Contemporaneity and “Making to Be Human”

Foucault’s philosophy embodies the contrast or tension between contemporaneity and modernity from many dimensions, and “being human” has always been a central topic of this philosophy without center. The philosophical ethos of an age determines what and how a human is. The contemporaneity refers to another kind of spirit in a specific time represented by spiritual loss, and therefore, a contemporary human is a human who abandons his faith, bids farewell to his ideals and loses his feelings. A human is a human via his learnings in the process of modernity, that is to say the subject is formed according to some universal rules, while he is a human via his doings in the process of contemporaneity, that is to say, the subject is formed by his doings. Foucault believes that the purpose of his writing is to change himself and diversify his image. He as a human with his learnings exactly embodies the important transformation from “learning to be human” to “making to be human”, although the former is included in the latter in some way.