Humanism

Within the depth-psychology corpus, Humanism occupies a contested and largely critical position. Its Renaissance incarnation — inaugurated by Ficino and Pico della Mirandola under Medici patronage and rooted in the recovery of Platonic manuscripts — is treated by Edinger as a pivotal moment in the West’s reorientation toward the human as measure. Yet the tradition’s philosophical genealogy, traced from Protagoras through the Enlightenment to Sartre, becomes for Hillman the central problem rather than an achievement: humanism, by installing man as the sovereign measure of all things, systematically depotentiates myth, forecloses transpersonal depth, and reduces psyche to a function of the ego. Archetypal psychology’s most sustained critique holds that secular humanism — whether existentialist, phenomenological, or ego-psychological — remains blind to the archetypal infrastructures that underwrite its own claims. Derrida, drawing on Heidegger, reinforces this from the philosophical flank: every humanism is grounded in a metaphysics, and the anthropologism common to Christian, atheist, and Marxist humanisms alike fails to question the Being upon which it rests. Against these critical voices, Snell and Auerbach register humanism’s cultural productivity — the humanitas tradition from Cicero through Petrarch and Erasmus as the connective tissue of European intellectual life. The term thus marks a crucial fault-line between soul-centered and man-centered orientations in depth psychology.

In the library 17 passages

the monotheistic hero myth (now called ego-psychology) of secular humanism, i.e., the single-centered, self-identified notion of subjective consciousness of humanism (from Protagoras to Sartre). It is this myth that has dominated the soul and leads to both unreflected action and self-blindness

Hillman identifies secular humanism — as a continuous tradition from Protagoras to Sartre — with the monotheistic ego-myth that archetypal psychology opposes, arguing it suppresses psychological diversity and generates pathology.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis

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the monotheistic hero myth (now called ego-psychology) of secular humanism, i.e., the single-centered, self-identified notion of subjective consciousness of humanism (from Protagoras to Sartre). It is this myth that has dominated the soul and leads to both unreflected action and self-blindness

In his programmatic account of archetypal psychology, Hillman frames secular humanism as the dominant pathogenic myth of modernity, requiring polytheistic correction.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis

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The insufficiency of the humanistic approach shows most seriously in the reduction of great transpersonal events to personal dynamics: myths become man-made. This misunderstanding of myth runs through humanism from its beginning in Protagoras the Sophist

Hillman argues that humanism’s foundational error is the anthropologization of myth, reducing transpersonal archetypal events to products of human consciousness from Protagoras through Sartre.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis

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humanism or anthropologism, during this period, was the common ground of Christian or atheist existentialisms, of the philosophy of values (spiritualist or not), of personalisms of the right or the left, of Marxism

Derrida, via Heidegger, establishes that humanism is not a partisan position but the shared metaphysical ground of all modern philosophical anthropologies, whether theist or atheist.

Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis

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“Every humanism is either grounded in a metaphysics or is itself made to be the ground of one. Every determination of the essence of man that already presupposes an interpretation of being without asking about the truth of Being, whether knowingly or not, is metaphysical”

Citing Heidegger, Derrida argues that the critique of humanism is inseparable from the critique of metaphysics, since every humanist definition of man already presupposes an unexamined interpretation of Being.

Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis

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Value arises not from man as in humanism, but from what is behind and within man, soul, anima. Psychology is soul-centered, not man-centered as is existential humanism.

Hillman distinguishes Jungian depth psychology from existential humanism by relocating the source of value from human consciousness to soul, thereby inverting the humanist priority.

Hillman, James, Healing Fiction, 1983thesis

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The appeal to a ‘totality of multiple perspectives’ remains an egocentric humanism, without the divine cosmoi that link the various perspectives through myths and that provide their root metaphors

Hillman argues that phenomenological and existential humanism, even when pluralistic, remains egocentric because it lacks the mythic and archetypal infrastructure that genuinely transcends the individual subject.

Hillman, James, Healing Fiction, 1983supporting

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The new movement was named Humanism. Two outstanding personalities marked the beginning of Humanism: Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494).

Edinger situates the origin of Humanism in the Florentine Renaissance, centering on Ficino and Pico as figures whose Platonist revivalism defined the movement’s intellectual character.

Edinger, Edward F, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One Early Greek Philosophy supporting

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Ficino devoted almost all his life to translating Plato into Latin and to studying, teaching and writing about Platonism… Christianity appeared to him, in this mood, as but one of the many religions that hid elements of truth behind their allegorical dogmas and symbolic rites.

Edinger’s portrait of Ficino shows Renaissance Humanism as a revisionary religious attitude that dissolved Christian exclusivism into comparative Platonism.

Edinger, Edward F., The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999supporting

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Thus humanitas really does remain the concern of such thinking. For this is humanism: meditating and caring that man be human and not inhumane, ‘inhuman,’ that is, outside his essence

Derrida reads Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism’ to show that even the destruction of metaphysical humanism retains a concern for the humanitas of man, redefining rather than abandoning the term.

Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting

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The Renaissance had opposed to the Judeo-Christian ideal of obedience to a supposed revelation of God’s law, the humanism of the Greeks.

Campbell situates Greek humanism as the Renaissance counter-ideal to revealed religion, linking it to a broader comparative religiosity that included Indian and pagan traditions.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting

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the dominant movement of thought in this nearly completed first quarter of the twentieth century has been what has been called ‘humanistic’, and what might better be termed ‘anthropocentric’. In religion, as in other domains, we have learned to view things ‘from the human end’

Otto identifies early twentieth-century humanism with a pervasive anthropocentrism that measures religious experience by human standards, a tendency his phenomenology of the holy explicitly opposes.

Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917supporting

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from Cicero through Petrarch and Erasmus to the age of the baroque, all European culture has borne the impress of this humanitas.

Snell traces the humanitas tradition as the central continuity of European intellectual culture from Cicero to the baroque, grounding it in the Isocratean-Ciceronian equation of humanity with the capacity for speech.

Snell, Bruno, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting

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Our own age, with its pagan naturalism and humanist idolatry of humanity provides a clear example of this.

Bulgakov diagnoses modern humanism as an idolatrous apostasy from Sophia and divine-humanity, exemplifying humanity’s tendency to relapse into self-worship when it forsakes the Church.

Bulgakov, Sergei, Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology, 1937supporting

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Man’s aim in humanistic religion is to achieve the greatest strength, not the greatest powerlessness; virtue is self-realization, not obedience

Pargament presents Fromm’s concept of humanistic religion — in contrast to authoritarian religion — as a tradition that locates the divine ideal within human self-realization rather than submission.

Pargament, Kenneth I, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting

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our Western liberal humanism is not something that comes naturally to us; like an appreciation of art or poetry, it has to be

Armstrong notes that Western liberal humanism is a historically constructed and fragile achievement, not a natural default of human consciousness, placing it alongside secular experiment as unprecedented.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993aside

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Petrarch and Erasmus, also, campaigned from prepared positions; in their case it was not the social or political mise en scène which shaped their beliefs, but the Christian creed.

Snell observes that Renaissance humanists operated within Christian frameworks, distinguishing their position from later secular humanism and underlining the theological embeddedness of early humanitas.

Snell, Bruno, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953aside

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