Liberal Humanism

By Andrew Aaron

.It is perhaps, only possible now, to speak of liberal humanism and hermeneutics as cultural products, in the light cast by materialism. The great work that materialism did for cultural critique was to open every area of human endeavor, including materialism, for exploration and critique. Heretofore, each new school of human thought, while fully able to analyze other schools, generally left itself off the hook. Descartes’ doubt extended only so far, Arnold having found high culture looked no further. However, a general discussion along such lines may be somewhat premature. A more particular summary of materialism and its forebears is in order.

Liberal humanism is and has been the dominant model that has governed the West for four hundred years 1. Its strength lies in its ability to speak to deep democratic impulses of liberty, justice, fairness, the centrality of the individual while at the same time allowing any number of imprisonments, injustices, unfairness, and atomization of the individual coupled with group dominance to exist and even flourish under its rubric. In fact, what is most apparent about each of the three models of critique is that they engender in their application, the reasons for new critiques (I will return to this). Liberal humanism fought against theism, authoritarianism, and the static nature of the Middle Ages 2,

The Catholic Church with its vast hierarchy and domination of all religious and much secular matter was perhaps the most organized opponent of liberal humanism. The various feudal monarchies bolstered by divinely given absolute rule had little or no truck with even primitive forms of democracy. Finally, medieval culture was deeply unchanging, to some extent resembling Egypt at its peak. Long years of war, plague, and ignorance all made for an environment that was hardly conducive to breakout thinking 3. Nevertheless, with the reformation of the church, the exploration of the globe, it was only a matter of time before a new model developed. Liberal humanism was that model. It emphasized man as individual, as conqueror of nature.

For Bacon, the superstition of the church and the dogma that enveloped and protected that superstition was anathema. Socrates’ belief that the man of wisdom could discern signs in heaven on how to live was replaced by actually seeing what was in heaven and what was on earth, in nature. Nature that was created just to be understood by man. Bacon saw that culture, therefore, in all its forms must be thoroughly doubted. Where did these ideas come from about the world, about people, about society? Bacon found his key to understanding in the scientific method, Hume went further, and he doubted even science. However, there is something cold and sterile in all this science, Kant attempts to add layers of nuance to liberal humanism. Kant attempts to corral each of the three ways that reason exists by forcing them to be viable only in their fields of endeavor. God's existence cannot be proved or disproved by science since the supernatural falls outside its purview 4. Culture, then, is not autonomous or given divinely for Kant but exists at the interstice of the individual and his world. It becomes the vehicle for pushing man upwards out of the slime and chaos of his past. Progress was an undeniable good for most of the architects of liberal humanists.

I wrote earlier that the critique of any model was found in the very application of the model. Liberal humanism was rigid at times, it relied heavily on science, and it seemingly attempts to place man in kind of perpetual now, as a self-creating individual who can be divorced from his background 5. This model founded on reason could only call into being a model founded on romantic tendencies. Hermeneutics is literally the science of interpretation. Surber derives the word finally from Hermes, the messenger of the Greek gods and the carrier of secrets. The hermetic texts were sacred and magical books that could only be deciphered by adepts and only truly understood by those adepts. While the thinkers who developed hermeneutics as a model of understanding and critiquing the world, were not magic seekers by any means (as far as I know) it says something that their model was at least partially based on magical thinking.

The great advance that this, in part, romantic model made over liberal humanism was the development of the idea that culture was a continuously produced, refined, reshaped, organism that depended on the individual and the world that individual inhabited. Moving back and forth between the throwness (past), the circumspective concern (present), and the projection (future), the individual and the group created language, art, writing, dance, in short all that human beings did or said was culture, was text. This being the case, it was the hermeneutisist's job to analyze and decipher what any particular "text" meant for reader and author, for viewer and painter, for observer and choreographer. Hermeneutics as a model may not be as complete or as far-reaching as the other two, but it does lay the groundwork for Deconstructionism in the study of literature, Psychoanalysis in the study of the human mind, Critical Legal Studies in the examination of law and governance. However, just as liberal humanism could become the backbone of the status quo and even quite reactionary (i.e. Arnold), hermeneutics could and sometimes does drift into obscurity, into side issues, leaving the grappling with the world to others.

