Ruth Nanda Anshen

From Philosopedia.org

Anshen, Ruth Nanda (20th Century)

Anshen was editor of Harper & Brothers’ World Perspective series and author of The Reality of the Devil: Evil In Man (1972). Asked her view of humanism, she responded to Warren Allen Smith:

It seems to me that there is a fundamental error in the attempt to create various categories of humanism. In my opinion there is only one humanism—that humanism which is the spiritual, moral, and intellectual universe in which humanity moves and has its being. It bestows upon the past unity and upon the present meaning. Romans such as Varro and Cicero proclaimed the lasting truth of humanism and denied that it was exclusively an affair of the Greeks and a transitory historical phenomenon. The original meaning of tradition which is embodied in humanism has been buried in the miasma of the prejudices and mores of an established but obsolescent social order. The pristine sense of humanism cries out for the re-articulation of the genuine spiritual and moral heritage of the human race. This heritage is not a dead weight, a heritage that supine acceptance may subdue rather than liberate our minds. Instead its very concept and essence imply the transmission of all of mankind’s sacred possessions, the consciousness of the fundamental achievements of man’s life which have assumed their classical form and corporealization in the works of the greatest sons of the human race. Such works can never perish. Their symbol is the flame of the inextinguishable burning torch which one champion passes on to the next in the pilgrimage for the most sublime reward of human life. Such works teach us as Dante said, “Come l’uom’ s’eterna.”
There is a divine fire which works in each of us, though we may not be aware of it. It reveals itself, in the historical life of man, in the rhythm of coming-to-be and passing-away of new individual phenomena analogous to the never-ending flux of Heraclitus. Only within the flux there is contained the unchanging, the permanent, the logos. One cannot step into the same river twice, declared Heraclitus, but he added, “In change is rest.” Apart from the repose of death, change gives us the consciousness of permanescence that we could not have in a static, frozen, congealed world. We are able to have an awareness of change only because of the permanence ever-present in the substructural modes and patterns, rhythms, and recurrences.
Humanism thus offers us the spectacle of the constancy of basic forms and ideas throughout a process of continuous social change and intellectual development. And the original form maintains itself through transformation. For the new must contain the older form and preserve it on another level.