Читать книгу Critical Humanism - Ken Plummer - Страница 15

The status of human is something we claim and enact rather than something we uncover.

Anne Phillips, The Politics of the Human (2015), p. 131

Humanism and humanity have fallen on hard times. They need to be reimagined and reconnected. As Anne Phillips points out, our human status must be enacted, not simply discovered. Three or four generations ago, their death was being firmly announced by European philosophers.¹ More recently, a posthuman era has been ushered in. This ‘ending’ of humanism happens periodically; the sociologist Marcus Morgan nicely calls it ‘the phoenix of humanism’.² Humanism has its fates, fatalities and foes; yet it rises back up again and again. Humanity seems to keep calling us. At its best, as John Dewey once remarked, it is ‘an expansion, not a contraction, of human life, an expansion in which nature and the science of nature are made the willing servants of human good’.³ Each generation finds its new responses. This book is one such response.