What Humans Are - What We Are Not

We live in times of trouble, like our ancestors, much of it novel, like them. The only continuity is change, change often brings challenge, challenge often brings trouble. Although our trouble seems double because it is our trouble, we should never lose hope. However, in the words of François Hartog, ‘today, enlightenment has its source in the present, and the present alone’. So, are we willing indeed to learn any lessons from history? Moreover, inasmuch as our trouble is novel, history, one may say, has a heuristic instead of a pragmatic function: it helps us discover ourselves rather than plot our next course of action. So, are we able indeed to learn any lessons from history? My research hypothesis is that we still need history; if anything, now we need it more than ever before, and we need it for both heuristic and pragmatic reasons, at the very least. I will test this hypothesis, informed by Rita Sherma’s ‘hermeneutics of intersubjectivity’, through a close reading of a specific characterisation of the human being from Psalm 8:6 (‘Yet you have made him little less than a god, crowned him with glory and honor’), with the help of its main ancient textual witnesses. Translation is always a difficult task – and a delicate one when sacred texts are concerned. However, quite often, difficulties in the text can be more fully tackled thanks to background information located in the historical context, delineating the content of the relevant concepts. Noting that, in the words of Mark Smith, ‘early Israel was populated with ՚ělōhîm of various sorts’, I argue that in Psalm 8:6 the human being is little less than a numinous being, in the sense of Rudolf Otto. I further argue that this fundamental insight, when correlated with Sophocles’ Antigone, 332-334, and with the Laozi’s chapter 29, discloses human beings as those beings able (and willing) to do both tremendous good and tremendous evil, the latter when they overstep the boundaries set by human nature. Much of the trouble, indeed most of it, that human beings face today in their relationship with God, the world, society, community, and with themselves can thus be traced back to the devastation brought about by húbris. However, should it enter consciousness, the possibility appears as well of a farewell to húbris, should we only sincerely wish this, and work hard on it. History gives us humans help and hope.