| Few words have been subjected to a more vehement critique in 20th century thought than humanism. After Heidegger's equation of humanism with metaphysics, Levi-Strauss' proclamation that the human sciences should not constitute but dissolve man, and Foucault's sweeping obituaries for the human subject, humanism is widely considered conceptually inoperable and historically dead. Humanism, moreover, has been contested and denied on the basis of an ethical agnosticism and conceptual relativism about the "good" for humanity, which purports to legitimate itself by inhabiting neither a particular perspective nor committed to any binding values. In a reading of three of its classic works, Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790), Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795/6), and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924), I offer a more nuanced analysis of humanism. Using the methods of conceptual history as developed by Cassirer, Gadamer, and Koselleck, I show that post-Enlightenment modernity, notwithstanding its inauguration of more "open" or pluralistic societies, still retains the humanist premise of society as bound in its constructive ethical and social commitments to realizing key philosophical values (education, creativity, sociability, friendship, love, self-knowledge). |
