Inventing the Renaissance

After the barbarism of the Second World War, many intellectuals questioned the possibility of restoring meaning to Humanism. But what is meant by this fundamental concept? This text examines the genealogy of Humanism, first retracing its appearance in public discourse, then its codification in Jacob Burckhardt’s text, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. If Humanism arose from the discovery of the individual, and if the individual is the individual described by Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, then rejecting or accepting Humanism means taking a stance on modernity and its understanding of the subject and its autonomy, as clearly demonstrated in the debate between Sartre and Heidegger.