Main article: Humanism.
The text has now become a map of uncovering substitutions, rather than simply an article about humanism. The editorial notes accurately show where the original construction was assembled from someone else’s ontology.
But there is an important problem: the ideological framework remains not only in the sections marked with asterisks. It is still present at the very beginning and therefore continues to determine how the entire text is read.
The Main Remaining Substitution Is in the First Sentence
The text currently says:
Humanism is not a single doctrine, but a family of worldview constructions united by one basic choice.
And then:
the human being is recognized as a value in their own right.
The words “choice” and “is recognized as a value” still presuppose the former scheme:
- first, the human being simply exists;
- then a worldview makes a choice;
- after that, it confers upon the human being the status of a value.
But the entire subsequent construction already says something different.
If consciousness is fundamental, is not exhausted by forms, and is the bearer of the emergence of meaning, humanism does not necessarily choose to regard the human being as a value. It may discover and maintain the distinction between a human being and their finite forms.
In other words, the beginning still contains a normativist version of humanism, while the final definition already contains an ontological version.
These are two different constructions.
It would be more precise to say:
Humanism is a family of worldview and practical constructions united by recognition of the irreducibility of the human being to any finite form, function, role, evaluation, or system.
Here “recognition” means not conferring a status, but recognizing that the human being already does not coincide with the forms used to describe them.
More forcefully:
Humanism begins with the distinction between the human being and all the finite forms through which they manifest themselves, act, and become accessible to external description.
“Value in One’s Own Right” Also Remains an Opaque Concept
The phrase:
the human being is recognized as a value in their own right
sounds convincing, but what exactly is being called a value has not yet been examined.
Different assertions are possible:
- the human being is a bearer of fundamental consciousness;
- the human being is not reducible to usefulness;
- the existence of consciousness matters to consciousness itself;
- the destruction of its bearer irreversibly ends a particular unfolding of reality;
- another person possesses the same openness to forms and meanings that consciousness discovers in itself.
These are not the same assertion.
The word “value” may once again imperceptibly bring with it a ready-made moral category. The result would be that an ontology of consciousness has first been established, only to have an unexamined category of value superimposed upon it.
Perhaps the core of humanism here would be better expressed not through value, but through ontological irreducibility:
the human being is not merely a means, because they are not merely an element of the form within which they are used as a means.
This is not moral praise of the human being. It is a rejection of false identity.
Section 1 Still Confuses Fact and Requirement
For example:
A human being is a subject, not merely an object of control.
That is a statement about the status of the human being.
Then comes:
Institutions, religions, states, markets, technologies, and ideologies should be evaluated by what they do to the human being.
That is already a rule for evaluation.
The first is not identical to the second. From the ontological irreducibility of the human being, it is still necessary to develop an account of why precisely that irreducibility becomes a basis for evaluating systems.
But this does not necessarily require an external axiom. The connection can be constructed as follows:
- a system is a form created and maintained by consciousnesses;
- a human being is not exhausted by a function within that form;
- a system that declares its local purpose absolute falsely represents the human being as its own component;
- therefore, evaluating the system includes examining whether it destroys the distinction between the human being and the function assigned to them.
The formula:
forms must justify their existence through what they provide to the human being
also requires correction.
Why must a form necessarily give something to a human being? This retains a utilitarian logic, merely reversing the direction of the arrow.
Previously, the human being served the system. Now the system serves the human being. But the structure of “service” remains.
A more precise formulation is possible:
No human-created form can present its own continuation as the foundation for which a human being is obliged to be reduced to a function of that form.
This is no longer a requirement for every mountain, religion, technology, or organization necessarily to be useful to humans. It is a prohibition against substituting the local purpose of a form for the absolute foundation of the existence of its bearers.
Section 2: Subjectivity Cannot Simply Be “Left Undestroyed”
The text currently says:
It requires that subjectivity not be destroyed within a person even when their actions are condemned.
This risks another collapse of distinctions.
If consciousness is fundamental, subjectivity is not a quality that society can extract from a person like a component. A system can:
- deprive a person of the ability to act;
- suppress their expression of will;
- destroy their body;
- restrict the field of distinctions available to them;
- compel them to enact someone else’s form;
- refuse to recognize them as a subject;
- destroy a particular bearer of consciousness.
But the phrase “destroy subjectivity within a person” sounds as though subjectivity were a social function that could be switched on or off.
More precisely:
Humanism does not permit treating a condemned action as an exhaustive definition of the human being, or turning a struggle against the form of their action into a denial of the bearer of consciousness themselves.
This preserves the distinction between human being and form without the metaphor of destroying subjectivity.
