Liberal Humanism
And the Liberal Humanist Subject
Liberal Humanism’s Philosophical Roots
• Liberal-humanist philosophical thought contributes to modern
beliefs in a reality that can be known directly through the senses
and through the employment of rational thought.
• Liberal humanism inspired a scientific, rational world view that
placed the knowing individual at the center of history, and
viewed
that history as the progress of Western thought.
• It served as the catalyst for the modern world’s reliance on
individualism and belief in a common human nature, scientific
rationality, and the search for truth as universal knowledge and
certainty in the world.
• Of the many schools of thought inspired by liberal humanism,
two directly inform modern reading practices: empiricism and
rationalism.
• Though Western empiricism finds its earliest inspiration in
Aristotle, it took its modern form following the great
17th- and early 18th-century British thinkers Locke, Berkeley,
and Hume.
• Empiricism posits that all factual knowledge is based
on our sensual experience and inner reflection -- that is, there is
a reality independent of the mind that can be experienced by
Liberal Humanism’s Philosophical Roots
• And while different schools of empiricist thought
interpret key terms such as experience, fact, and world
differently, they generally hold that the mind comes to acquire
knowledge about the world by systematic means including
induction and the scientific method.
• Rationalism, a school of thought with its early Western roots in
the dialogues of Plato, claims as its modern proponents the
17th- and 18th-century philosophers Descartes, Spinoza, and
Leibniz.
• Rationalism is characterized by the belief that knowledge of the
world can be attained through reason, that this knowledge is
universal and deductive in character, and that everything is
fundamentally explainable by this universal system.
• This view of the world, while at odds with certain fundamental
tenets of empiricism, finds its greatest expression in the fields of
logic and mathematics.
The Modern Self
• Before the Renaissance, Western society defined the self by its
location within both a "secular and divine order."
• The center of pre-modern epistemology was "the great chain of
being," in which all members of society had a proper place.
• With the rise of Renaissance humanism and the Enlightenment,
however, the individual began to be conceived as sovereign and
epistemologically central
• This reconfiguration of the self, spurred by historical events such
as the Protestant Reformation and the scientific revolution,
ultimately led to the systematic examination of the modern self.
Although many participated, four of the more influential theorists
were Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes, and John Locke
The Modern Self
• Kant asserted that the definitive characteristic of the human self
was its capacity for reason.
• Reason allowed the self to understand and order the world
with certainty. According to Kant, "[R]eason is the faculty
which supplies the principles of a priori knowledge," and
"pure a priori principles are indispensable for the possibility of
experience, . . . [f]or whence could experience derive its
certainty, if all the rules, according to which it proceeds, were
always themselves empirical, and therefore contingent?"
• Defining humans by their capacity for a priori reasoning reveals that
the essence of the Kantian self is individual and imperviousness to
experience (i.e., static).
• Kant deduced further that this self he envisioned was unitary
• Proceeding from the notion of a unitary self or selfconsciousness governed by a capacity for reason that is
unaffected by the
particularities of experience, Kant felt that "pure reason" both
enabled and compelled humans to construct a "transcendental
philosophy" that articulated the structure and order of the
experiential world.
• Locke shared with Kant the belief that humans were essentially
individualistic and defined by their capacity for reason.
Beliefs of Liberal Humanism
• General
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•
Absolute Truth
The world can be controlled and ordered
We can picture and represent the world
Belief in linear progress
• Universal
• Universality means text must be studied in
isolation (context, personal ideologies)
• Human nature is unchanging
• People's individuality (personality) is
transcendent
• Purpose = humanist enhancement of life
Liberal Humanist Subject
• the notion that we have a more or less stable
self-concept.
• The idea that we have a more or less stable and
coherent Self (often referred to as the 'Cartesian
self' - after the 17th century French philosopher,
Descartes)
• This Cartesian, liberated and autonomous
subject is in charge of him/herself and engages
(or at least is capable of engaging) in rational
debate with other subjects to arrive at a
consensus.
• This conception of the self or subject is fundamental
to humanism and underlies, for example, the typical
understanding of liberal democracy.
Liberal Humanist Subject
• understanding of the self as somehow having a
uniquely individual core, somehow sheltered
from cultural forces.
• the modernist notion of the individual self, with
individual rights, including the right to selffulfilment, self-realization, 'the pursuit of
happiness', the right to property, the right to
self-expression, to the 'free and full
development of his personality’
Individualism
• a political and social philosophy that emphasizes
• individual liberty
• belief in the primary importance of the individual and in the
virtues of self-reliance and personal independence
• embraces opposition to authority and to all manner of
controls
over the individual, especially when exercised by the
state or society
• Is directly opposed to collectivism, but it can exist in a
community where individuals respect other individuals
• may derive from a belief in solipsism and is often confused
with egoism.
Three conceptions of the self
•
as suggested by Stuart Hall
1. the Enlightenment subject, the highly individualist
Cartesian subject, with some kind of essential, stable
centre or core.
2. the sociological subject, this conception of the self, while
still adhering to the notion of an inner or core self,
examined how the self was shaped and developed by
significant others, reference groups and so on, and is of
course central to any understanding of the notion of
socialization.
3. the post-modern subject, which is often referred to as the
decentered subject, in which there is no stable 'core'
identity; if there appears to be then that is only because of
the 'narrative of the self' which we have constructed and
such narratives are themselves the product of social
intercourse.