The Modern Twilight of Humanism: Is a Renaissance Possible?

A Civilisation Waiting for Its End

In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche famously announced the “death of God” in The Gay Science. Since then, the phrase has risen to the status of a pop-cultural cliché. The transvaluation of all values, the collapse of universal moral laws and the weakening of essentialist thinking did more than trigger a postmodern philosophical turn. They also opened the age of “end-time philosophy”. Oswald Spengler predicted The Decline of the West. Arnold Toynbee considered the possibility of human self-destruction in Civilization on Trial. José Ortega y Gasset, in turn, described the degradation of the individual in The Revolt of the Masses.

The apocalyptic visions of the early 20th century grew largely out of fears connected with war and totalitarianism. Yet the end of the World Wars did not weaken the obsession with endings. Michel Foucault proclaimed the death of man. Francis Fukuyama announced the end of history. Christian Godin wrote of the death of humanity. Today, the individual exists in a twilight condition. In a world filled with doubt about humanist paradigms, the very act of “becoming human” seems to have lost its teleological meaning.

We are told to prepare for the arrival of the “post-human”, a figure meant to inhabit the age of post-humanism, transhumanism or even anti-humanism. But should we treat that vision as a catastrophe, or as a hope for transforming a tradition weakened by technological change? Reality changes, so thought must change with it. But must every transformation take the form of an obituary? We should ask whether we truly need a new paradigm, or whether we are simply living through a moment of deep human fatigue.

Humanism on the Historical Couch

Renaissance humanism rested on a stable ideological and conceptual order with the human being at its centre. It drew on a cultural code shared by Platonists, Aristotelians and Christians alike. At the heart of that code stood a dual vision of man as body and soul, with the soul holding primacy. To realise the idea of humanity meant reaching toward something transcendent. Human beings alone felt an inner need to shape material reality in the name of values that surpassed it.

Postmodernism dethroned transcendence. It replaced the innate orientation toward spirituality, once seen as the basis of subjectivity, with instincts and drives. The rise of the natural sciences and technical forms of thought further weakened the perceived need for metaphysical reflection. As a result, contemporary humanism often seems to seek change not because reality demands it, but because it feels embarrassed by its own roots. Many now dismiss metaphysical reflection as outdated. They reject its descriptive ambitions, criticise its categories as harmful and attack its hierarchies as exclusionary.

But does the fact that human beings differ from other beings really prove their egoism? Humans possess a natural tendency to create culture and pursue abstract values. Must that difference now be dismantled completely? Does the twilight of humanism truly require us to deconstruct these ideas in order to respond to a changing world?

The Hunger for the Absolute

The recent rise of pseudo-religious movements and the growing dogmatisation of science suggest that contemporary man still hungers, at some deeper level, for lost transcendence. Yet the post-humanist currents offered as substitutes often undermine the very foundations of existence. These vast programmes of deconstruction strip the individual of the inner drive toward a higher idea. And that drive is itself a value.

We often forget that the idea of the Absolute never simply disappears. Other ideologies take its place. They often arrive under the banners of revolution or emancipation, only to harden into Absolutes of their own.

I Am Human: Nothing Human Is Alien to Me

Today, discussions about the future of humanist thought are dominated by a materialist and transgressive narrative. That narrative questions both the value of culture and the legitimacy of transcendence. Ironically, it often carries metaphysical ambitions of its own. One example is the Nietzschean vision of man as a being who must endlessly surpass himself. But does this way of thinking really improve the human condition? Or does it only produce a hollow satisfaction rooted in negation itself?

In the face of civilisational change, we should recover some elements of the humanist tradition. To realise the transcendental idea of humanity through a life lived according to natura humana does not mean choosing stagnation. On the contrary, it can reignite the search for the essence of the human being. It also allows us to reconsider the current sense of crisis. Are we facing a real forecast of collapse? Or are we witnessing a deeply human tendency to dwell on mortality, now expressed through a modern philosophy of endings?

Humanism Against Depersonalisation

The challenges of the 21st century place anthropocentrism on trial. Too often, people equate it automatically with speciesism or egoism. Yet they overlook one crucial point: anthropocentric thinking can contain its own limits. It can restrain itself through autotelic values such as truth, beauty and goodness. We do not need a radical deconstruction of man to answer humanitarian or ecological crises. Our present condition stems not from humanism itself, but from an excess of practical materialism.

A return to transcendent roots may offer the only fruitful path toward healing the human condition, which today suffers from profound depersonalisation. If we revisit forgotten traditions and adapt them to contemporary socio-cultural realities, we may rediscover something essential. We are not merely numbers in a mass, nor are we reducible to the sum of our drives. We are beings capable of witnessing the sacred. Only by resisting the twilight of humanism can we reclaim the subjectivity that consumerist and technological reality has worked to suppress.

Read this article in Polish: Współczesny zmierzch humanizmu. Czy istnieje sposób na jego odrodzenie?