10 - Towards a new humanism

Summary

The search for an appropriate universalism within the writings of feminism suggests both an unwillingness to abandon the possibility of ethics altogether, and a desire to discover and to work towards the liberation of women and the greater fulfilment of human life. Their unwillingness is evidence of a profound awareness of fundamental questions about life in all of its dimensions, questions which press upon our consciousness, and which require the whole range of skills available to us to pursue and to understand, and of a belief that such awareness is a basic feature of being human. There is much that may still be developed within feminist thinking from what is basically a moral sense. It ensures, on the one hand, a most critical attitude towards, and assessment of, existing modes of reasoning in moral matters. Thus the dismantling of the notion of a disembodied thinking self, whose thoughts and actions need to be guided by transcendent rational principles, has been an exercise in developing a more adequate understanding of human life and the place of the moral within it. On the other hand, it is from this moral sense that women may recognise and speak of the different possibilities of morality, which may yet serve human life in new ways.