths – these truths which, within a culture, we take for granted and never call into doubt, just as we never question the fact that the earth is round. Only a collective tragedy of the size of World War II could produce a shock strong enough to cause the emergence of this almost buried layer, and lay it open to discussion and criticism. It was indeed during the years following the Second World War that the philosophical debate was rekindled on how the human essence should be thought of and on the meaning of humanism. The debate began in France, but quickly spread throughout most of Europe.
In 1946, Sartre published the essay "Existentialism is a Humanism". In this essay, he strives to reformulate his own philosophy as a humanist doctrine, which sees in Man and in his freedom the supreme value. At the same time, he calls for a commitment to militant action in society and the fight against all forms of oppression and alienation. A doctrine structured in this way was to serve as the basis for the construction of a new political force, for the opening up of a "third way" between the Catholic Party and the Communist Party, who for their part claimed to be inspired by humanist doctrines. So in post-war France, there arose a conflict between three different formulations of humanism, three different conceptions of the human essence. But this conflict was not limited solely to philosophical circles; through the political parties which took inspiration from these three disputing doctrines, the conflict descended into the street, carrying along and inflaming a large part of the social strata, as occurred in Italy during the Renaissance.
For Sartre, the human being does not have a determined, fixed essence. The human being is fundamentally an existence propelled into the world and who constructs himself through choice. The basic characteristic which makes him "human", i.e. different from all the other natural beings, is this very freedom to choose and to choose oneself, to project oneself, to make oneself. Consequently, Man ceases to be "human" when he refuses this freedom and adopts the behaviour that Sartre calls "bad faith", in other words when he withdraws into accepted and codified types of behaviour, the routine of roles and social hierarchy.
In Christian humanism, as expressed by its creator, Maritain, in the first half of this century, human essence may be defined only with regard to God: Man is "human" because he is the son of God, because he is immersed in the Christian history of Salvation; So, Man ceases to be truly "human" when he refuses the divine fatherhood and obeisance to the law that God, in his love, has imposed upon him.
For Marx, Man is on the one hand a natural being, as Feuerbach understood him to be, and on the other hand he possesses a specific feature that makes him "human". This specificity is "sociability", i.e. the tendency to form a society. Taking this argument further, human essence does not reside in the individual, but in the social community, just as the essence of the bee or the ant does not reside in each animal, but in the hive or the anthill. It is within society that Man, thanks to his work with other men, ensures that his natural needs are met and transforms nature into something that becomes increasingly closer to himself, into something more humane. And Man ceases to be "human" when his natural sociability is denied, as is the case in the capitalist society where his work is extracted from him for the benefit of a minority.
In 1947, Heidegger enters into the debate, solicited by the French philosopher who asked him how to give meaning to the word "humanism", meaning which had been lost in the dispute of all these claimants. In a famous text, the "Letter on Humanism", Heidegger analyses the different conceptions of the essence of Man, formulated by the different humanisms, ancient and modern; he finds in all of them a common tacit presupposition which is nevertheless never subject to investigation or criticism. This presupposition, that all humanisms implicitly accept, is that the human being corresponds to the old definition of Aristotle, i.e. that he is a "rational animal", where "rational" becomes intellect, soul, spirit, person, etc. according to the different philosophies. Certainly, says Heidegger, we thereby affirm something true with regard to the human being, but his essence is thought of in too narrow-minded a way. The essence of Man is thought of from the "animalitas" and not from the "humanitas", Man thus being reduced to a natural being, a zoological phenomenon and finally to a thing. In this way, we forget the fundamental point, i.e. that the human being is not a "what", not just any kind of being, but a "who" who asks himself the question of the essence of beings of his own essence. Implicitly reducing the human being to just any kind of being, to a thing, caused the impoverishment of traditional humanisms and their historical failure. The root of nihilism and the eminently destructive impulsion of the current technological society can also be found in this reduction of the human being to a thing. For Heidegger, the essence of Mankind should be thought of from a totally different standpoint; for him, the human being is infinitely closer to the divine than other natural beings. An insurmountable chasm separates him from animals for instance. Heidegger does not say in which way one could make a new experience of the essence of Man. For him, the achievement of such an experience is not within the grasp of men, who may only prepare themselves, in silence, for what he calls "the new revelation of the being".
