On 9 January 1642, Galileo died at Arcetri, near Florence, where he had been confined under house arrest since 1633. The severity of the condemnation pronounced by the Church had not been softened by his blindness, total since 1638.
He had, moreover, saved his life only by making a heartbreaking retraction that shames us still today.
“I, Galileo Galilei, a Florentine of seventy years, appearing personally in judgment and kneeling before you, most eminent and most reverend cardinals of the universal Christian republic, inquisitors general, having before my eyes the holy and sacred Gospels, which I touch with my own hands, swear that I have always believed, that I now believe, and that, God helping me, I shall believe in the future all that the Holy Church, apostolic and Roman, holds, preaches, and teaches…”
What was the crime of this man who has definitively marked the history of the sciences and of thought?
“I have been vehemently suspected of heresy for having maintained and believed that the sun was the center of the world and immobile, and that the earth was not the center and that it moved…”
To lighten the responsibility of his judges, it has been said that they knew the truth and acknowledged it, in private. I do not see how that excused them; on the contrary, I find the scandal all the greater. They, as always, preferred to sacrifice truth and justice to the inviolability of dogmas. For what would become of Christ’s ascension toward the celestial heights if the earth is not the center of the universe? Or the location of hell, traditionally situated in the lower depths? This battle against the freedom of the mind and the progress of knowledge has never ceased. At the time of the promulgation of the Rights of Man, the pope of the day proclaimed that these rights are in opposition to those of God; he is not wrong: it is indeed a matter of two radically different philosophies.
If one had to choose a watchword for the philosophy of the rights of man (and, if I may be so bold: of all philosophy), a concept that would order all the others, that of humanism seems to me the one that would still suit best. What is knowledge for, if not, beyond the pleasure of curiosity, to master the real for our benefit? Morality, if not to regulate our conduct with a view to a better common life? What is metaphysics for, of which religion is one of the expressions, if not to situate us better in the universe?
I seem to be cultivating paradox; never, it would appear, has humanism fared so poorly. Let us say nothing of those countries where it has no place at all in the preoccupations of the powerful, nor of those where religion demands of man a total submission to God and to His servants. These are, moreover, often the same; political power and clerical power lend each other a hand. Even in Europe, which had the honor of being its cradle, no sooner does Soviet totalitarianism begin to recede than the danger of a clerical totalitarianism appears. We are witnessing an extraordinary offensive against humanists, conflated, in a dubious amalgam, with atheists and pagans, denounced as incarnations of the devil. Only a “re-evangelization of Europe,” the present pope ceaselessly reminds us — that is, only a new clerical order — could exorcise us against the risk of the destruction of civilization. In the lands of Islam, no sooner does humanism show the tip of its nose than it is hunted down, anathematized. Fortunately, if one may say so, liberal capitalism scarcely accommodates itself to a society rigidly held by the priests! But this contradiction is only half reassuring; capitalism, even liberal, in no way comes thereby to the aid of humanism. Capitalism makes a place for man only because, as a seller, it needs buyers. It cares more about selling than about the one to whom it sells. In any case, so much the worse for the destitute, the fragile, the marginal. Finally, as it has sufficiently demonstrated in the past, it will hardly hesitate to resort to violence and to massacre should its interests find themselves threatened; one passes very quickly then from liberal capitalism to fascism — that is, to the crushing of man.
None of this is surprising. If humanism is that philosophy which obstinately gives priority to man, it is normal that it should be suspected, contested, harassed by all the forms of social organization that claim to serve, first, the groups or the ideologies. In the Encyclopædia Universalis, which would have deserved more objectivity, the author of the article Humanism — a university professor, no less — complacently taking up the fashionable theme of “the death of man,” an echo of “the death of God” proclaimed by Nietzsche, scarcely conceals his disdain. A professional philosopher writes in a major daily:
“… man, if he limits himself to the humanist aim alone, and to the reversible relation of man with man, will always remain caught in the snares of the Same, with no possibility of elevation or of comprehension for what is foreign to him.”
