The Humanist Imagination
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later.in one strand of current neohumanism. The idea of unencumbered freedom implies an effacement of other realms of being as well as a reduction of other forms of life solely to instrumental purposes for human beings. The project^25 This conception of radical freedom is the principal object of criticism
of radical freedom backs the “overhumanization” of the world, that is, the enfolding and encoding of all existence within the kingdom of human power. Not surprisingly, many twentieth-century thinkers challenged the idea that human power shapes all realms of being. Martin Heidegger in his
response to Sartre argued that “humanism” too easily reduces Being to “standing reserve” for human purposes. Heidegger saw in humanism the roots of the modern technological domination of being.be revised because the idea of the human as mime, the image of Jupiter, (^26) Humanism must
isolates human existence from the rest of life and warrants the human domi-nation of Being. The human must be conceived, Heidegger argued, as the “Shepard of being.” Our task is to protect and preserve being.Many thinkers have followed Heidegger’s criticism. Some ecological
philosophers see the drive to domination rooted in ideas about radical free-dom and in the biblical tradition’s sanction of human sovereignty over nature due to the unique dignity of the human being as the God who dominates the world. (^27) The idea is not to be “anti-human.” Once imago dei, the mime of
human life is rightly seen within larger patterns of life, then it might be properly oriented to some greater good than mere human flourishing. What has finality in this kind of neohumanism is not human self-realization but care for the earth, or tending Being.
neohumanism. The metaphor of the world as theatre is not a claim about the human power of self-invention, a staging of the masks under which human being appears. But the focus is also not on “Being” or ecosystems. The theatre Theological humanism strikes a different if related path to this kind of
of the world has reference to the integrity of life and not just human crea-tivity. Freedom is not the power of self-creation but a distinctive way of being in a world saturated with value and in response to others. We return to this insight throughout the remainder of this book.
The metaphors of the garden and the school are also prevalent in classical humanistic discourse about human freedom in the world. The accent in Self in the Garden
these metaphors is not on self-invention but self-cultivation and moral for-mation. “ ‘I also know,’ said Candide, ‘that we must cultivate our own garden.’