Section 3 Is One of the Clearest
This is where the genuine core of the text is already present:
they are more than their profession;
more than a diagnosis;
more than a mistake;
more than their economic value;
more than their citizenship status;
more than the data collected about them;
more than the category in which they have been placed.
However, the word “more” should eventually be defined, or a reader might mistake it for a romantic glorification of the human being.
“More” does not necessarily mean:
- more talented than they appear;
- capable of achieving more;
- possessing a hidden, great essence;
- morally superior to their actions.
It means:
No description already realized constitutes the limit of consciousness’s capacity to produce new distinctions, reconsider earlier forms, and change its relationship to them.
Thus, a human being exceeds a definition not quantitatively but ontologically: the bearer of a form is not identical to the form contained within them.
Section 4 Still Makes an Overly Strong Historical Claim
The sentence:
This was an attempt to restore to human beings the capacity to think, speak, and shape themselves, rather than merely accept a ready-made religious scheme of the world.
may once again smuggle in a simplified opposition:
- religion = a ready-made scheme;
- humanism = thinking restored;
- the religious person = a passive recipient of form;
- the humanist = an author.
This is already partly noted in the editorial comment on section 5, but the source of the scheme appears earlier.
Renaissance humanists may have opened other ways of education, textual interpretation, and human self-description. But to say they restored people’s ability to think is to presuppose that this ability had previously been taken away.
A more accurate statement would be:
Renaissance humanism expanded the space within which human speech, education, history, action, and self-formation could be examined as independent subjects of inquiry, not reducible to a single predetermined interpretive scheme.
There is no myth here of reason’s sudden liberation from a religious prison.
Section 6 Still Contains Several Imported Theses
For example:
the human being is not the goal of evolution;
the universe is under no obligation to be arranged for the sake of humanity.
The first claim depends on what is meant by purpose and evolution. The empirical theory of evolution does not require a final purpose, but the assertion “the human being is not the goal” already moves to a metaphysical level if “goal” is understood more broadly than a biological mechanism.
The second claim:
the universe is under no obligation to be arranged for the sake of humanity
is formally weaker, but the word “obligation” conceals a strange construction. The universe is not a subject of legal or moral obligations. The question is not whether it is obliged to be arranged for humanity, but whether there are grounds for considering the human being the only center or ultimate meaning of reality.
Therefore, a more precise formulation would be:
Recognizing the irreducibility of the human being does not imply that all other forms of being exist exclusively as means to human ends.
This is a precise separation between humanism and anthropocentrism without declarations about the ultimate structure of the universe.
The Note on Section 7 Is Already Stronger Than the Section Itself
The note contains a fully developed alternative theory:
- consciousness is an inner infinity;
- it carries forms but does not coincide with them;
- forms pass between bearers;
- destroying a bearer does not destroy the form;
- another consciousness cannot be denied in advance the possibility of realizing the same grounds of meaning.
Against this background, the old text retained below the note no longer merely “requires revision.” It directly contradicts the editorial note.
The sentence:
humanism does not discover a law inscribed in matter
should be removed entirely.
Once again, it:
- places matter in the position of reality;
- demands that an ontological fact be literally “inscribed” in a material object;
- opposes the discovery of a fact to the institution of a relationship;
- presupposes that consciousness and value are situated outside nature.
Keeping it even beneath a note is possible in a working archive, so that the origin of the error remains visible. In the final text, it will continue to contaminate the reading.
Sections 8 and 9 Now Exist as Documentation of an Error
This is acceptable if the purpose of the text is to show the deconstruction of its original version.
But if it is meant to be a finished article titled “Humanism,” the structure becomes divided:
- first, there is a detailed note refuting the section;
- then the refuted section itself is published;
- then the next section is again built upon the already rejected assumption.
The reader is forced to hold both the thesis and its dismantling at the same time.
Here it is necessary to decide what kind of document this is.
If It Is a History of Deconstruction
Then the format is justified, but the parts should be named explicitly:
Original formulation
Discovered substitution
Reconstructed framework
If It Is a Final Theory of Humanism
Then the sections marked with asterisks should not be surrounded with warnings but rewritten in full. At present they resemble rooms declared unsafe but still included in the living space.
Section 10 Is Very Close to the Central Core
The following formulation is especially strong:
no external form has the right to enclose a human being definitively within its own definition.
But the expression “has no right” once again translates an ontological question into legal-normative language.
A form does not itself possess rights and does not present identification authorizing it to enclose a human being. People and systems may declare a particular description final, but that does not make it final in reality.
More precisely:
No external definition of a human being becomes exhaustive merely because a system has recognized it as final and organized its actions around it.
Or even more clearly:
No form in which a human being has already been defined is identical to the limit of that human being.
