Humanism

Definition

Humanism is the philosophical orientation that places the human subject at the centre of value, meaning, and agency — the inheritance of the Renaissance and Enlightenment that treats human rationality, dignity, and autonomy as foundational. In architecture, humanism underwrites both the Vitruvian "man" (the measure of all things) and the modernist belief that architecture should serve human needs and emancipation. But humanism is contested in this wiki: posthumanism (Peirce's pansemiotics, Latour's actor-network theory) challenges its anthropocentrism, Foucault's archaeology shows the "human" itself to be a historically recent, discursively-produced figure, and Benjamin's critique of bourgeois dwelling exposes the class-bound limits of humanist domesticity. Kant's "cosmic" and holistic understanding, by contrast, extends humanism toward a cosmopolitan, planetary responsibility.

Key Thinkers

• Immanuel Kant — the Enlightenment humanism of autonomy, dignity, and cosmopolitanism.
• Michel Foucault — "man" as a discursive figure with a recent "date of birth"; the critique of humanism.
• Bruno Latour — the nonmodern critique of the humanist separation of nature and culture.
• Jean Baudrillard — humanism as an unexamined residue of political economy: "Humanism is an idée fixe which also comes from political economy" (1973/1975); its man is the productivist identification of man with his labour power, and its telos is refused as a projection — "The subject will not become again a total man". See species-essentiality, productivism.

Related Concepts

• Enlightenment — the historical home of humanism.
• Posthumanism — the critique of humanism's anthropocentrism.
• Ethics — humanism's ethical core (human dignity, autonomy).
• Species-Essentiality — the generic essence that Baudrillard's humanism-critique reads as an effect of the code of political economy rather than a human ground.
• Productivism — the identification of man with his productive potential that humanism shares with the political economy it thinks it opposes.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Kant for Architects — Kant's humanist and cosmopolitan vision.
• Latour for Architects — the nonmodern critique of humanist purification.
• Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office (Fuss & Sanders 1996/2006) — humanism's mirror-interruption: "By forcing the subject of reflection to confront an externalized gaze relayed back upon itself, the mirror on Freud's window interrupts the reassuring classical symmetries of self and other, inside and outside, and seeing and being seen that constitute the traditional humanist subject" (p. 119) — the humanist subject's symmetries named and spatially dismantled in the room where psychoanalysis undid them.
• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — humanism as the anthropology political economy leaves unexamined: the aside "Humanism is an idée fixe which also comes from political economy" (ch. I, "Critique of Use Value and Labor Power," p. 22) is developed into the thesis that man is "metaphysically overdetermined as a producer by the code of political economy" (ch. I, "Man's Double 'Generic' Face," p. 30), and into the refusal of the humanist telos: "'Alienation' remains the imaginary of the subject… The subject will not become again a total man; he will not rediscover himself; today he has lost himself" (ch. V, "The Radicality of Utopia," pp. 163–167). The "total man" is thus the imaginary of the subject, not its destination. See species-essentiality, productivism.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).