Svetozar Stojanovic

From Philosopedia

Svetozar Stojanovic (18 October 1931 - 7 May 2010 )

A professor of philosophy at the University of Belgrade in 1999, Stojanović signed Humanist Manifesto II and was a contributing editor for Free Inquiry and Philo.

A Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism, Svetozar Stojanović was elected in recognition of his defense of human rights and democracy.

At the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) held in Buffalo (1988), Stojanovic addressed the group. In 1973, he wrote Between Ideals and Reality: A Critique of Socialism and Its Future. In 1988, he wrote Perestroika: From Marxism and Bolshevism to Gorbachev (1988). With Paul Kurtz, Stojanovic co-wrote Revolution and Tolerance. In an interview with Kurtz (Free Inquiry, Summer 1996), Stojanovic told of his early days as a Marxist humanist, of being repressed by the Tito regime, of his difficulties on the faculty of the University of Belgrade, and of his now calling himself a

• social-eco-democrat, because I put in the center of my concerns global ecological problems in the widest possible sense of the world, including the concern for sheer survival of humankind.

Although Karl Marx is dead, he noted,

• What is not dead in Karl Marx is his critical insights into alienation and reification phenomena, ideology, the economic dimension of social classes, capitalism. There is no way to avoid recognizing that Marx was pretty successful in his critical but not in his constructivist approach, and that radical conclusions ought to be drawn from that. For instance, I do not buy his rejection of a market economy.

As for whether the wars in Yugoslavia are religious in origin, Stojanovic explained,

• In my opinion, there is no doubt that our conflicts are fratricidal, inter-national, and inter-religious civil wars. . . . Serbs, Croats, and Muslims are of the same ethnic stock. These three nationalities, all South-Slavs, speaking one language (Serbo-Croatian) are divided by religion and history. You first have a division between Christians (Serbs and Croats) and Muslims (former Christians, Serbs, or Croats, who converted to Islam during the Turkish rule). And the second division is within Christianity, between Catholics (Croats) and Orthodox Christians (Serbs). In other words, the basic constituting and defining characteristic of these three main nationalities in the former Yugoslavia is religion. . . . We have to build, to build a ‘quasi-religion’ of humanity, or at least to poeticize the existence of humankind. Admiration, thrill, amazement, awe—that is how astronauts describe the spectacle of Earth and us on it when they are temporarily separated from it and can view it from space. Unfortunately, the most radical positive humanist utopia is increasingly going to be the survival of humankind and the most radical negative utopia the self-annihilation of humankind. This is humanism and post-humanism at once.

At the time of the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, Stojanovic complained that “The whole world is shocked by the plight of ethnic Albanian refugees but at the same time overlooks tens of thousands of Serbs and other minorities fleeing from Kosovo to the other parts of Serbia and to Montenegro.” He was critical of the part played by the United States. Stojanovic signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.

{Free Inquiry, Summer 1996 and 1999; HM2; SHD}