What is Humanism?

‘Humanism’ is among the most powerful terms in historical and contemporary political, religious, and philosophical debates. ‘Humanism’ is equally used historiographically and normatively. The term serves to position in ideological conflicts and to cement a claim to interpretation in global historical discourses, but is highly contradictory. Since the middle of the 19th century, a contested field of tension has been opened up between ‘religion’ and ‘humanism’ in particular, which was – and is – just as effective politically as it has fundamentally influenced the understanding of religion. My paper addresses ‘humanism’ in its complexity and striking contradictions. Contemporary definitions of the term are confronted with the 15th to late 19th century historical contexts the term ‘humanism’ is applied to. Based on Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer’s invention of ‘humanism’ as a pedagogical-philosophical and, according to Niethammer’s self-understanding, anti-Enlightenment concept (1808), I will not present an outline of a mere conceptual history of ‘humanism’, but rather a theoretically oriented discourse, an examination of the contextual front positions, between which ‘humanism’ has been constructed as a reformist educational concept, a socialist and atheist programme (Marx/Engels, Ruge), a social movement, a confessionalist slogan and an equally anti-reformist and anti-Roman category. These conceptualizations from Niethammer to the German historiography in the middle (Karl Hagen) and at the end of the 19th century (Georg Voigt) have been unmistakably steered and shaped by their contexts. This way, the historiographical – and heuristic – impossibility of the term is shown, which, however, is rooted more precisely in its strict contextuality. In a second part, a) historiographical alternatives to this dilemma are pointed out regarding the use of the term for the 15th and 16th century movement later called ‘humanism’, in order to finally b) give suggestions not only for an ethical-normative work of historians of ‘humanism’, but for dealing with ‘humanism’ in general as a present and future discourse, in connection with discourse-theoretical suggestions and as a decisive question of how man is and how he should be.