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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
The most burning question we are faced with, in our anxiety about the possible dehumanization of the world, concerns the nature of modernity. Today's erasure of and uncertainty about norms relating to the definition of the human only go to confirm this. Indeed this is a typically modern question because it is in this civilization, which is unique in human history and which is replacing heaven with earth in the order of values, that human beings have been able to observe themselves from the outside and think that humanity could be outside itself to the extent that the idea of the ‘death of man’, the ‘end of humanity’ and now even a ‘posthumanity’ can be entertained.
1. Durkheim (1991), Le Suicide (Paris, PUF), p. 378.
2. Durkheim (1987), L'individualisme et les intellectuels, in La Science sociale et l'action (Paris, PUF), p. 265.
3. Durkheim (1974), Sociologie et philosophie (Paris, PUF), pp. 51 & 58.
4. ibid., p. 76.
5. Durkheim (1992), L'Education morale (Paris, PUF), p. 123.
6. See my book (1999), L'Idéal démocratique à l'épreuve de la Shoa (Paris, Odile Jacob).
7. See my attempt in (2000) Le Monothéisme est un humanisme (Paris, Odile Jacob).
8. In the spiritual tradition of Judaism it underwent considerable growth with the mystical thought of Itshak Louria (sixteenth-century Galilee).