Being Human

“Be human!” or “Sey a mentsh, un hob rachmuness!” (“Be a mensch and have compassion!”) as they say in Yiddish—an accepted adage that life should be lived according to humanitarian principles, whether from a secular or a religious perspective. This axiom has always felt like good advice, whether for individuals or groups: from antiquity to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and Kant’s concept of human dignity, to the present, it has repeatedly been invoked as the foundation for social and legal orders of various stripes.

Accordingly, the idealistic aims of humanist ethics continue to have an effect today and are still considered achievable—though perhaps only in the distant future. Keenly interested in humanity’s potential for civilization and convinced of science’s capacity for discovery, Freud had complete faith in the “voice of the intellect”: “We may insist as often as we like that man’s intellect is powerless in comparison with his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless […] [t]he voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. […] This is one of the few points on which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind […].”[1]

Indeed, even after the acts of violence that Hannah Arendt referred to as devastating blows to “the status of humanity,”[2] the general faith in the potential of human civilization grew: at the very time that people were attempting to come to terms with the atrocities committed under National Socialism, humanist thought was embedded in the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1945: human dignity is inviolable and must be protected. Just three years later, “crimes against humanity” and “genocide” were anchored in international law as criminal offenses.

Especially in the West, the ongoing response to the consequences of World War II has given rise to political maxims like “respect for our common humanity is rooted in our responsibility for the past”[3] that entertain hope for permanent peace. Yet a comparison with the war crimes of more recent history—committed for example in the 1990s in former Yugoslavia and currently in Ukraine, the Near and Middle East—gives the lie to our “culture of remembrance” that had once been hard won and cost millions of people their lives. Right now, it appears to be withering into a knee-jerk defense to the truths bespoken by the daily torrents of information and images testifying to massive destruction and inconceivable suffering and relentlessly flooding Western capitalist existence via our ubiquitous media channels.

It is impossible to close one’s eyes to these catastrophic developments with global impact that dominate almost every field of sociopolitical life and discourse and fly in the face of established notions of what it is to be human. Even in the West and in those countries that, spared from war, have been able in recent decades to focus mainly on economic growth, the divide is growing. Political factions are on the rise whose promises of salvation envisage radical isolation from all incoming dangers. Yet despite this, the sense of sovereignty and security that once made it possible to fervently declare “Never again!” or “We can do it!” is on the wane.

An awareness of others’ suffering fosters the fear that we too will soon meet the same fate as we learn of virtually and with overbearing realism via digital networks. Especially the more direct encounter—deemed by some an imposition—with the precarity of migrants’ lives and refugee status in our own or neighboring countries appears to exceed the limits of societal resilience. Likewise, the intensifying global energy crisis, deteriorating environmental and economic conditions, and lack of credible, practicable, and timely countermeasures, are destabilizing the collective consciousness. Individuals are averting their gaze, narrowed as it is by insecurity and fear, capable only of perceiving that which concerns themselves or at most those closest to them. It is no longer possible to ignore how the varied staccato of global crises and not least the man-made alter ego of artificial intelligence are sending our time-honored self-image into disarray.

Questions concerning humankind’s current and future existence, which with Freud’s research into the unconscious and his finding that “the ego is not master in its own house” had to undergo another significant reformulation around 1900, are therefore the focus of our program for 2025. It kicks off with critical articles by the members of our advisory board, who share their diverse stances on the current and challenging issues of being human. For their multifaceted texts that offer not only interesting insights but also important lines of thought, I would like to thank:

Jeanne Wolff Bernstein (Wiener Arbeitskreis für Psychoanalyse), Herman Westerink (Radboud University Nijmegen), Lisa Appignanesi (King’s College London), Oleksandr Filts (Danylo Halytsky Lviv National Medical University), Rubén Gallo (Princeton University), Gohar Homayounpour (Freudian Group of Tehran), Victor Mazin (East-European Institute of Psychoanalysis St. Petersburg), and Spyros D. Orfanos (New York University).

 

Monika Pessler

Director
Sigmund Freud Museum

 

[1] Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1928), ed. and trans. James Strachey, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961, p. 53.

[2] Shinichiro Morinaga, Über den Begriff “Verbrechen gegen die Menschheit” – Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt, in: The Journal of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Toyama, Japan, vol. 41, 2013, p. 1.

[3] Angela Merkel 2008 at Knesset