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Humanism and Superhumanism — A Deep Analysis

davidsholz.com · 14,610 words · saved by 1 readers

The manuscript is item 33 in the Stapledon archive (Liverpool University Library, STP2, F11/4): thirty-four sheets of pencil notes, with red-pencil staging annotations, prepared for a lecture titled “Humanism and Superhumanism.” The synopsis sheet carries the red annotation “South Place, 29·12·3[4]” — the South Place Ethical Society, London, the oldest freethought community in Britain (from 1929 housed at Conway Hall). The final digit of the year is ambiguous in the handwriting (the transcription models split between 34 and 36), but the archive tradition and the lecture’s content — Communism and Fascism discussed as live rival creeds, no mention of war — fit the mid-1930s. The audience matters enormously. South Place was the cathedral of English secular humanism. Stapledon walked into the home crowd of organized Humanism and told them, gently but firmly, that humanism is not enough. The whole rhetorical architecture of the notes — stating the humanist’s case “as strongly as possible” b

Humanism and Superhumanism: A Deep Analysis Olaf Stapledon's lecture to the South Place Ethical Society, read against everything he wrote. 1. The document and its occasion The manuscript is item 33 in the Stapledon archive (Liverpool University Library, STP2, F11/4): thirty-four sheets of pencil notes, with red-pencil staging annotations, prepared for a lecture titled "Humanism and Superhumanism." The synopsis sheet carries the red annotation "South Place, 29·12·3[4]" — the South Place Ethical Society, London, the oldest freethought community in Britain (from 1929 housed at Conway Hall). The f

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