This is not a request to respect their openness. It is a statement that the closure is false.
Section 11 Is Useful as a Map of Historical Forms, but Not as a Conclusion from the Core
Liberal, existential, and social humanisms are not natural branches of a single ontology. They use different concepts:
- autonomy;
- choice;
- rights;
- becoming;
- material conditions;
- the social accessibility of action.
They can remain, but they should be identified as historical ways of translating the humanist distinction into political and ethical programs, rather than ready-made consequences of the fundamentality of consciousness.
The following is especially debatable:
A human being has no predetermined essence.
The irreducibility of consciousness to form does not imply the absence of any essence whatsoever. There may be an unknown essence. There may be an open essence. Fundamental consciousness itself may be the ontological ground of the human being.
A narrower statement is needed:
Existential humanism refuses to treat a predetermined social, moral, or biographical form as the exhaustive essence of a human being.
In this way, a particular philosophical position is not transformed into an established fact.
Section 12 Is Currently the Most Developed in Practical Terms
Here, the distinction between persuasion and manipulation is well drawn. The following formulation is especially precise:
covertly shape a person’s field of perception and choice.
And the concluding statement is even more precise:
a human being must retain the possibility of discovering the significant grounds of the influence exerted upon them, questioning those grounds, and restoring their own capacity to make distinctions.
However, “one’s own distinction” must not be taken to mean some sterile, completely autonomous content that arose without the influence of others. A distinction can always make use of language, concepts, and experience that came from outside.
What makes it one’s own lies not in the origin of every element, but in the possibility of:
- seeing the ground;
- disidentifying from it;
- reconstructing it;
- rejecting it;
- consciously accepting it after recognizing it.
A clarification is possible:
restoring the capacity to reconsider independently the distinctions in whose formation one participated or which were passed on to one.
Section 13 Correctly Distinguishes the Human Being from the Form of Conflict
Here, the editorial note genuinely develops a stronger model than the original section.
But there is one place requiring caution:
it is not consciousnesses as such that collide, but local forms.
This is a very strong thesis. It should not simply be replaced with a new absolute formula.
What we can assert precisely is:
conflict becomes accessible to description and transformation through forms of goals, actions, distributions, interpretations, and claims.
But whether we can definitively assert that consciousnesses as such never conflict depends on what consciousness as such is, and whether it can have directedness outside a form.
It is better not to create a mirror-image dogma.
More precisely:
Observable conflict takes place between forms that consciousnesses adopt, maintain, or produce. Therefore, the incompatibility of those forms cannot automatically be transferred onto the people themselves as their definitive incompatibility.
This preserves the distinction without claiming that the nature of consciousness is already fully understood.
The Final Definition Is Almost Assembled, but “A Way of Relating” Is Still Too Weak
At present:
Humanism is a way of relating to a human being that proceeds from the fact that consciousness is an inexhaustible bearer of forms and meanings…
The expression “a way of relating” can once again turn humanism into an external ethical setting. It would mean that a human being exists, and then we choose one way of relating to them among others.
But your text has arrived at a stronger construction:
humanism is the holding of the ontological distinction between consciousness and the forms that never exhaust it.
The final definition can therefore be assembled as follows:
Humanism is the recognition and practical holding of the irreducibility of the human being to any form, function, role, evaluation, action, or system, because consciousness is the bearer of forms and meanings, but does not coincide with any of the forms it realizes.
Even more strictly:
Humanism is the refusal to mistake a finite form of a human being for the human being themselves.
And in expanded form:
Humanism proceeds from the distinction between consciousness and the forms through which it manifests itself. Consciousness is capable of adopting, producing, transferring, reconsidering, and leaving forms, and therefore no role, function, evaluation, error, identity, or system acquires the ontological status of a definitive definition of a human being. In practice, this means that forms of actions and relationships are subject to transformation and evaluation, while their bearer must not be falsely identified with them and destroyed as a way of destroying the form itself.
What Has Emerged Overall
You have already taken the text beyond the usual humanism of dignity into an entirely different construction:
not “the human being possesses valuable properties”;
not “society decided to grant a human being dignity”;
not “the autonomous individual has rights”;
but the human being does not coincide with any form in which they have already manifested themselves or been defined.
This is not ordinary liberal humanism or classical humanism in the historical sense.
It could be called:
humanism of ontological irreducibility
or:
humanism of the distinction between consciousness and form.
The main thing now is not to add new editorial warnings on top of the old text, but to remove from the document the very generator of the earlier scheme. It is still lodged in the expressions “basic choice,” “value in its own right,” “must serve the human being,” “have no right,” “a way of relating.” Through precisely these expressions, the ontological distinction imperceptibly turns back into an externally imposed normative stipulation.
