Is Humanism Dead?

What does it mean to say Humanism is dea?

Such a statement could be historical, in the sense that the Italian Renaissance movement called Humanism is over. See Humanism [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy].

More radically it could mean that the values of humanism are no longer shared. What would these values be?

– The return and admiration of the classics and classicism.
– A focus on human achievements and expression, especially those in a self-conscious tradition that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.
– Preference for practicies of dialogue and academic organizations over practices of science and professional organizations.
– Preference for interdisciplinarity or antidisciplinarity over specialization and professionalization.

Are these values no longer shared? Have we moved on?

If we have, it would call into question the relevance of Humanities Computing as that application of computing to humanistic disciplines. Could HC be an interested extension of a dead tradition?

Of course, to announce something is dead in the tradition of Nietche, is to resurrect it, to make it worthy of recapitulation. To call it dead is to call attention to it. But humanism is more vital than that. Its vitality comes from its transparency – the very calling of something as dead is a humanistic turn or fold. The Renaissance philosophers turned back consciously and folded scholasticism out of the way to return classical themes. The folding away of the call of death is the baroque move in humanism. If humanism is dead it is only dead in the sense of folded out through an unreflective move.

To return to the values of humanism.

One could argue that cyberculture values the cyborg over the human, but the cyborg is an enhanced human so cyborg culture could be seen as an extension of humanism – a baroque humanism that folds in the machine and myn.

One could argue that we are multicultural and no longer priviledge the Greco-Roman classics. But this is not really reflected in our structures. It is more likely that classical humanism has simple coopted other classical traditions and cultures. The very value of otherness and other cultures could be argued to be a humanist virtue.

That leaves professionalization and specialization over interdisciplinarity. Hmmmm.

Really, calling dead is a rhetorical move that is overdone in its drama. The humanists would have appreciated the call to bring out your dead (and probably stayed home.)

From the web:

“Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now. Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with all your brains, would be useless in a mouse’s universe…”
– Greg Bear, Slant