3. The Humanistic Impulse
We have completed our socio-semiotic summary looking at semiosis at the level of the sign and subsemiosphere. But the ends we seek, the ones we declared at the outset, are those of humanism. We began by asking why humanist movements fail, and we have answered in structural terms. But now comes the first step of actually materially understanding the task at hand - what actually are humanistic ends? What is the humanistic impulse at root of this all? Where does it come from? How does it function? Why is it so easily displaced?
Social existence at all presupposes that actions must be anticipated and fit into patterns of behaviour, that interaction unfolds over time. This itself supposes that participants persist as agents who act in ways that carry forward into future-directed activity. In primitive days social coordination needed constant continuing "loci" of action, so the most corrosive form of behaviour in our tribal days was not "conflict" or "hierarchy" or other abstractions, but simply the treatment of another tribseman as if they were not an agent at all.
Evolution shows why specific dispositions persist but not how they are experienced, reproduced, or justified by humans. So we do not possess an impulse that explicitly aims at "self-preservation." Patterns of behaviour compatible with continued survival under given conditions are that which persists since survival was never an individual question, social persistence required constraining the uncontrolled negation of agency and the collapse of expectations necessary for ongoing coordination. Dispositions that made this possible were kept because social formations in which they were absent failed to reproduce - they simply died out - and yet, this is not because agents 'consciously' understood them as survival strategies.
As a result we developed a persistent disposition to regulate action and justification in ways that are compatible with long-term social persistence. From what we know right now this disposition did not arise "for the sake" of cooperation or any other higher goal, since it seems to simply be the form self-preservation has taken when socially-mediated in the long run. It is not "lived" in that way though since the altruistic lengths to which this influence can push someone can lead to sacrificing one's own self-preservation. It is also experienced as a background "orientation" that constrains what kinds of actions, justifications, and social arrangements are to be perceived as tolerable, excessive, or unacceptable in a semiotic space.
The humanistic impulse should therefore be understood as a dispositional force that manifests in our ideas of good, evil, duty, etc - the many historically variable moral systems. Moralities, generally speaking, are ways of formalising and operationalising this disposition within particular scopes of agency-recognition. Codes and moral conclusions do differ, yes, but the impulse persists through these differences. Moral behaviour itself is rooted in this disposition, but never identical to it. To phrase it technically: morality is the semiotically mediated residue of a dispositional regulator formed under conditions of long-term social persistence and subsequently displaced into historically specific systems of meaning.
This disposition forms one of the primary generative forces behind codes in early shared semiotic fields. The codes we have previously examined themselves arise from material constraints, material needs of coordination, and other survival pressures of all kinds. But among these pressures, the humanistic impulse played a decisive role, patterns of meaning-reproduction that were incompatible with the preservation of agency within the group's scope of recognition were eliminated along with the groups that carried them.
This is also why its displacement by surplus and autonomisation is so consequential: a force which was once among the primary selective pressures shaping codes in early social fields is now subordinated to those very systems whose reproduction those codes sustain. Since the impulse is internal to ourselves rather than externally observable, we constantly mystify it in reflection. Not in a metaphysical way, but because of the structural limitation of agents embedded within their own regulatory dispositions.
So, ultimately, it has one universal form in all of its manifestations: it is the impulse to protect the agency of others - its variations differ by the 'radius of care' (whose agency "should" be protected,) and in the impulse's strength itself - is it your family? Your tribesmen? All that is capable of agency? What arose is the concern that others not be treated as disposable without consequence and is perceptually experienced as structural empathy. The limitations of recognition are mediated historically. This is why care and cruelty coexist - groups extend profound concern toward those within their radius of care while treating those outside it as obstacles and non-agents. An egoist extends the radius only to himself, perhaps his family. A sincere "nationalist" extends it to all his countrymen (regardless of his operative object-ideal) but not necessarily beyond. There is no society without the impulse, only societies with different scopes of agency-recognition. Feudal orders were "humanistic" within narrow circles of estate. Nationalists are "humanistic" within the bounds of the nation (in justification.) What later appears as dignity or moral obligation is the lived and justified form of this constraint within a particular scope. Agents experience violations of agency among those who count as cruelty or injustice even when such violations are advantageous, because they are embedded within a the disposition it regulates admissible treatment prior to explicit reasoning. This does not say that there is a metaphysical moral order either, it is just the result of the internal operation of a regulator whose scope is not self-determined.
