According to the definition of the American Association of Humanists, humanism is a progressive life position that, without the help of belief in the supernatural, affirms our ability and duty to lead an ethical way of life for self-realization and in an effort to bring greater benefit to humanity.

This idea passed a long historical path through the well-known written history of mankind.

Ancient Greece

Convicted to death, Socrates drinks a bowl of poison, but does not renounce his convictions.

Socrates argued that beauty, reason and goodness are human qualities beyond gods.

"There is only one god - knowledge, and only one devil is ignorance," "Who is wise is the one who is good." These are the true treasures of the human soul, but people do not appreciate them, because they do not know themselves, and therefore are blind and helpless in the world, allow false values ​​to bind themselves and enslave: "How many there are things without which you can live!"

"Which I do not are needed. " It is necessary to search only for what gives man freedom and independence. The most important task of human existence, according to Socrates, is to find its good meaning. He taught: "To be lower than yourself is nothing but ignorance, and being above yourself is nothing but wisdom."

Socrates combined the pursuit of happiness with the search for truth and self-knowledge. He put prosperity in dependence on wisdom. "Virtue is born not of money, but from virtues people have money and all other benefits, both in private life and in public life."

He moved people to goodness, convinced that the true good is identical with the wisdom that makes a person's life perfect. Life is like a wandering, as long as a person has not discovered the basic virtues laid down in everyone.

You just need to turn to yourself, to your mind, and he will teach moderation, justice and courage. These are the main, supreme, according to Socrates, human virtues. They, in his opinion, are called to be the basis for all others: strength, courage, valor.

Ancient Rome

Seneca (about 4-65 AD) is a Roman Stoic philosopher, tragic writer, author of numerous works: Moral Letters to Lucie, Mercy, and Good Deeds. "On the Blessed Life", "On Anger", "On the Tranquility of the Soul", "Consolation", etc.

Despite the fact that Seneca considered the nature of man to be bad, he did not abandon the idea of ​​human perfection. Moreover, the wisdom of life, in his opinion, is precisely the improvement of the human soul - its liberation from passions and lusts.

He believed that man can not change the order of things. But in his power to find courage and worthily accept everything that fate brings: "Remember: a person has no misfortune except those that he himself considers unhappy."

For Seneca, all people are equal in spirit, and this spiritual equality he considered the basis of tolerance and justice: "Man is holy to man." He regarded passions and vices as disastrous for society, and virtues, on the contrary, as what most of all connects the human race to a single community of citizens of the Cosmos.

According to the thinker, the spirit of man is great and vast, does not tolerate any boundaries. His true homeland is the whole of this world, which includes the celestial vault, and the seas and lands. More shameful slavery than slavery of the spirit does not exist. In this slavery, a person is ignorant.

Therefore, a person must constantly strive for knowledge: "Life without knowledge means death and inglorious burial." Seneca taught that in order to achieve a dignified life, it is necessary for a person to treat oneself kindly "Who is a friend to himself, that friend and to everyone" and to determine the goals of his life. "Who does not know which harbor to sail, there is no passing wind for that".

The texts of the Ancient philosophers after the collapse of the Roman Empire in Europe were lost and preserved only in Asian countries, previously conquered by Alexander the Great and absorbed the learning of the ancient Greeks and Latins. The Crusades opened the ancient world to the wild Europeans again and scholarship began to develop.The forerunner of the Renaissance is rightly considered Dante Alighieri, but the first humanist was Petrarch.

Renaissance

Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), in contrast to theocentrism (in the center of God), returned to ancient anthropocentrism, when man was placed in the center of the universe.

This revolution is comparable to the advent of digital technology. Previously, a man's attempt to penetrate the mind beyond the bounds of religious knowledge was safely liquidated by priests and animal fear before punishment for his own thoughts different from the dogma.

"Everything is from God!" In a word, a solid Arkanar, where the clever drowned in the parachute. Petrarch put the value of the human person along with faith, religion - for priests with a center in God, people - their own separate life, in which the highest value is a person.

The crisis of the 20th century

The idea of ​​humanism, together with scientific knowledge, gradually spread to the minds of people across Europe, problems began when, at the beginning of the 20th century, education became widely available, literacy does not mean understanding the most complex processes in human life.

The savage semi-literate people, drawn from various estates into the social life, have learned with their ignorance a rather paradoxical thing.

They perverted the idea of ​​humanism to its full opposite.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The hierarchical consciousness of the people of that time inherited from the theocentricism experienced a wild evolution.

Refusing to God, but not changing their attitude, oriented to slavish worship of the absolute, they began to create idols for themselves, the idea of ​​the God-man of the creator appeared. It permeates most of the works of those years from Nietzsche with his superman to Karsavin with his symphonic personality.

Lev Karsavin, fled from the Bolsheviks to the Baltic States, after the aggression of the Soviet Union and the seizure of the Baltic States, was placed in a Soviet concentration camp where he died pretty quickly from hunger.

Antihumanism in the form of perversely understood humanism, in Germany brought to power the National Socialists, who killed millions of people for the sake of implementing a false idea, and in Russia - the Bolsheviks, whose successors still do not allow the Russian people to live peacefully, carrying out unnecessary wars.

The symbol of the realization of the crookedly understood humanism was most clearly seen by Alexander Blok in the form of 12 apostles-Red Army men marching through the night Petersburg, podminayuschih under themselves all the space, leaving no place for people to live.

They go with the ideas of humanism, realizing a future love for people through the destruction of specific people around them. They were going to shoot a family of tenants of that house, who looked after the advice for Maxim Peshkov, nicknamed Gorky, a stunned humanist and a man-loving person.

This is how the symbol is created from the great idea of ​​a curve. Let's move the implementation of the principle to an uncertain future, we'll see in people whose property we liked fierce opponents of universal human happiness, and for the sake of a great goal we kill them.

So what is humanism?

On the necessity of which I wrote the post "The Last Technological Frontier", opening the horizon of the world of cockroaches without people. We will reject the ancient understanding and begin to form graphic images. Imagine a cosmos, a completely empty space, a vacuum.

There is no top-down, right-left, any point of support to start counting your life, there is neither space nor time. And then there was an event that had no need - I appeared, completely disoriented and helpless. The only thing that I can self-organize is the space for my life, anxieties, desires and experiences.

In space, it is possible only in the form of a sphere in the center of which I am some fleeting adherence of the nerve cells of the brain, to which I always return. And this is a purely physical process, the effort of thought coming out of the center, always comes back, everything that came to me, only from me. This principle is very important. Usually people think that they are dealing with other people, different subjects.

It seems to man that the world is not fair and terrible, forgetting that the law will not be begged - it's all from me.What brought to light, then to me and returned, the injustice of the world - this is also my product.

That is why any search for those guilty of my failures - the State Department, the world behind the scenes, other people - is a mad run from me to me with a strain that gives birth to negative energy nourishing mutual anger and hatred.

But in fact, the other person is my idea of ​​myself being imprinted on someone else's photo. That is why when liberals fight for freedom, arranging violence against people who allegedly resist the common good, they are dealing not with resistants, but with their slavery, which is their internal reality.

Any object in the world exists only because I think about it. The idea in my head constructs it, giving it the properties produced by my presentation. That's why the rake is not on, the whole point is that you put them here and came.

This picture of the world is anthropocentric, the person is in the center, and in the world there is only that which comes from him. This is the foundation of true humanism and the possibility of a normal human community, open in the ancient world.

Previously the text was published in Russian: https://golos.io/psk/@varja/gumanizm-osnovnoi-istochnik-socialnoi-spravedlivosti