In what learned terms are such inanities formulated! Why would being a humanist prevent one from understanding men? Why must one take the detour through God? Why this impossibility of “elevation,” unless one reduces, as usual, all spiritual elevation to religious elevation, if not to physical elevation, toward the heavens? The tip of the ear shows too plainly: it is always a matter of reducing the share of man, if not of sacrificing him, to the benefit of that of the church, of the nation, or of the revolution. “God alone is great!” the Islamists cry on every occasion; “One does not compromise with God!” repeats the rector of the Mosque of Paris; “God first served,” insists Rabbi Eisenberg, the chief rabbi of France, who, more audacious or more naïve, recalls it more crudely still: “We are believers before we are men”; “God first!” is the title of an entire, regular page in the newspaper Présent, integralist Catholic and nationalist. It is not long since the German nationalists were proclaiming “Germany above all!”; now here comes the sacralization of borders. Ah! if, one day, we adopted with the same firmness the motto: “Man first!”, “One does not compromise with the human!”. We would then no longer have need of idols and gods, for, according to the excellent formula of a contemporary humanist, if there “is nothing to believe or to hope for… there is living to be done and helping to be given” (Jean Cassou).
People readily make light of the precariousness of humanism; scarcely is it born, they say, than it is already dead. It would weigh very little indeed against so many venerable doctrines. And, no doubt, the word humanism, which comes from the German Humanismus, dates only from around 1850. One must wait for Proudhon to see it used commonly; it then arouses some enthusiasm in accompanying nascent socialism; but with the doubts and the failures of the socialist utopia, the heart is no longer in it. But if the term humanism is indeed recent, the humanist philosophy yields nothing, in ambition and in antiquity, to the other doctrines. Protagoras, a Greek sophist of the 5th century B.C., would be, in short, the ancestor and the first conceiver of humanism; then, why not, Socrates, who, tirelessly, with a patient irony, secures and fortifies the mind of his interlocutors against all dogmatisms. It would be truthful to note that the affirmation of the preeminence of man, and of the human in man, goes through ups and downs. Let us say that there have always existed two traditions, which now ally themselves, now exclude one another more or less, without ever quite succeeding in doing so, because they correspond to two different, perhaps irrepressible needs: the concern with the human and that with a beyond of the human. The religious thinkers themselves have often attempted a synthesis of humanism with faith. “Saint Socrates, pray for us!” exclaimed one of them, perhaps without laughing. The persecutions never managed to reduce entirely the tenacity of the humanist current, even in a fideist milieu. The Middle Ages, in which the clerical powers triumph, evidently see an apparent eclipse of it, but it continues to make its way, more or less masked, through the works. The Renaissance — Italian first, then French and European — renews, openly this time, its bond with humanism; it is in search of a model of a complete man, free and fulfilled. As early as 1486, Pico della Mirandola publishes his book with the manifest title On the Dignity of Man, where he affirms that he has found:
“in the books of the Arabs that one can see nothing more admirable than man.”
The French and English 18th century will be the great century of humanism, with the great demand for happiness for all, and even the rehabilitation of pleasure. Henceforth, in varied forms and to diverse degrees, humanism will never again leave the philosophical and cultural scene. Even the curious 19th century remains, through its regressions, its submission to the traditional authorities, an heir of J.-J. Rousseau; its ambiguity is manifest in Chateaubriand, Renan, Taine, and Michelet, then in Marxism, existentialism, and even a certain Christianity which renews its bond with “Saint Socrates” — that of Gabriel Marcel and Emmanuel Mounier — all of which claim to be humanisms, each in its own way, it is true.
So much so that this flexibility is the occasion for a further irony, whereas I find in it, on the contrary, a motive for admiration and hope. Humanism leaves intact the possibilities of cohabitation between men who are different and who hold to their differences, if they manage to agree on a few common principles. Which is not the case, after all, with the rival doctrines! Humanism, fortunately, is not a philosophical dogmatics, or a faith exclusive of the others, in the name of untouchable texts in which it suffices to discover the right quotation in order to close the debate triumphantly, as in the Sorbonne jousts: “Aristotle said…” (see art. Scholasticism).
