Catholic integral humanism (from Maurice Blondel and Cardinal Newman
to Jacques Maritain), atheistic-secular humanism, and Sartre’s existentialist
humanism. Furthermore, Edmund Husserl posited phenomenology as the
foundation for the human sciences, and Gadamer offered philosophical her-
meneutics in defence of humanistic education. We may add to the humanist
roster Levinas’s ethical‘humanism of the other’, Islamic humanism, and even
postmodern anti-humanism, evolutionary humanism, and futuristic transhu-
manism. The term humanism thus embraces many important intellectual
currents, but this very inclusivity also indicates that a simple definition of
humanism is impossible.
Moreover, narrow definitions that focus on the emergence of the label
‘humanism’often occlude more than they reveal about the rich intellec-
tual heritage undergirding the term ‘humanism’.Forexample,tonote
F. J. Niethammer’sfirst using the term to designate an educational ideal, or
German historian Karl Hagen’s describing the Renaissance as a humanism,
tells us little about the actual intellectual and spiritual ethos that gave rise to
the designation‘humanism’.^1 Moreover, the common but mistaken equation
of humanism with agnosticism or even atheism—a twentieth-century trend
started by the likes of Bertrand Russell—equally obscures the religious heritage
of humanism. As my own chapter in this volume aims to show, the traditional
opposition of secular to religious humanism, which rests in turn on the
dichotomy of faith and reason, has more to do with the legacy of modernity
and an outmoded conception of scientific knowledge than with any intrinsic
animosity between religion and humanism. The truth of this claim is proven at
least in part by the existence of an atheism that isnota secular humanism.
Strongly influenced by Martin Heidegger, French thinkers such as Alexandre
Kojève, Jean-Paul Sartre, and George Bataille rejected the foundationalist and
idealist metaphysics of traditional secular humanism. What emerged was an
atheism that was also sometimes labelled‘anti-humanism’because it rejected
any anthropocentrism out of hand.^2
In his remarkable, recent attempt to provide a conceptual history of the term
humanism, Florian Baab categorizes humanisms in a broader way that takes
us beyond a simplistic opposition of religion to secular humanisms. Hefirst
identifies the‘hard humanisms’of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
which espoused‘the central value of the human collective. Assuming a concrete
ideal of what constitutes a human being one projects an ideal society—or at
least an educational ideal, which criticizes certain existing conditions.’^3
(^1) See Lewis W. Spitz,‘Humanismus und Humanismusforschung’,inTheologische Realenzyk-
lopädie, xv (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986), 639.
(^2) For a thorough history of this non-humanist atheism see Stefan Geroulanos,An Atheism
That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
(^3) Florian Baab,Was ist Humanismus? Geschichte des Begriffes, Gegenkonzepte, säkulare
Humanismen heute(Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 2013), 26.
2 Jens Zimmermann