Humanism in Europe and the Middle East

The humanists of medieval and Renaissance Europe—and indeed of Greek antiquity and Islam—were driven by spiritual, moral, and cultural ideals and values. In the eighteenth century, another form of humanism, one that adopted a more materialistic stance concerning human perfectibility, emerged. The Enlightenment stressed that the application of human reason, unimpeded by the state or by religious authority, could alone produce human progress in the sense of improved conditions of life for the whole human race. Immanuel Kant's (1724–1804) plea in his essay "What Is Enlightenment?" for the release of the human intellect from its condition of tutelage into the full flower of its maturity captured this demand for the freeing of the human mind. The French philosophes, such as Voltaire (1694–1778) and Denis Diderot (1713–1784), may have spearheaded this position, but it echoed throughout the Western hemisphere during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—in Great Britain (David Hume, Jeremy Bentham), Germany (Immanuel Kant, G. E. Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn), and North America (Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson). Whereas the Enlightenment version of humanism was more scientific than literary in its orientation, its demand for an anthropocentric perspective on human affairs, encouragement of creative enterprise, and advocacy of social and political reform marked it as a clear successor to earlier forms of humanistic thought.

The question of what impeded the realization of the humanist project became crucial for humanism in the nineteenth century. For the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), it was religion that stood in the way of human fulfillment. Although other humanists had questioned whether religious institutions or monotheistic beliefs were compatible with humanism, Feuerbach attacked religion per se. Adapting the Hegelian dialectical method to a materialist metaphysic, Feuer-bach asserted that the supposedly divine object of worship was itself something human, a purely mundane creation. Until human beings realized that they had abased themselves before a fictitious deity that represented nothing more than the sum of humanity's creative and intellectual potential, they would live under conditions of extreme self-alienation and immiseration.

Although he drew on many elements of Feuerbach's analysis, Karl Marx (1808–1883) found his conclusion that the elimination of religious faith would herald the beginning of human happiness far too idealistic. In his writings dating from the early 1840s, Marx claimed that mere atheism constituted "theoretical humanism." He asserted, by contrast, that communism was "practical humanism" or a truly "radical" humanism. Marx meant by this that the sources of inhumanity were not products merely of the human mind but also of the distribution of property into private hands and of an economic system that forced the vast mass of humankind to toil under conditions of extreme alienation. Communism, which he saw as social ownership of the means of production, would yield the material conditions under which all of humanity could flourish in a free and creative manner.

Humanism in more recent times has been manifested in a number of different movements. In addition to "secular humanism" in the United States, existentialism has been trumpeted as a form of humanist philosophy, inasmuch as it holds that individual human freedom constitutes the source of all authentic human values. For the existentialist, the failure to choose by submitting to the value systems of others (whether churches, nations, or political movements) is a dehumanizing force. In Eastern Europe during the 1950s and 1960s, and in recognition of the rediscovery of Marx's early writings, many socialists reinterpreted their philosophy as a form of humanism, emphasizing the subjective consequences of economic and political oppression. This not only generated a reinvigorated critique of the alienated state of capitalist society but also became a stimulus for communist regimes to loosen their grip on their populations.