У ПОШУКАХ НОВОГО ГУМАНІЗМУ. КАРЛ ЯСПЕРС І СУЧАСНІСТЬ

Abstract

After the negative experience of the events of the Two World Wars in the first half of the 20th century arose the critique of classical humanism. The famous philosophers who raised the question about the critique of classical humanism and the question about finding a new humanism were Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers who belonged to a single existential philosophical tradition. The first of these three philosophers, who began to critic the classical humanism, was Sartre in his work ‟Existentialism is a Humanism” (1946), after him followed Heidegger with his ‟Letter on Humanism” (1947) and Jaspers with his lecture ‟About conditions and possibilities of a New Humanism” (1949). Jaspers’ work on humanism didn’t gain such a great popularity as the other two works of Sartre and Heidegger, and therefore it remains beyond the big attention. This article investigates Jaspers’ concept of humanism, his critique of classical humanism and also his vision of a future humanism. The negative experience of the events of the Two World Wars was a consequence of the crisis of classical humanism. To avoid similar negative experience in the future, Jaspers determined the major tasks ahead of coming humanism: the upbringing of a person on the basis of common knowledge that was gained from previous generations; the reinterpretation and taking of special cognizance of technology and politics; the perception of the ideal model of a human not as the final goal of human development, but as the basis for this development; the promoting the development of internal selfsupport and external freedom of a human in the society. The article substantiates the thesis that all these tasks that Jaspers posed in the middle of the 20th century in theface of coming humanism, are also very important for the present time and for our future humanism. Because nowadays a human is still in the similar conditions in which was a human a half-century ago. Moreover, some tasks ahead of humanism, for example the rethinking the phenomena of technology and politics, are today even more urgent.