What, then, would these principles be? Beneath the diverse trappings due to the circumstances of history and geography, one could, it seems to me, sum up the essence of humanism in three propositions:
- Man first.
- The whole man.
- All men.
The first proposition may be illustrated by the definitive formula (as definitive, in any case, as civilization itself could be): man is the measure of all things. As for most of the pre-Socratics, of whom we have only fragments left, we scarcely know what the Greek philosopher meant to put into this shorthand; but I know what I, for my part, wish to hear behind this superb banner: man must be the center, the criterion, and the goal of knowledge and of action.
I shall not develop this program in detail here; let us say that the interests and the respect of man must always come before the others. Before all the others? Even before those of science? Yes, even before those of science, of art, or of religion! There exists today a great debate on the importance of science. Following the extraordinary development of the sciences, biological ones in particular, the “ethics committees” are often embarrassed: what are the limits of the scientist’s freedom? Must one accept all the applications of research? The answer is nonetheless simple: when there is doubt, let us refer back to man; let us ask ourselves tirelessly: is this good for him? Let us recall ceaselessly that science, art, religion, and law are made for man and not the reverse. There is also in humanism, it must be recalled, a eudaemonism: one always seeks therein to increase the well-being of the greatest number, according to the principle of the English empiricists of the 18th century. Indeed, as soon as one forgets that, one always falls into some idolatry.
It is again this relativism, with man as the point of reference, that inspires a method of approaching the real. We do not know whether our mind can attain “the bottom of things,” “the essence” beyond “phenomena” (if these expressions have a meaning), but we know that we have only our mind at our disposal to understand the real, and that its principal tool is reason. From this follows not a proud dogmatism, as is sometimes claimed, but on the contrary a systematic modesty. The critique of facts and events, which we demand of the mind, with the help of reason, we demand of the mind with respect to itself. What is rightly called the critical spirit — that is, the spirit critical of itself — as against the spirit of authority, which is a renunciation, on the part of the mind, of its own freedom. This critical relativism, which leads to historical and cultural relativism, demands tolerance and measure. Humanism opens onto a wisdom.
For it is indeed a matter of a philosophy of man and of the human. If one understands that it gives rise to discussion, by what scandalous reversal of meaning do the dogmatists of every kind, chauvinists and integralists, dare to call its nobility into doubt? A cardinal has dared to stigmatize, in a public declaration, humanism as a synonym for the power of money, of sex, and of violence! Whereas it is the only philosophy that defends man against all idolatries — religious, financial, or political — and even against man himself.
The second proposition, without which the first risks remaining abstract, considers the totality of concrete man, suffering and rejoicing; the individual man and not only universal man. It could have as its motto that of the Latin poet Terence, which could serve equally for the third proposition: Nothing human is foreign to us. The fine minds will smile again: all this is quite old, “passé,” as one says today. But yes, precisely, humanism is an old affair, covered over by the breaking waves of all the totalitarianisms. The Greek sages said more or less what had to be said about human conduct, its complexity and its difficulties. Must one renounce this patrimony, on the pretext that, having resisted time, it has become banal? And that Judeo-Christianity has rather impoverished?
Terence’s motto may mean that one must take an interest in all the aspects of man, or in all the men who thus form one and the same humanity. In the first sense, man possessing — or rather being — at once a body, a mind, a social being, and an imaginary being, humanism disdains none of these aspects, notwithstanding a preference for one or another of them. Man is an animal, in his biological functioning, in a large part of his psychology, in his participation in a collective being, as the social animals are, perhaps even in his fictional life; for we now know that animals too dream, apprehend, hope. To Terence’s formula one could add here Pascal’s famous remark on the angel and the beast, which are equally within us. Attention to the body, to its realities, to its legitimate necessities, needs, desires, and even pleasures, in no way means that humanism is not concerned with what is specifically human in man — that is, his culture, the particular development of his reason, and the search for an ethics, that is, a regulation of his collective life. The accusations leveled against humanism, because it refuses to consider the angel in man separately, are derisory and suspect. A long line of humanists has demonstrated, brilliantly, that the respect for the mind and its free productions is, among them, greater than elsewhere; often to the detriment of their personal tranquility, and even sometimes of their lives. In short, this second proposition leads to a comprehensive anthropology, open to all the aspects of human reality, without exclusion of any kind — of sex, for example, as our religionists so often demand.
