The Humanist Imagination
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anti-humanist form. This position challenges the idea that we have natural propensities that can be “cultivated” to their perfection. “Perfection” requires some notion of distinctive human “nature” that is hard to sustain in light The second line of critique of the image of the garden has taken a decidedly
of what we know of other species.Pico, who see human dignity in the power to define self, or those, like Montaigne, who want to cultivate life, some anti-humanists deny any differ-ence between the human and the non-human. They speak of the “post-^33 Unlike humanists such as Vives and
human,” cyborg existence, or the “end of nature.”“nature” and therefore the idea of forming or cultivating life is wide of the mark. The power of human beings is to remake themselves, to morphe and fashion cyborg existence. The very idea of nature as the defining essence or^34 Human beings have no
feature is denied by these critics. Insofar as humanism persists in believing in human “nature,” it is a quaint philosophy hardly capable of providing orientation to human power in a technological age.Some contemporary neohumanists have responded to these criticisms.
Todorov, for instance, retrieves and revises the image of the human as the “imperfect garden” in order to speak of the humanist project. His point is that the “I” is not an origin, but an end, a goal to be valued and achieved. To be a human being is to be an incomplete project. But the goal of action is
not only one’s own life, but to respond to other actual persons as well. To be human is to be on the way to an identity that is bound to others, but only human others. Indeed, “human being takes the place of the divine. But not just any human being, only one who is embodied in individuals other than
myself.”limited to the encounter with the human other alone. Yet the image of the garden will remain important.^35 In theological humanism the reach of human transcendence is not
One other metaphor of human freedom has been especially important among classical humanists: the school. Humanists of various kinds have Discipline and the School
always been interested in education; importantly, they often thought that life itself is a judgments aimed at cultivating one’s own garden, as Montaigne and Voltaire believed. It is also a form of learning and habituation, school of virtue. Self-cultivation is not simply a matter of autonomous paideia, through pat-
terns of spiritual discipline.freedom in the moral space of life in a way decidedly different than the theatre. Formation is not invention. Yet the metaphor of the school also^36 The image of the school articulates the place of