Heidegger's intervention closes the last great debate on humanism. Today, the loss of faith in "progress", which marks the end of modernity and the entry into the post-modern age, has stripped the 19th century image of its shining halo. Today, the only aspect left of the human being is that of the "biological machine", i.e. a "thing" determined by his chemical make-up – genetic inheritance – and by stimuli coming from the surrounding environment. It is an image in which we all believe, with various subtle differences. Finally, we have substituted the Christian god with a more mysterious and enigmatic god: Fate. This fate, which, in ways that are by definition unpredictable, determines the mutations of matter and its particular form which is life, and then abandons them to the hard necessity of physical laws. In this dimension, there is no room for freedom and choice, nor any possibility of founding a system of values. And human life, like the whole world, loses its meaning and is transformed into a humdrum and impenetrable day-to-day existence, into an absurd race towards death. I do not feel that it is worthwhile to dwell on these negative aspects of the current cultural situation, since many contemporary thinkers and artists have already taken pains to describe them in depth. I would just like to highlight that such a situation is necessarily the prelude to a new "rising wave of nihilism", if we do nothing to amend it. 
It is in this vacuum that we see the birth of New Humanism and the Humanist Movement which embodies the ideals thereof. This perhaps seems a little backward in this post-modern era where any structured form of ideas is reduced to a simple "narration", an individual or group myth concealing a quest for power. We are not so naive as to believe that our ideas are "scientific" and that they represent the "objective" reality, in the words of the last century. We place ourselves in the phenomenological tradition, and this is why we do not talk of "objectivity" but interpretation, of project. New Humanism is a general interpretation of the situation of this globalised world and a structured set of propositions to find a way out of the crisis in which our civilisation is struggling. It is a project, a Utopia for the new millennium, which may be accepted or rejected, but which demands a dignity at least equal to that which is reserved for the thousand partial propositions with which the pragmatic frenzy of this age presents us every day.
The Humanist Movement was founded thirty years ago by a Latin American thinker, Mario Rodriguez Cobos, who signs his works by the pen name Silo. The initiating act was a speech that Silo held on 4 May 1969 in a lost corner of the Argentine Andes, and which was attended by some 500 people of different countries within South America. The speech was entitled "The Healing of Suffering" and deals with the subject of the meaning of life, mental suffering, violence and the ways in which they can be overcome. Over the past thirty years, the Humanist Movement has spread and become rooted in around fifty countries on all five continents. It has drawn up an image of the new human being, as opposed to that which presently dominates, and also a new idea of humanism in coherence with the global world in which we live.
Silo has rebuilt an image of the human being. This reconstruction falls within the framework of the development of 20th century thought which positions itself as an alternative to naturalism: it is the tradition of the phenomenology and existentialism which goes from Husserl and Heidegger through to Sartre. For Silo, the human consciousness is not a passive or deformed "reflection" of the natural world, nor a container of "psychic facts" existing in themselves; the human consciousness "transcends" the natural world, in other words it constitutes a phenomenon which is radically different to the latter. It is intentional activity, a ceaseless activity of interpreting and reconstructing the world. It is therefore fundamentally being able to be, i.e. future, overcoming what the present gives us as "fact". It is in this reconstruction of the world, in this impulsion towards the future that resides the freedom that is a component of the consciousness: freedom between conditioning, i.e. under pressure from the past, but freedom no matter what. In the naturalistic interpretation, the human consciousness is, on the contrary, fundamentally passive and rooted in the past: it is the reflection of the outside world and its future is a deterministic updating of the past. This interpretation, if it intends to be coherent, leaves no room for human freedom.
Consequently for Silo, although the human being is part of the natural world through his body, he cannot be reduced to a mere natural phenomenon, for he has no "nature", he has no essence which may be defined once and for all. He is a "project" of transformation o the natural and social world and of himself. If we really want to define him, we can say at best that "man is the historical being whose method of social action transforms his own nature". Indeed, each human being is born into a world which is not only natural but also historical and social, i.e. clearly human, and where objects are all full of meaning, intentions and aims.
But where does this impulsion come from, which animates this activity of construction and deconstruction that we call History?
