Humanism escapes anthropocentrism the moment it stops severing human beings from the rest of the living world. Philosopher Frédéric Worms proposes linking the fight against violence between humans to the preservation of nature: protecting people, he argues, now means protecting what surrounds them.
What anthropocentrism is humanism criticised for?
Today’s humanism “must link the fight against violence between humans to the preservation of all living things.”
Certain readings of humanism are criticised for treating human beings as an absolute exception among living things. In this view, humanity’s exclusive status above other species would justify treating nature as an inert object, entirely at its disposal. The whole of the Earth would thus be subject to its will alone.
The trouble with this stance is that it cuts human beings off from their own natural environment. Rather than recognising the distinct nature of other living things, it reduces them to mere resources serving a single master. Humanism criticised in this way loses sight of the fact that it, too, belongs to the world it claims to dominate.
How is humanism being rethought today?
Since the Renaissance, philosopher Frédéric Worms reminds us, human beings have stood at the centre of humanist thought. But that central place, he argues, can no longer rest on a superiority that isolates humanity from the rest of the living world: contemporary humanism is no longer built on that kind of disconnection. Rethinking humanism therefore means changing the bond between the human species and what surrounds it, without abandoning the thinking that has underpinned it for centuries.
For Frédéric Worms, this shift comes down to one precise move: connecting two struggles long thought of as separate. Today’s humanism “must link the fight against violence between humans to the preservation of all living things.” Human survival, in other words, is intimately bound up with that of the living world around us. Humanism now ties the protection of people from one another to the protection of everything that lives.
Can we protect people without sacrificing the planet?
Framing the question this way, protect human beings or preserve the planet, means accepting a choice that shouldn’t exist. The humanism we are calling for gives up neither: it looks for the point where human dignity and the health of the living world sustain each other rather than compete. This shift changes the nature of the debate: instead of a dilemma to be settled, it becomes a horizon to be built, step by step, decision after decision.
Perhaps this is where the answer to the question that opened this article lies: avoiding anthropocentrism doesn’t mean disappearing behind nature, but learning to place human beings among living things rather than above them. A humanism broadened in this way protects human beings no less, it protects them differently, by taking into account the world they depend on.
Placing human beings among living things, rather than above them, doesn’t erase what humanism has spent centuries building. It gives it new breath instead: a single demand for protection, one that no longer really separates human dignity from the health of the world that sustains it.
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