Regenerate humanism
16
Mar
In his 100th birthday celebrations, which Edgar Morin did last year,
and is in his memoirs “Leçons d’un siêcle de vie” (lessons from a century of life), long before the current war he was talking about resisting domination, cruelty and barbarism, and called for a new humanism, which was always present in his literature.
Recovering the awareness of human complexity, and including it on a new level that would overcome anthropocentrism, this was humanism taken up in the Renaissance, and above all, create a world where world citizenship was possible with respect for cultural diversities.
He who fought in the resistance to Nazi-Fascism, did not fail to show his regret for the period of Stalinism, he knew that we were at an impasse between these two thoughts that could lead us to barbarism, prophetic in relation to the current escalation of the war.
It is not an isolated development, since in other works of his such as O Praíso Perdio and the Method, his key notions of concepts such as autonomy, uberdade, love, individual and subject were developed, saving values that are inherent to them, as well as maintaining a dignity potentially threatened, I would now say, the civilizing process as a whole.
In Method II he does not hesitate to denounce the illusions of traditional humanism (right or left) and seeks to revitalize its ethical and anthropological sense: “It is not a matter of refusing humanism. It is necessary, as we will see, to hominize humanism, and therefore enrich it, based on the reality of the Homo complex” (Morin, Method II, p. 398).
The election of man as the center of the world, and the rejection of both God (or some superior division to which we submit) and the respect for nature which science thought it dominated, is a fundamental step towards regenerating humanism or we walk in the logic of domination.
Everything happens as if history began at the height of 18th century capitalism or early 20th century communism, the few references to true culture both Greek and Judeo-Christian, directly or indirectly condemned, is the cutting of this humanism root.
It is not enough to say that it is superseded, without any historical reference, for example, to Socrates and Heraclitus, where there is a deepening of the education and interiority of consciousness.
It is not enough to say that it is superseded, without any historical reference, for example, to Socrates and Heraclitus, where there is a deepening of the education and interiority of consciousness.
The question of the emergence of Being is linked to another indissolubly linked to that of freedom, the man annulling his autonomy (they say in favor of a certain anthropocentric “humanism”) is a victim of fatalism, of the absence of horizons that are not the domination of the Other , that culture or order that is different from the other and that must also be respected.
Nicolau de Cusa, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, explored this perspective, in Ficino, for example: providence (which governs a spiritual order), fate (which directs animated beings) and nature (which allows the Being to remain in the world as a living body to which beings submit), although it needs to be updated in terms of language, it is not anthropocentric.
Morin, E. The Method vol. II, Europe-America, Lisbon, Ed. French: Paris, 1997 (portuguese edition).
