Dividing Humanity: Humans, Humanisms, Inhumans

To create, say the great founding texts, is to share and distinguish: between mortals and immortals, between humans and beasts, between an eternal God and ephemeral beings, between a perishable body and an immortal soul…

This first gesture launches the whole investigation. Its purpose is to examine the ways in which these divisions have been taken up, transformed, contested and rejected over the centuries. So many historical figures of man are examined, one chapter after another: The Greek anthrôpos, the Roman homo humanus, the homo christianus, then the man of the humanists, the one who makes his own the “I am man and nothing human is foreign to me”, before the proclamation “man is a God for man”, itself soon followed by the announcement of “the death of man”, leads to the rejection of a “proper” of man and of all the dualisms which, over the centuries, have marked his history.

Humans, humanisms, inhumans: the subtitle further defines the historical framework. By combining and opposing each other, the three terms form a system. Humanism, by seeking to distinguish the human from the inhuman, has sought ways for humans, or at least some of them, to be more or better human. This has not always prevented them from being blind to the inhuman. Today, in the face of the inhuman, humanitarianism claims to act in the name of a human characteristic: dignity.

To retrace the great arc that leads from the formation of anthrôpos to its dissolution implies neither that this path was mapped out in advance, nor that it must lead to some kind of apocalypse. On the contrary, it shows how the present moment of widespread disorientation is part of a long history. And, at the same time, to help us understand it better.