For Silo, the root of historical dynamics is in men's fight against physical pain and mental suffering. Pain concerns the body; it is due to a hostile nature that man fights through the development of Science, or it is due to violence with which certain men seek to quash the intentionality and freedom of others by reducing them to the instruments of their own intentions, in other words to natural objects, to things. Violence is not only physical, but may also take on the forms of racial, sexual, religious or economic discrimination, which, in addition to physical pain, cause mental suffering.
For Silo, physical violence is not a "natural" fact, as certain ethnologists would have us believe, but the result of human intentions. It is indeed the expression of freedom which constitutes human consciousness. In the same way, economic violence, produced by the most diverse legal mechanisms justified by the laws of the market, is not a "natural" fact, it is not the manifestation at human level of the fight for the survival of the fittest, which according to certain 19th century naturalists characterises the animal kingdom. In economics and politics, there are no natural laws, only human intentions. (In this respect, we may also note that in the animal kingdom there is not only fighting but also co-operation; and the extension of Darwinism to the social sphere was only made possible because the human being had previously been reduced to a zoological phenomenon.). For Silo, if violence and discrimination are the expression of human intentions, a free act of opposition thereto is also possible. It is also possible to choose between the side of the oppressors and that of the oppressed; it is possible to choose solidarity, and a commitment to fighting for a fairer and more egalitarian society.
But neither social justice nor science provides a cure to mental suffering which arise out of the channels through which human individuality is comprised, i.e. perception, memory and imagination. We suffer when we experience a contradictory situation, we suffer on account of what we have lost, of what we have not obtained or what we believe we cannot obtain, we suffer from humiliation, frustration, shame, we suffer for fear of illness, old age or death. In the face of suffering, in the face of the fear of death for example, modern man and the man of 5000 years ago are not different. Only a renewed meaning in life, says Silo, only a new spirituality can cure mental suffering. The quest for transcendence, the rebellion against the absurdity of existence that death seems to impose, take up a great deal of space in Silo's work and in New Humanism. Silo has always shown an absolute faith in the fact that physical death does not put a stop to existence, but constitutes a step towards immortal transcendence. However, he asks no-one to have the same faith in his ideas on the divine and neither does he claim to propose a new religion with rites and dogmas. On the contrary, he proclaims the freedom for all to believe or not to believe in god and immortality. There are in the Humanist Movement atheists and believers from all religions. Like Buddhism, the Humanist Movement offers paths, experiences through which each person may verify for himself the veracity or usefulness of what is said.
To gradually vanquish pain and suffering through the development of science, through the setting up of a fairer society and by regaining meaning in life, this is the collective human project that the Humanist Movement proposes for the new millennium and which it calls "Humanising the Earth".
As we said, Silo reformulates the concept of humanism by placing it in a globalising historical perspective, i.e. in harmony with the current age in which, for the first time in human history, a planetary society is emerging. Silo affirms that humanism, which appeared with force during the Renaissance period by demanding centrism and dignity for the human being in opposition to the depreciation practised by the Christian Middle Ages, already existed in other cultures e.g. in Islam, India or China. Of course, it was called by another name, since the cultural parameters of reference were different, but nevertheless humanism existed implicitly in the form of an "attitude" and an "outlook in life". In this conception, humanism is no longer a phenomenon which is restricted to a particular culture or geographical area; it is no longer a European fact, but rather a phenomenon which arose and developed in different parts of the world and at different periods in history. This is why it can encourage the convergence of different cultures which, on this planet unified by mass communications, are henceforth inevitably and conflictingly in contact with each other. But how can we recognise "humanist moments" in cultures which sometimes have an age-old history. For Silo, such moments may be identified by the following historical indicators:
1. The human being occupies a central position as a value and concern
2. The equality of all human beings is affirmed
3. Personal and cultural diversity is recognised and valued
4. There is a tendency towards developing knowledge beyond what is accepted as the absolute truth
5. The freedom of ideas and beliefs is affirmed
6. Violence is rejected
Humanism, defined by this personal and collective attitude and outlook, is not therefore the heritage of one specific culture, but that of all the great cultures of this earth. And in this sense, it may be presented as a universal humanism. By drawing on the humanist moments which exist in their history, the major cultures which are today in confrontation, may build together this great dream that the Humanist Movement calls the Universal Human Nation.

This concludes my speech. Thank you for your attention. Peace, Force and Joy to all.