Symposium
Towards discovering humanness
From the realm of what has been established to freedom
Attigliano - Italy (TR), 1st - 2nd November 2014
In this time of great changes, individuals, institutions and societies are in crisis. We are going through times of urgency and possibility.
The paradigms we have been living by do not longer provide suitable answers, and the future is not entirely at sight yet.
Fast transformations wipe away the social landscape in which the preceding generations grew up, creating abysses of incomprehension and insecurity. The old world is already gone, but the new one is still to come.
The future seems uncertain, but the certainty that it is necessary to make deep, intentional changes for the survival and evolution of the human race is gaining ever more ground. Specifically, it is becoming all too clear that there will not be progress if it is not for everybody.
The issue then is to promote a structural, revolutionary transformation of the way in which humans coexist with other humans and with the material support to our lives, the environment.
In order to run this change, it is essential to discover what is at the basis of this dying world, that which is really in crisis: an old image of mankind, an obsolete way of regarding the Human Being.
The Human Being is not a thing among things, a given entity, sterile and motionless. When one reduces humanness to its natural aspects, the merely biological aspects, when one subjects humanness to the logics of “the established”, the done and finished, the grounds are erased for all creativity, for all freedom.
If today, the Human Being is a consumer for the capital, a naïve mind for the mass media, just a vote for mendacious politics, and the eternal guilty one for religious factions; if, in short, the most legitimate aspirations are suffocated, repressed and manipulated everywhere, who should be surprised to see that from the depth of their innermost being, people are manifesting today in streets and squares in justified rebellion?
A rebellion that, along with a new common project, consists in discovering and cultivating a new look, a new way of regarding ourselves.
A look that departs not from theories, but from human existence and its need of overcoming pain and suffering.
A look that accounts for the intentionality of Human Beings, for their capacity to give direction to their own lives, both individually and socially; a look that proclaims their intrinsic freedom, and their tendency towards indetermination.
A look that does not define humanness from external facts, but understands its structural connection with the environment. Namely, a look that overcomes the fake duality of an immoral objectivation of people and a naïve subjectivation of the world.
A look that asserts the social and historical dynamics of all that is human, as permanent construction of its own nature and related transformation.
A look that understands that violence is, in its roots and in all its manifestations, the denial of humanness in others and in oneself, and proposes an active attitude towards non-violence as the starting point towards the human being of the future.
A look that connects human potentialities with the transcendent, challenging the absurd that opposes matter to the spirit, the earthly to the eternal.
In synthesis we are speaking about a look that regards all that is Human as the fundamental value and concern in a new scale of values, alerting to the fact that, acting in any other direction will devoid any conscious action of meaning.
Thereby, it is by pointing to the option of this new look, by advancing towards the urgent transformation that large groups are claiming for today, by highlighting the impossibility of passing on to another stage if Humanity does not discover its unlimited potential and the freedom of its destiny, that the World Centre of Humanist Studies invites to the IVth International Symposium “Towards discovering humanness - from the realm of what has been established to freedom”.
We invite you to actively participate in this vital reflection about the look that we have on ourselves, on others, on the human phenomenon in general.
We invite you to observe the revolutionary consequences that the discovering of humanness could have in different fields of human action.
We invite you to awake your faith in the possibility of carrying out a simultaneous transformation of the world and ourselves, focusing on a new look upon the human phenomenon.
We expect this to be a Symposium where we may exchange views, ideas and experiences about a humanity that is starting to discover itself and the new paths to its liberation.
To sum up, we invite you to tune into this one-way trip to the future. 