The subject of humanities in the light of Ernesto De Martino's philosophical anthropology

The philosophical anthropology by Ernesto De Martino (1908 -1965) helps us to answer the question Who is the subject of the human sciences? He is a precursor in the philosophy of psychopathology since most of his philosophical hypotheses build on psychopathological data as well as on ethnological ones. Madness and the "magic world" are the via regia to the understanding of the human condition since in both these states the boundaries between man and world are not yet firmly established and/or jeopardized. He also supplies a method for the human sciences, called "critical ethnocentrism", whose main principle is that if one wants to investigate another culture or world then he also must turn his own gaze into an object of inquiry. To explore another world is not just an act of knowledge, certainly not of objective knowledge; it also entails an "ethical" stance since acknowledging the existence of another mode of being-in-the-world is a way to transcend one's own. The outcome of this "ethos of transcending" is not relativism, but a deeper understanding of the condition of possibility of one's own world and of the other's. The subject of the human sciences, then, is someone who wishes to be more in touch with his own world and the other's and in doing so performs a "double thematization" of his own and the other's way of being-in-the-world.