Humanisme, Moderne tijd

(1) August Buck, “Humanismus – Seine europäische Entwicklung in Dokumenten und Darstellungen“, Karl Alber 1987; “Among the manifestations of humanism as a philosophical world view, Marxist humanism has a numerically large following, which, as we know, is not limited to socialist countries only, because of the political situation of our time. Real humanism, as Karl Marx called it, corresponds to the third and at the same time highest rung of communism “as the positional abolition of private property as human self-alienation and as the real appropriation of the human domain for man; therefore if … return of man. like a human being. This communism as perfect naturalism is at the same time humanism, as perfect humanism after naturalism. / On the basis of these definitions of Marx, around a century later, educationalist Heinrich Deiter, who taught at the East Berlin Humboldt University, determined the foundations of real humanism in our time: 'Modern European humanism is thus the result of a historical epoch in which the bourgeoisie held the lead in all areas of culture. This era has ended. That is why humanism is caught in a transformation. Her essential features are fully recognisable. Culture will become a matter for the masses. The individual emerges from isolation and becomes the link of the community. In the general conception of the world and the position of men in it, they turn away from spiritualism and towards materialism. All these changes arise from the one fundamental fact, that humanism ceases to be the affair of a ruling minority and becomes the affair of the whole. But the conditions of present-day humanism may ... say that it has fulfilled the will left to it by the earlier times of the movement. / 

(2) Passim:The social consciousness of the present forms its conceptions of man's nature from the materials of present reality and the critical exchange with history. Although this image is taken from reality, it nevertheless advances on it and the future development takes its way. In striving to fill the gap between that which is and that which will be, consciousness unfolds its activity. His first step is the critique of existing social conditions. It was performed by Karl Marx as an analysis of capitalism and its laws of function. Without this analysis it was impossible to speak of humanism as a matter of our time. The second step of the hjmansi on this path is the decision to participate actively in the direction of our time, to change the existing and by something better . If we trace back the history of mankind from the turning point of the 19th to the 20th century, we discover the sources from which emerge the new humanism for an assured peace and the democratic order of the state, the struggle of the workers for the remnants of feudal property relations and monopoly capital, the struggle against colonial peoples for their political independence. The last few centuries have said plainly enough how narrowly fate has forbidden humanism with the ups and downs of this much-veiled struggle for a new world order. Hand in hand with the first and second politics, however, this positive vision of a new culture, which embraces human existence in all its manifestations and, as a whole, allows the conception of the new humanism of the being to pass people completely into reality . / 

(3) Passim: Why the new humanism expresses itself as real named, arises from all that has been discussed before. To this end, it distinguishes the idealistic form of humanism that has come before it. In her time, this was exactly as much a social reality as the current form of humanism. However, insofar as it becomes policy today, it transforms itself into a danger, because its philosophical foundations are not tenable. Evidence for this movement has been produced in large measure in time to World War I. The honest champions of the Weimar Republic wandered about like will-o’-the-wisps, thereby contributing to the victory of National Socialism. In contrast, real humanism develops its pragmatics from all reality and applies it to all reality, in its conception of man it disputes the correctness of the antithesis of mind and matter, on which, in fact, all idealism is built and treats the people as a unit. Correspondingly, it unleashes the possibility of separating a sphere of the interior from the rest of the outer life within man’s existence. It defines human life as a unitary event, in which all parts interact and depend on each other. And again correspondingly, he rejects preferring to turn to an elite of the higher educated, as the older humanism did in practice, and focuses his publicity on the whole. As a result, it cannot recognize itself far enough in the realm of spiritual life, rather it directs its support from all efforts for the transformation of social relations, which require such something, beginning with the forms of material production. .”// Marxist humanism is integrated into the socialist image of antiquity built on the Marxist-Leninist theory of history, which sees the forward-pointing achievements of the reception of antiquity and at the same time “the late bourgeois falsifications of the image of the antiquity in its consequences has been exposed’.”

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(4) Div. “Proceedings of the 1st International Humanistic Symposium at Delphi – September 25 – October 4, 1969” First volume – Glenn R. Morrow, “The philosophical bases of humanism”; “Movement in the Western world that call themselves humanism derive their inspiration, directly or indirectly, form the Greeks and from the conception of man expressed in their histories, art, and literature. But the picture we get is so rich and so varied that it is sometimes difficult to see the subject of it. We see warriors and athletes; poets, painters, sculptors, and architects; orators and statesmen; historian, scientist, and philosophers; but what essentially is this creature man, so gloriously exemplified in the action of the Greeks and so splendidly portrayed in their literature and art? If anyone thinks this an idle question, I would remind him that we who call ourselves humanist must have some such conception of man if our humanistic fait is to have as an intelligible object. Hence I propose that we are to formulate an idea of the essence of man, and that we take as our guide the Greek philosophers, who fist taught us to ask this kind of question and who have themselves given an answer to this particular one. The philosophers fail us, I fear, at one critical point; nevertheless what they have to say about the nature of man will furnish an invaluable starting-point for our inquiry.” (The most reasonable seems to me to be the one represented by a movement – that lives for, through and with its fellows.)

