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Every once in a while, there comes along an exception to G.W.F. Hegel’s dictum “The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.” While the observation that theory is able to express the essence of an age only after it has entered its decline generally holds true, there is such a thing as genuine philosophical foresight. A case in point is French political theorist Bertrand de Jouvenel’s classic book, On Power.
"The eclipse of the idea of authority is an essential characteristic of today’s world; in fact, it is the most immediately observable characteristic” (Del Noce). Yet freedom has not become more luminous in the absence of authority. On the contrary, it has been eclipsed together with authority by ever-more absolute forms of arbitrary power: totalitarianisms which aim precisely at authority. Authority is in the service of freedom; for it is the power to make things grow in accord with the given order to which the authority is first subject. It is best represented by a father who bears witness to that order, received from above, as he hands himself over to the mother and together with her brings a child into being.
Humanum is about the human: what makes us human, what keeps us human, and what does not. We are driven by the central questions of human existence: nature, freedom, sexual difference and the fundamental figures to which it gives rise, man, woman, and child. We probe these in the context of marriage, family, education, work, medicine and bioethics, science and technology, political and ecclesial life. We sift through the many competing ideas of our age so that we might “hold fast to what is good” and let go of what is not. In addition to articles, witness pieces, and book reviews ArteFact: Film & Fiction searches out the human in the literary and cinematic arts.
Humanum is published as a free service by the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C.
