Humanism is the “demon” of all Western culture, its byname, its eponym. Athens had Athena as its eponymous deity; Western civilization has as its eponymous subject Man, the first of the Archons, he that gives his name to the years. Humanism is not simply the sense that man has of himself (Selbstgefühl). It is a “public” discourse, a reasoning “according to difference”, with the psychomotor detachment typical of the animal man, who builds a symbolic world, whose contents are not experience’s data but the actions of men – brutal or heroic, fraternal or hateful, great or mean. Humanism is the “cultural sensorium” of societies, the way they rework their experiences and question themselves about every reality, superior, inferior or adjacent. In our globalized world the dimensions and the strength of this sensorium are so profound as to be similar to the sensorium Dei of which Newton spoke, referring to the organ by which God communicated with nature and impressed motion on it.

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