To speak of humanism implies faith in human nature. Men´s minds differ even when they make an assessment of their own nature. There are the pessimists who think along lines like these ones of Herbert Butterfield: “It is essential not to have faith in human nature. Such faith is a recent heresy and a disastrous one.” (1) This vehement assertion seems rather prejudiced: in the West, to take a position in favour or against human nature came to be influenced by politics since the champion of the thesis of the “good man”; Rousseau affirmed that “nature has made man happy and good, but society depraves him and makes him a wretch”. It is not true, as Butterfield believes, that all great men were bad men and that hardly any public reputation survived the exposure of private archives. Those are not yet in the level of true grandeur: who will say that Christ, Buddha, Socrates, Dante, Goethe, Tolstoy were bad men? It is fairer to say that all men who achieved great things have shown faith in men, and that is why they achieved them.
The discussion on if man’s nature is good or bad is an ancient one. In China, Mencius said that “Man is essentially good, and he has a nature which takes up from heaven”. Mencius went further, he believed that in the nature of every man there is greatness: “Kungtutse asked Mencius, ‘We are all human beings; why is it that some men are great men and some are small men?’ Mencius replied, ‘Those who attend to their greater selves become great men, those who attend to their smaller selves become small men’.” One who cultivates his higher self, Mencius continues, will find that his lower self follows in accord. That is how a man becomes a great man. “The man who wants to cultivate himself must also develop himself to the full extent. A great carpenter teaches his apprentices to use squares and compasses. The man who wants to cultivate himself must also have squares and compasses for his conduct”. (2) This humanist golden rule is as valid today as it was in Mencius’ time, twenty four centuries ago.
Though a Confucian, Hsun Tzu, one of the greatest Chinese philosophers, who lived in the third century B.C., had a contrary opinion: “the nature of man is evil; his goodness is only acquired training”. Every man desires to be good because his nature is evil”. The civilizing influence of teachers and laws, the guidance of the rules of proper conduct and justice is absolutely necessary “to improve and to force the evil nature of man”, says Hsun Tzu. (3)
To discuss here if man’s nature is good or bad seems pointless, not only because what we know about man in his genuine natural state are mere conjectures, as education and training soon change the virginal nature with which he is born, but also because what counts for a humanist assessment is man as he builds himself up surrounded by society, emerging from history.
The word humanism began to be used in the early sixteenth century, applied to the literary and scientific movement of the Renaissance. But we see already humanist ideas in that wonderful balance of reason and sentiment and in the principle of a free man sharing in the government of the City, in Classic Greece; in the praise for a juristic order, broadened to the perspective of universality in Rome; in the higher respect for woman and yearning for ideal justice in the Middle Ages, as well as in the confidence upon the powers of the intellect and on the enlightenment of culture of the men of the eighteenth century, and in the admiration for the force of human passions of the romantics of the nineteenth. But it was in the Renaissance that the humanist movement made the widest strides, recast into new forms and newer meanings.
The world of the Renaissance was the last integrated and harmonious world of knowledge. The Renaissance was the last epoch in which man had full confidence and faith in his destiny. He believed then in his privileged place in the universe and in that exceptional moment in which all human potentialities were blooming. All the disciplines of knowledge stressed the value of man, exalted his dignity. The world of ideas coming out of many rediscovered books of Greek and Roman culture, together with the emphasis on the value of personal experience, have given a rich substance to the Renaissance movement. This rich intellectual fermentation had as ideals, in knowledge, the attainment of wisdom, and in expression the clarity of thought, the balance and harmony of reasoning, the neatness and elegance of style. In all these virtues the classics were the revered paragons. With love for the lessons of the past with its courage for valuing present experience and its confident vision for the future, the Renaissance has created a completely new world to which we are today heavily indebted.
From the Renaissance, the word humanism carries an implication of generosity, of tolerance, of faith in man as master of his destiny, based on reason and on a joyous confidence on the possibilities of a fuller life, embellished by the endless beautiful things of nature.
To this whole of ideas, the twentieth century has added new ideas originating in the new developments of art and literature and mainly in science and technology.
##Under today’s humanism two main ideas are lying: the free development of individual personality and the idea of freedom. The first came to us after an evolution of five hundred years, from the Renaissance, through Locke, Voltaire and Rousseau. It proclaims the full development of human personality, prized for itself, and sees man’s creative powers as the core of his being. This self-fulfilment of man is unattainable without freedom, so that these to main ideas are linked together. (4)
To science and to technique is mainly due the economic, social and even spiritual revolution of our age. This revolution is not limited to the political field, as the French Revolution was: it alters fundamentally the position of man in the cosmos and his capacity of knowledge in regard to nature and to society. We are before a new utilization of knowledge and a new sense of human dignity, of man’s confidence upon himself, upon his creative capacities.
Here both communist and non-communist thinkers are in agreement. About the foundations of humanism writes Nikolai Semenov, a Soviet chemist who received the Nobel Prize: “To make man free from hard psychological work, as well as from automatic work not requiring any mental effort; to assure all men an adequate provision of food, clothing and shelter, so that they will not be oppressed by hunger, cold, and homelessness, thus making them truly free; using this freedom to make everyone share, to the full extent of his abilities, the enjoyment of cultural and spiritual values. (5)
Science and technique have created the bases for a new dignity of man and advanced the welfare of humanity. The power over things inspires man with a new joy and a new strength; the accuracy of his action gives him a tonic self-confidence. Man feels his superiority over a shapeless world.
But both science and technique can be deviated from their just aims, as it happens with everything human, and the danger of this deviation becomes greater with their astonishingly increasing development. The extraordinary physical power conquered on the material world became a moral challenge to man. Man risks to be annihilated by the same things he has created, to be buried under the shambles of his own victory. Goethe warned that everything that liberates the spirit without a correspondent progress in man’s inner discipline is a danger.
This happened already with science and happened with technique - “The knowledge and techniques developed through science for the illumination of the mind and the elevation of the spirit, for the prolongation and amelioration of life, have been used for the destruction of life and the degradation of the human spirit. Technological warfare, psychological warfare brainwashing, all make use of science with frightening results”. (6)
##We have seen already in our Age, in a large scale, the appalling consequences of this danger: when Nazis made use of scientific and technical progress for degrading human beings: these vilifying techniques were massively and systematically employed for humiliating human dignity, for erasing in men every trace of humanity, for instilling in men the horror of men and a contempt of themselves.
The West brought with its technique, everywhere, that vileness and grandeur. Technique has spread the forces for the salvation of the world and also the seeds for its destruction. It brought the remedies against starvation and disease; the know-how for promoting economy, development, education, social advancement and liberty for many millions, and also inflicted wars without and with atomic bombs.
There is a serious lack in technique, as it tends to destroy the object it creates. Perhaps this destructive impulse, this tragic void can be filled by what exists in Eastern culture, in a rhythm of knowledge that searched for happiness, independently of technical progress, for thousands of years.
The conditions of Western expansion, its confidence, efficiency and vigour together with its abuses, violences and cruel inequalities can be explained in great part by the characteristics of Western capitalism that has given the impulse. According to Sombart, European capitalism has produced its immense technical superiority due to its constitutional elements: “individual ethics and war, luxury and asceticism, thirst for adventure and American gold, financial calculation and the love of risk, state and private enterprise, science and the impulse of power”. Until the end of last century, European capitalism was a unique phenomenon, the development of which was due to the special conditions of the European soil and atmosphere. In its roots, technique owes its nature to the humanist ideas from which it derived. We can see that machines, in the time of Dickens, - and not only then, but still today, in a smaller scale, - have caused misery and exploitation of poor people and even of children; we see today some pure intellectuals talking with superior disdain for machines, as we see others raising them to the prestige of a myth. Technique, as well as science, have their source in a humanist ideal, and they concur to spread today this humanist ideal which is instilled in them since their origin.
To the humanist ideal marked in technique must be attributed the higher standard of living in most of under-developed countries. Great works have given bread to millions; radio and cinema brought education to the most backward areas; but, again, these have also their reverse, as they are also responsible for exploitation, for lowering the intellectual level of the masses everywhere, spreading inferior ideas and often giving the most afflicting banalities the privilege of ubiquity.
 
