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Spanakopita Four Humanism: The Value of Persons Although the academic at lunch is not a pretty sight, this did not bother Dessie today, even their picking up their asparagus in their ‹ngers, like the British, because today he had to expose his delicate concept of the humanist society to Adam’s withering comment. Last week he could attack Adam’s materialism, feeling himself a spokesman for a substantial group, the antimaterialists. But this week he spoke mostly for himself— there was no coherent coterie of humanists at Clark’s (the English professors all lunched at the Yorkside) or in that frightening larger world outside of New Haven eating places or even outside of New Haven altogether . “Very well, then. Alone!” he said to himself, striking a Churchillian pose in the red leatherette booth—awkward, at best. “What are you muttering?” asked Adam, sitting down. “Homo sum; humani nil a me alieanum puto,” said Dessie. “Oh, I thought you were going to have spinach pie,” said Adam with a smile. Dessie leaned forward in the booth, a bad sign, indicating a longer disquisition than strictly necessary. “In Edgar Allen Poe’s mystery story,” he said, “there is a map in which is hidden the main clue to the mystery. Searching for this clue, the amateur detectives got out their magnifying glasses and pored over the ‹ne detail on the map for the answer to the mystery. As everyone knows, the clue was written in large type across the map so that no detailed search could spot the obvious. So is it with the clues for what to put in the place of the material goals that have served us 63 so well for most of history but now seem insuf‹cient to sustain our morale. If society is humanity writ large (which is true only in a misleading metaphoric sense), the large type has eluded our sophisticated social science magnifying glasses.” “Very pretty,” said Adam with a sigh. He knew about graphs and models, but the size of the type on a map seemed extraneous to any problem he had ever tackled before. “What are we supposed to make of your mystery story reading?” “Only this,” said Dessie (sti›ing the completion of Poe’s poetic phrase “and nothing more”). “It is a query: What measuring rods are people using when they discard the one Protagoras claimed: ‘Man is the measure of all things?’” Adam looked at Dessie quizzically, thinking that if, as he had heard it said, his mind was like a steel trap, then Dessie’s mind was like a dry sponge, absorbing literary references and dripping them out one by one at odd moments. A similar dripping reference popped into his head, Pigou’s “measuring rod of money,”1 but he suppressed it. “Are you forgetting , or rejecting, the pluralism of this land of plenty?” he asked. “I don’t know what Protagoras meant by his eloquent but obscurantist phrase, but last week you offered a whole lot of criteria which must, for their authors, have implied measuring rods other than Protagoras’s. Is ‘Man,’ in his ignorance, the measure of veri‹able knowledge or of the cosmic beginnings long before he arrived?” “It’s a metaphor,” Dessie said with a patronizing air. “Protagoras’s ‘measure of all things’ refers to all the contribution to the welfare and well-being and development of the human species.” He paused to rehearse his extemporaneous views. “Remember our discussion two weeks ago,” said Dessie, bracing himself for the inevitable. “Well, now I have to make good on my promise to give an account of the humanist values I espouse. As I said then, humanism has had a history of various de‹nitions. For my namesake and others in the late medieval period, it meant a return to the classics (especially the Roman classics). But in some ways, it is best conceived as an opposition to something else: for Erasmus, a reaction against high church doctrine; for Alexander Pope (1773, echoing Pierre Charron), ‘Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, / The proper study of mankind is man’—also a reaction against theologizing and a typical Enlightenment sentiment (whose members, however, never used the term humanism). As the dominance of the priesthood and the church waned, humanism came to be regarded as a worldview somewhat opposed to science or even the scienti‹c method in literary and historical matters. For After the End of History 64 [3.138.33.178] Project MUSE...

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