La notte dell’umanesimo. L’immagine dell’uomo nella società contemporanea

The image of man established in the last centuries in Western society is today in deep crisis. It is replaced, as we will try to prove in this article, by the images of the « homo naturalis », the « homo data » and the « homo neo-religiosus ». The homo naturalis emerges as a consequence of an integral questioning of the meaning universe of modernity. Nature rises here as an exemplary model. The homo data is the result of a sort of hypermatematization of the world made possible by new digital technologies. The homo neo-religiosus is the protagonist of the process of desecularization: here the imagery gives back to men a sacred universe. Analyzing the sociological reasons by virtue of which the image of the man of humanism are today replaced by the images we have just mentioned, is the goal of this paper.