The most recent theory on humanism has been formulated by the existentialist philosophers. In his essay L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme Jean Paul Sartre contends that Existentialism is a humanism “because we remind man that there is no other legislator besides himself and that it is in abandonment that he will decide of himself; man is not closed in himself, but always present in a human universe” pursuing transcendent aims, surpassing himself. Existentialism sets out from the cogito of Descartes: “there is no other truth, at the starting point, except this one: I think therefore I exist; it is there that the absolute truth of the conscience reaches itself” (7) But here existentialists go beyond Descartes because in their cogito, ‘I think’ man finds himself in front of others, and realizes that the existence of the others is indispensable to him and a condition of his existence. Thus the existence precedes the essence, and “consequently it is not possible to refer an explanation to a given and immutable human nature; in other words, there is no determinism, man is free”. In this freedom he is responsible not only for his own individuality, but also for all men.
The concept of human nature, found in all previous philosophers, considers that each man is a particular example of a universal concept, man, therefore implying that the essence of man precedes this existence. Existentialists contend that “there is no human nature, or in other words, every epoch develops according to dialectical laws and men depend from their epoch and not from a human nature”.
Existentialism is mainly a philosophy of man, before being a philosophy of nature. As a humanism, it embodies two contradictory lines of thought: at the same time that it wants to put the emphasis on man’s power and responsibility of deciding and building up his destiny, existentialism contends that man pursues an inaccessible aim.
This pessimistic bend is clear in Sartre. “This rage against being, does it translate but the feeling of having failed what Gabriel Marcel calls ‘the nuptial tie of man with life’”, asks Emmanuel Mounier.
Between the existentialist philosophers, especially between the Catholic ones, like the distant originator of the school, Soren Kierkegaard, or today Gabriel Marcel, and the atheist like Heidegger, Karl Jaspers or Sartre, there are considerable differences.
The existentialist thinkers see in the history of thought a series of existentialist awakenings, from the ‘know yourself’ by which Socrates opposed the cosmogonic dreams of the physicists of Ionie until Pascal who raised against those who deepened too much of the sciences without giving much attention to man, his life and his death. (8)
Existentialist philosophy lives from the distinction between ‘world’ and ‘existence’, setting between both a maximum of polar tension. ‘Existence’ being a dominant element, to which the ‘world’ is sacrificed in order to emphasize it, the specific value of the ‘world’ is lost and consequently also the value of life. (1)
Another criticism made to existentialism refers to the concept of liberty: man is entirely responsible for his existence, and such responsibility is so full and charged with possibilities that through it man possesses the whole world. But this is an empty liberty, it has no contents and no aim, it is a liberty pour rien (9).
Existentialist philosophy represents today the expression of an epoch. In spite of its pessimism, it has instilled liveliness of thought and aggressiveness in the bitter years of post-war disillusion. Its close relationship to the literary movement, particularly in Sartre, has contributed to popularize philosophy and make it fashionable, even sensational at times. Rarely has philosophy lived in such intimacy with an intellectual mass. Sartre in his Critique de La Raison Dialectique has made a great effort to “combine Existentialism with Marxism, a philosophy of personal destiny with a philosophy of collective destiny.
The existentialist attempt to lay the bases of a new humanism did not succeed, but the importance of existentialist speculation on the problems of anxiety, temporality of existence, human responsibility, historicity of man, is very great. (10) It is also important the projection of existentialism on the field of literature, specially with the novels of Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Miguel de Unamuno, on the theatre of Sartre and Gabriel Marcel and on the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, besides many who show more or less direct influences.
 
