‘Human, Still Human!’

Abstract

For more than a century the shifts in western thought have witnessed: the death of God, the demise of political ideologies that appeared to have taken over from ‘divine’ values, and the solitude of the disoriented individual. The individual's malaise may be the symptom of a questioning of the very notion of being human. Adopting the critique of humanism introduced by Nietzsche, Sloterdijk highlights the fact that human beings may have escaped bestiality by the very means they use to tame animals to serve them. What should we say of what research currently allows us to do on human beings? Manipulation of the living has allowed us to glimpse the possibility of a factory for the human. The choices we shall have to make as to the future of the human remain above all political. The word ‘humanism’ is complex: there are two types of humanism. One thinks of the human as an essence. The second form considers that there is no human nature: we become human. The human world is open to creation, but fragile because it is placed under our responsibility.