Humanitarian Rationality and the Possibilities of Rational Humanism

The article discusses the relations between humanism and humanitarianism through the prism of rationality, which allows to identify the significant contradictions between their essences and methods of implementation as well as to reveal the subtleties and differences in the relationship between them. The author demonstrates the interrelation of the idea of rationality as reasonability with the theory of humanism and its practices; it is shown that the charges of inhumanity against rationality can be addressed mainly to instrumental reasonability, which occupies a dominant position in the society of Modernity. The inconsistency of the development of humanism in recent years is examined. On the one hand, first organizationally formed humanistic movements emerged in the 20th century and humanism gradually became a common social practice. On the other hand, starting from the second half of the 20th century, representatives of the postmodern and religious-conservative traditions more and more clearly pronounce statements about the crisis of humanistic ideology. It is determined that the classical concept of secular humanism has lost its representativeness to social realities because its model of a person becomes outdated and requires rethinking and renewal. It is emphasized that the role of humanitarian technologies is increasing under the new conditions of the science functioning in modern society, in which any knowledge, including natural and technical, acquires a humanitarian dimension. Therefore, the humanitarian component is a necessary part of any science today since the humanitarian component offers a pragmatical and axiological comparison of the scientific achievements with the life-world of men and their needs. The author concludes that rational strategies for overcoming the crisis of humanism (transhumanism and posthumanism) are associated with new ontologies and represent attempts to understand the transformations of humanistic values in the technoscientific world.

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