Finally, man is a social being even when he lives in solitude; he is constituted, literally, by his relations with various partners, from his birth and all along his life; in his most hermetic, most distant retreats, he carries with him the acquisitions of civilization; he continues, even in his imagination, to hold dialogue with his absent fellows. The sociability of man builds itself up from the narrowest group — the one he forms with his progenitors, then with his brothers and sisters — up to the whole of the men living on the earth. Montesquieu, in a formula of perfect generality, proposed always to privilege the broader over the narrower: humanity over the nation, the nation over the region, the region over the clan, the clan over the family. One may discuss this order; it remains that all that is human concerns us, moves us. We belong to several groups and, in a certain way, to all of them, whatever their hierarchy. We feel ourselves to be — we are, in some measure — in solidarity with all men: this is not only an ethical wish, but a fact, more and more evident today. Our economic, cultural, and ecological ties assert themselves more each day, so that universalism inscribes itself more and more in our existences, after having been a more or less utopian design. If morality is the set of normative rules that allow us to live together, we have, more than ever, need of an art of living within this great common whole that humanity is becoming. The debate on Europe is but the prelude to a more universal debate. In short, we need a common Law, accompanied — let us dare to say it — by a common force; being a humanist does not mean being a utopian, or scatterbrained, or cowardly. To be sure, change being disquieting, this transition gives rise to resistances, if not to convulsions, or even to some steps backward, like a horse that recoils before the obstacle. But who seriously thinks of preventing the planet-wide diffusion of television programs, or of refusing the new means of communication? Which already translate into a historically unheard-of knowledge of our fellow human beings.
It is again a humanist ambition that one finds in a possible fourth sense of humanism: to know men better in their common foundation, beyond their diversity, through the study of their languages, of their traditional writings, of their respective wisdoms. This was once called by a fine name: the humanities, thanks to which each person familiarized himself with the different cultural heritages, appropriated them in some sort so as to compose an immense common heritage. Never as today has this dream had more chance of being transformed into reality. We are at last beginning to forge our true common History. In short, if the first formula is relative to psychology and physiology, the second to anthropology, the third concerns morality and culture; a fourth would be relative to culture. Humanism is indeed a complete philosophy, knowledge and conduct, which sets out from man and returns to him.
I shall end with three remarks:
The first is that, while we have the leisure to choose another philosophy (morality, alas, does not impose itself as a “necessity”), we do not have the choice of choosing or not choosing. The gods and the religions, the groups and their ideologies pass away; man remains, like that Egyptian fellah who has crossed the centuries, resembling himself since the pharaohs. We may choose to oppress him, to massacre him; we cannot turn our attention from him. He will take it upon himself, for the rest, to recall himself to us.
The second remark is, however, that if we choose injustice, inequality, and oppression, we take at the same stroke the risk of permanent war. Man resigns himself with difficulty to subjection.
The third remark is that this is a most exalting project for the moralist, for the politician, and for the pedagogue. One hears it said that our societies can no longer offer young people an ideal for their beginning existence, that morality no longer exists, that values have collapsed: this is absurd; there always exist values, quasi-permanent ones, even if they are sometimes veiled. This is a maneuver to persuade us that salvation would lie in a return to traditional values and to the powers that have had their day. To be sure, the considerable changes we are living through demand of us reflection and adjustment; but is it not exalting to build a world in which suffering, misery, and oppression will have the smallest part? To contribute to the happiness of men, of all men on the planet? Helping men to emerge from prejudice and ignorance — is that a negligible task? There exists in Paris a superb museum with an evocative title, the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Man); there ought to be one in every city, in every country, so that children, young people, and adults may see that, beyond their differences — curious or fascinating — men are fundamentally brothers and deserve an equal compassion. Perhaps then they will let themselves be less easily convinced to hurl themselves periodically against one another in atrocious and vain tragedies.