The Humanist Imagination
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the self that fashion the self. Michel Foucault, while profoundly interested in self-fashioning, would see the metaphor of the school as a discourse for mechanisms of power, discipline, and punishment. Foucault’s central focus in his early work was the way human beings are made “subjects,” are subju-
gated, within the hidden workings of power that are the real forces in the world.fashioning of the self, like Pierre Hadot does in his famous Way of Life (^41) Some thinkers want to explore the idea of spiritual disciplines in the , but nevertheless a specific conception of freedom remains basic. Philosophy as a
The enterprise for these neohumanists is one of rigor of spiritual discipline, a school. Here, too, theological humanism will chart a related but different course. We will speak later of the formation of the cosmopolitical conscience in order to address forces working on the self-fashioning through the
global scene. Towards Theological Humanism
We have explored the basic convictions of classical humanism and also various images of human existence found among Western thinkers. Insofar as free-dom names the distinctive human form of causality, and so our power, what is the nature and extent of our freedom? How does freedom relate to the
incompleteness of human life and the struggle for integrity? Does freedom situate us within the wider compass of life on this planet or it is the very power to create worlds, as Vives and Pico seem to suggest? In light of the incredible extension of human power in a technological age and the threat
of overhumanization in its various forms, what realm of value might limit the endless expansion of human power and so help us protect the fragile integrity of life on this little planet?To imagine human beings as “things in between” in our age requires
attention to the place, the locality, of human freedom in relation to other realms of life on this planet. Mary Midgley writes that,human freedom centres on being a creature able, in some degree, to act as a whole in dealing with its conflicting desires ... Though it is only an endeavour,
The human struggle for wholeness, for integrity, situates us in the wider though the wholeness is certainly not given ready-made and can never be fully achieved, yet the integrative struggle to heal conflicts and to reach towards this wholeness is surely the core of what we mean by human freedom.^42
complex of life as well as amid conflicts among our desires.