Surber quotes Marx's line “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however, is to change it,” at least twice in his chapter on the materialist critique. There is excellent reason to repeat this dictum. It is the clearest formation of the difference between materialism as it became under Marx, and either hermeneutics or liberal humanism. Both of the latter are tools to analyze, to probe to understand why and how and what an object, an idea, a civilization is and is not. The former is a tool for all these but it also can be the tool to change the object, the idea, the civilization. Materialism gets its start with Baruch Spinoza, philosopher and theologian, in the 17th century. Spinoza pushed for a matter-based world, the mind and substance not being incompatible6 in such a universe. Once this becomes established, once science makes nature a thing that can be controlled, changed, a purely sensed based view of reality is not going to last long.

As materialism develops, it becomes somewhat mystical under the sway of Hegel. Feuerbach pulls Hegel back and turns him around, shifting his words in order to change the meaning of his sentences. Marx takes this notion and creates a critique of culture in which culture is seen as both the expression of a person and a people as well as the way in which the operative forces of history are masked and hidden from the people. Marx's famous and oft-misunderstood belief "that religion is the opiate of the masses" becomes clear when religion is seen as being a cultural construct that generally supports the those in power, whether by its structure of belief in a kingly God-figure which sets an example for earthly rule, the hierarchy of priests and prelates, or the dogma and superstition that Bacon abhorred 7. Culture is too be critiqued (and criticized) when it occurs under status quo, domineering models of governance and power relationships. When it can occur spontaneously under optimal conditions it is to be embraced, according to Marx. However, as Marxism played itself out in history, becoming Leninist-Stalinist Marxism, it assumed many of the faults and foibles of the regimes it had stood against. This forced a reevaluation of Marxist theory. For the purposes of this essay, Gramsci's view of culture as part of hegemony and anti-hegemony forces, his belief that culture and politics/economics were reciprocal, that is mutually enhancing and detracting is of paramount importance. Materialism is at bottom a view of the universe, that sees all as matter, the "stuff' of the universe, as existing obeying laws, governed by time and space, even human affairs obey these laws. Gramsci and Althusser push Marxism and materialism into new places, new modes of thinking. Together Marxist-Materialism remains as a powerful tool for analysis.

Reading back over this essay, I am struck by how much my language reflects liberal humanism. I speak of "advances," of progress. I talk of engendering; my language is tainted by diachronism. I feel myself missing "the big picture," trapped by my own belief in my individual intelligence. I mentioned Borges before, something of his terror and wariness when confronted by vertiginous thinking by multiplicity of form and sameness. Am I guilty of banality is the essay that others are also guilty of before and after me? How much of my cultural baggage has made this essay what it is and what it is not? Each model that I have discussed contains faults and virtues, the leading virtue and the leading virtue both being that reflexivity, the looking and critiquing the self beyond just the moral but also the political, the scientific, the personal, the cultural, is here to stay.

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1 Culture and Critique, Jere Paul Surber (Colorado: Westview Press, 1998). This figure is quoted on page 45 but the theme of liberal humanism's dominance is repeated often in the course of all three chapters.

2 Ibid. Surber repeats this formulation through chapter I

3 However, it is worth noting that the Greek and Roman knowledge that Bacon, Hume, et al valued, was preserved by monks and clerics in Europe, and the sages/theologians of Islam. Structuralism strikes again.

4 Many atheists dispute this logic.

5 This may explain the American capitalist notions of the self-made man and every individual's ability to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, regardless of their past or how that past may impinge on their present.

6 We are all materialists in our day-to-day lives. I find it hard to imagine really being able to prove to the average person the truth of a David Humian world. Borges's refutation of time might be the last great example in this century.