Today’s meaning of Humanism has to comprehend not only the dominant trends towards achieving a lucid consciousness of man’s place in the universe and the fullest ways to attain happiness, but also the far-reaching implications of the use of new means of action. Man is not yet fully human, and humanism is therefore the conscious effort to fully humanize man, through the advance of knowledge and the aiming of action within the sole perspective of man. The concrete development of the full capabilities of each man living on earth, by means of attaining a meaningful and intense life, by the application of all his virtues and the consummation of all his edifying ambitions in order to increase his creative individuality, his wealth in humanity. In this sense every individual is destined to become a complete man, totally developed, sharing in the creation and enjoyment of all the values created by civilization. Man lives in both the world of physical realities and in the world created by his intelligence - social institutions, social ideas - which becomes a reality separated from him. The duality between the ‘real’ man, as moulded by the social circumstances in a certain epoch and the ‘true’ man faithful to his inner self and unadaptable to the society of his time has been dealt with by literature since Dante. (11)
 
The moments in History when a serious affirmation of Humanism has been tried, were critical moments of breaking off with the past, when men were embarking in new avenues of experience; new fields of reality called for action, personality expanded during a period of ascension, along which man experiences a feeling of infinite capacities, an exhilarating optimism in action and in thought which only finds satisfaction in the conscience of working within and being an agent of cosmic harmony.
In our time, impulses towards a humanist revolution were evinced by the several spiritualist, Marxist and existentialist humanisms, each one limited in its scope, but all being a manifestation of a large stream of anxiety for expanding the capacities of man so that he may match a world whose limits science broadens every day.
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This humanism of today moves in great strides, comparable to those of the Renaissance. Then, an inner feeling of mental and physical power encouraged man to discover the universe; today the same feeling of discovering new frontiers of a vaster and more complex universe inspires man with new confidence, imposing him a new need of adjusting himself to this expanded universe and of matching the momentous realities.

It would be too late and unworthy to complain about the ominous dangers of our present situation. What we have to do is to reverse the omens into challenge and keep our head lucid to choose, among the many paths lying ahead, those which lead towards happiness and a fine quality of living. Einstein warned against creating a dangerous imbalance of getting to know much about things and too little about ourselves: “Man has very little insight into what is going on within himself”; our own backyard is as mysterious as the heavens ever supposed to be, he writes. Human world is much more complicated than the physical world. Exploring the inner world of the mind, said Julian Huxley, is far more important than exploring the world of outer space.

Here we can appeal to the East to help us with its ancient truths, as the East has given itself more than the West, for thousands of years, to the exploration of the mysteries of the human world. The sum of knowledge and human experience accumulated in the East and West, put together for the first time in History, will foster the first true Humanism.