But what is important to specify is that in primitive conditions, the impulse functioned as a real regulator - in fact, as the chief one. Why else would it be engrained in us evolutionarily? Deviation from the impulse within an intra-tribal radius meant the group's destruction. The 'feedback' of the times were immediately material. So, we did not receive the impulse for its "goodness," but because of a literal survival constraint. Does this detract from its value? Not at all.
The humanistic impulse by itself no longer regulates complex societies, since once a stable surplus emerged a gap appeared between social practices and the consequences for agency-preservation. Communities could now persist without directly depending on the level of agency protection across all of their members. So, selection began operating on whether or not practices stabilised the subsemiosphere's internal coherence rather than on their relation to agency. The impulse just lost its capacity to regulate systemically while continuing to operate within malnourished scopes. It was displaced from regulation into justification; its language is now "order," "justice," "care," "the greater good" but there is a structural misalignment between the impulse's orienting force and the reproduction of the systems agents inhabit. It has since generated all of our ideals, moral systems, and notions of justice, and these function as regulators - but weak ones. They "push" us but they cannot compel autonomised structures into correspondence.
But we still haven't answered what 'humanism' is. Is it the humanistic impulse itself? Not quite.
Humanism is the universalised humanistic impulse - it is the completion of the expansion of the radius of care rather than just the impulse itself. Renaissance humanism extended agency-recognition beyond estate and divine hierarchy to "man" as such. Or, in our days, as extending agency-recognition to all that is capable of agency - though this was almost certainly what the renaissance humanists had in mind. This universalist humanism transformed the social order of the modern world, since all major justificatory theories draw from it: liberalism, based in "universal freedom and rights"; socialism, justifying itself through the "universal liberation of labourers from exploitation." Its rise of popularity at this time is most probably because of a globally interconnected form of production. Marxism is the radicalisation of this universalist humanism: the universality of agenthood in all humans as producers. Humanism, properly understood, is the name for the universalised form of the residue - the extension of structural empathy to all agents without exception. But Marxism's justifying point in its raw form inherits the same structural weakness: the ideal is abstract, and therefore vulnerable to parasitic reinterpretation. This is the direct consequence of the fact that the residue, however universal it becomes, remains a light regulator.
M. N. Roy, who described himself as a radical humanist, articulated something close to the universalised humanistic impulse as his normative base: "The purpose of all rational human endeavour, individual as well as collective, is attainment of freedom, in ever increasing measure. Freedom is progressive disappearance of all restrictions on the unfolding of the potentialities of individuals, as human beings, and not as cogs in the wheels of a mechanised social organism." Roy articulated the end but lacked the diagnostic means to understand why it was consistently betrayed.
Species-Will
The species as a whole constitutes the semiosphere - the largest subsemiosphere. Like any subsemiosphere it also reproduces itself through codes, and those codes factually select for something. What they select for is the species-will (or gattungsgeist) - the operative object-ideal of the species-level social organism. This is not a normative idea (something like "what humanity should be doing"), it is what humanity is doing, that we identify empirically just by observing what the global social organism's activity actually produces and reproduces.
The gattungsgeist, as it currently stands, is not humanistic. Whatever the species-level codes currently select for - and this is a question for scientific investigation - it is evidently not the preservation and advancement of universal human agency.
If we are to treat humanity as a subject at all - if the word "mankind" is to refer to anything coherent - then the only "will" attributable to it is one that concerns the organism as a whole, including its constituents. A "species-will" that systematically negates the agency of its own members is not a species-will. It would be something more like the will of a parasitic subsection operating under the representamen of the species. The species-will is simply the universalised humanistic impulse: the preservation and advancement of agency across the species. The universalised humanistic impulse is therefore the only nominal object-ideal at the species level that is not self-contradictory.
This is humanism - the only coherent content attributable to the concept of the interests of mankind. Humanism is what you necessarily mean when you speak of the interests of humanity as such.
The task of scientific humanism is therefore making the gattungsgeist humanistic - restructuring the conditions under which species-level selection operates so that the operative object-ideal of the species moves toward universal agency-preservation. Whether any given society, movement, or individual is aligned with humanistic ends is a question of material fact: do the conditions they produce move toward or away from the material requirements of universal agency-preservation? This question scientifically answerable in principle.