Humanism, Existentialism, Semiotics

Abstract

Humanism is the theory that man is an end in itself, for itself and through itself. With this in mind, how are we to situate Sartre’s, or Jaspers’, or Kierkegaard’s existentialist humanism in the history of humanism as such? I would propose that we need to understand Sartre’s “break” with classical humanism as just another phase or facet of the slow unfolding of the historical understanding of man as "homo humanus," exemplified by the classical authors of philosophy and tragedy, the Renaissance visionaries, artists and inventors, the  Enlightenment poets and politicizers, the Modern philosophers of exactitude and progress and the countless other self-made men whose ideals and value reflected man’s “essence-less essence” as “free becoming” towards a cosmopolitan, humanitarian and humane social order of humanity.

Keywords: Humanism, existentialism, semiotics, Sartre, Heidegger