The Humanist Imagination
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matter how fleeting that might prove to be. If one’s life is to be anything more than fancy and sorrow, one must undertake a process of self-transcendence whose end is integrity with and for others on earth. One does so aware, tragically or comically, that perfect integrity is never attained in time. That is
the lot of being a “thing in between.”thinkers. A Christian or religious humanist of some stripe will insist that what defines the integrity of human existence and thus the distinctive good of Granting broad lines of agreement on these ideals, debates begin among
human life is a unique capacity on the part of human beings for a free, respon-sive relationship to God. Human transcendence is already and always in part a movement towards and in response to the divine. The heart is restless until it rests in God, as St. Augustine famously put it. Conversely, a non-religious
humanist denies this claim and argues, in the words of Todorov, that humanism “marks out the space in which the agents of these [human] acts evolve: the space of all human beings, and of them alone.”is over the range of human transcendence, the extent of the moral space of (^13) The debate among humanists
life, humanists explored “self-transcendence” whereas current neohumanists focus on relations to the other, intrasubjective or lateral transcendence. Theological humanism charts its own course. But the debate at root is about the spiritual conjoined to an affirmation of the preciousness of freedom. Classical
dimension of human life, the reach of human transcendence.Anti-Humanism^14
The debate among humanists will concern us later. At this juncture it is necessary to note positions that reject humanism root and branch. There is a lineage of anti-humanism in Western thought that challenges any focus on human well-being as the point of thinking and action. Consider briefly four
S’s that span the history of Western thought from the ancient world to the contemporary United States: Stoics, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Singer.determined universe and accordingly the only happiness a human being can The Greek and Roman Stoics thought that human life takes place in a
attain is happen outside of one’s control. What is within one’s control is the tran-quility of one’s own emotion, and nothing else. For the true Stoic, the loss of child, spouse, fame, honor, or one’s own life ought not to disturb the tran-apatheia, a state of unconcern and tranquility about things that
quility of the soul. Human attachments are transcended by consent to the “god within,” that is, the divine spark of the power determining reality. The Stoic maxim, accordingly, is to live according to nature, meaning by that demand