Humanism, as a philosophy, is about 2500 years old. There is nothing new in it except that it is new for us. We have forgotten humanism for the last fifty years. So let me try to remind you of the history of the idea of humanism in our tradition. I would have to talk about a Chinese and Indian humanism expressed in Taoism and Buddhism, but this would take a little too much time, so I might as well begin with the idea of humanism in the Old Testament.

One expression in the Old Testament is that God creates only one man. And as Talmudic sources say, God created one man only in order to indicate two things: first, that no man can say, “I am superior to you because my ancestors were superior to yours,” and second, to indicate that anyone who destroys one single life is as if he had destroyed mankind. Another expression of the idea of humanism, of the one man, is the statement in the Old Testament that man is created in the likeness of God: that all men, hence, are equal, are the same in spite of the fact that they are not the same, because of their all being created in the likeness of God. And eventually you find in the Old Testament a command of love that is very significant and often overlooked and neglected, one that refers not only to the love of our neighbor but that refers to the love of the stranger.

The stranger is precisely the person with whom we are not familiar. The stranger is precisely the person who does not belong to the same tribe or to the same nation or to the same culture, and the Bible says: “Love the stranger, for you have been strangers in Egypt and hence you know the soul of the strange” (Lev. 19:33). Indeed, only if one experienced what the stranger experiences, if one can put oneself in his place, one can understand him, or to put it more broadly, only if one can experience what any other human being experiences can one understand him, can one know what he feels.

Eventually you have perhaps the most explicit expression of Old Testament humanism in the prophetic concept of messianism.

The idea of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 – 1781), another great humanist, went in a similar direction. He considered it the task of man to realize the essence of the human species. You see in Lessing’s works the same concept, namely that which is specifically human – the essence of man, the essence of humanity – must be realized, must be made manifest, must be developed. This is the task of man. The most important of all humanist thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was perhaps Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I should like to mention a few ideas of Goethe here. One that he expressed was the idea that man carries in himself not only his own individuality but all humanity with all its potentialities, although man, because of the limitations of his existence, can realize only part of these potentialities. The goal of life, to Goethe was to develop through individuality to universality. I should like to stress this, because eighteenth- century thinking up to the philosophy of Goethe (and later Marx) was a thinking in which one did not believe that one reached universality by diminishing individuality, by making himself like everyone else in order to feel his one-ness with others. On the contrary, it was believed that man, only by developing his own individuality fully, could come to the experience of his own humanity – and that means of all humanity. He would feel one with all, then, precisely because he had become fully himself. And if he does not become fully himself, if he remains, mentally speaking, a stillborn person, then he will neither have nor be able to feel that humanity which he carries within himself.

The experience of humanism is that – “Nothing human is alien to me”; that I carry within myself all of humanity; that, in spite of the fact that there are not two individuals who are the same, the paradox exists that we all share in the same substance, in the same quality; that nothing which exists in any human being does not exist within myself. I am the criminal and the saint. I am the child and I am the adult. I am the man who lived a hundred thousand years ago and I am the man who, provided we don’t destroy the human race will live a hundred thousand years from now.

Goethe was the last of the tradition of humanists in the nineteenth century. Then began a new wave of nationalism, and it is one of those ironies of history that the French Revolution, was based on and stimulated by a philosophy that was essentially humanistic, was precisely the revolution that created the new nationalism, which began to create the new idol, the national state. Force and nationalistic sentiments were used in order to realize the powerful economic interests that existed within the national state. This nationalism, which began in the French Revolution and in the German-French wars, spread rampant into Germany after 1871, when Germany was finally united. We find it even more rampant later in Germany, as well as in the Stalinist Russia. It found expression in two world wars; it is equally terrifying as the cause for a possible third, and this time, nuclear war.

I should like to mention briefly that the most important expression of the eighteenth century humanism in the nineteenth century is to be found in the Socialist thought of various types, perhaps most clearly in the thought of Marx. Now this may sound surprising to you, because most of you have heard that Marx was materialistic, that he believed that the main motivation of man was material, and so on. Actually Marx is much quoted and little understood, but so is the Bible. Marx’s aim for man was precisely that of Spinoza, like that of Goethe; the independent, the free man: “A being does not regard himself as independent unless he is his own master, and he is only his own master when he owes his existence to himself. A man who lives by the favor of another considers himself a dependent being.” Man is independent only if he “appropriated his manifold being in an all-inclusive way and thus as the whole man.” This latter concept of the “whole man” comes from the Renaissance through Spinoza, Leibniz, and Goethe to Marx. Further: “All his human relations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, observing, feeling, desiring, acting, loving – in short, all the organs of his individuality…are…. the appropriation of human reality. Private property has made us so stupid and partial that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when it is directly eaten, drunken, worn, inhabited, etc., in short, utilized in some way…Thus, all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple alienation of all of these senses: the sense of having.

Another statement of Marx is very characteristic for all humanistic thinking; the statement concerns man as an active bearing against passive being. This statement refers particularly to love. For Marx, as for Spinoza, the problem is never “to be loved”, as it is for most of us, and the question is never the principal question, “How does anyone love us?” but the problem is our capacity to love and the quality of love as an active quality. “If you love without evoking love in return, that is, if you are not able by the manifestation of yourself as a loving person to make yourself a beloved person, then, your love is impotent, a misfortune”

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