Humanisme, Tijdperk van burgerlijke revoluties

(1) August Buck, “Humanismus – Seine europäische Entwicklung in Dokumenten und Darstellungen“, Karl Alber 1987; “The belief in the inherently uncorrupted human nature was the main support for the recognition of freedom of will, which is of central importance in the thinking of Christian humanists. On the basis of the free inner decision, man is able to develop with the help of the good disposition dormant in them. From this victory proceeded the Florentine Neo-Platonists, when they extolled the dignity of men, who sank down to the beast or ascended to god, can freely decide on their account. Likewise, for Erasmus, the possibility of free decision is the condition for a life according to the fundamental rules of the 'philosophia Christi': 'By free will we understand ... the capacity of the human will, with which man adheres to that which belongs to the eternal bliss, assigned or turned away by him.” / That is why Erasmus and Luther must compulsively fight over the problem of freedom of will. This struggle was propagated after Christian humanism and the Protestant Reformation had already taken an opposing position. When Erasmus reproached Luther that his "temeritas" harmed the cause of the Reformation and the Gospel, which filled Luther with deep distrust of Erasmus, "That the human esteemed more than the divine." 

(2) Passim:There could be no compromise between these two positions; before that the explanation of the freedom of the will could be obtained. A human will, the image known to Luther, whether driven by God or by the devil, without having the possibility of one’s own decision, is rooted in a high-strung faith, in which man destroys himself before God; thus in an atmosphere to which Erasmus and his humanist gangmates had no access. To them, without the recognition of freedom of the will, human existence appeared meaningless, since man must freely demand his natural perfection through formation and therefore attain a high degree of virtue from himself and thus meet the workings of divine grace . / However, with his unlimited faith in the divinity of human nature and with the conversion of the religious into the moral of humanism, the power of the theologically speaking, the ‘mysterium iniquitatis’ and the promise of salvation rooted in him with a transcendent purpose, are ignored of the people; correspondingly, the concepts of sin and redemption had “almost completely evaporated.” When on the one side of the reformational early years, on the other side the Catholicism, regenerated by the Tridentium, raised the question of sin, grace and redemption, the ethically founded formative religiosity of Christian humanism could not hold its own against the newly experienced religiosity of faith. If the Christian humanists also failed at that time, their ideas remain alive wherever there is concern for a balance between the ‘divinium’ and the ‘humanum’.

Verband tussen literatuur en geschiedfilosofie

(1) Erich Heller, “The Disinherited Mind”, Penguin 1961; “For the present, Burckhardt maintains ‘a single source, happily chosen, can, as it were, do duty for a whole multitude of possible other sources, since he who is really determined to lean, that is, to become rich in spirit, can, by a simple function of his mind, discern and feel the general in the particular’. / This is an echo from Goethe’s world. For Goethe knew the difference in quality between a writer, who, starting with reconceived ides, assembles his particulars to fit the needs of his generalities, an poet who ‘discerns and feels’ the unreal in the particular phenomenon. Like Stifter, with whom he had so much in common, Burckhardt felt himself to be one of ‘Goethe’s’ family’. As a young man he hoped he would become a poet – and he actually did publish a number of poems – and throughout his life history remained form a poetic activity. ‘As a historian’, he once wrote, ‘I am lost here and I cannot begin with Anschauung’. It is a Goethenean word and hardly translatable. Its connotations are visual, and it means the mental process by which we spontaneously grasp, through observation aided by intuition, a thing in its wholeness. Goethe uses it as the opposite of analysis, the mental approach which he feared would establish itself as the dominant habit of an age fascinated by Newtonian physics, only to destroy all culture of the intellect. 

(2) Passim: Sometimes Burckhardt even felt it to be a nuisance that the historian, in presenting his historical narrative, was bound by the chronological order compelling him to tell one thing after the other, when the true order ‘could only be represented as a picture’. With such a mind it is not surprising that he agrees with Aristotle and Schopenhauer in claiming for poetry and art a higher rank in the hierarchy of understanding and knowledge than history could ever hold. In those lecture notes which he prepared in the years 1868-71, posthumously published by Jacob Oeri in 1905 under the title of Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen [Reflections on World History], he states in a fashion leaving no doubt about the degree of his certainty: ‘The rivalry between history and poetry has been finally settled by Schopenhauer. Poetry achieves more for our knowledge of the truth about mankind; even Aristotle said: ‘Poetry is more philosophical and profound than history’, and this is true because the faculty which gives birth to poetry is intrinsically of a higher order than that of the greatest historian; further, the end to which it is created is much more subtle than that of history .Hence history find in poetry not only of its most important, but also one of its purest and finest sources’.”