Becoming Human
Welcome to the New Renaissance
Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. (Yale) is a philosopher, institution builder, consultant, keynote speaker, and existential coach for individuals and corporations. He builds bridges between the ivory tower and the public square, and he has worked with clients such as the United Nations, Oliver Wyman, Red Bull Arts, Ximalaya FM, and Flagship Pioneering.
Born in Athens, Greece, Samuel's ancestors’ diverse origins give him global roots: in Okinawa, Japan, among the Chippewa (or Ojibwe) people, and in Eastern Europe (Poland and Croatia), and motivate his mission to unite the ancient and the modern ,integrating separated silos of knowledge and culture that need each other’s wisdom.
Samuel is the Editor-in-Chief of the Marginalia Review of Books, Founder and Director of the Institute for the Meanings of Science, Co-Founder of The Writing College, Creator of the Becoming Human Project , and the host of Becoming Human: A Show for a Species in Transition. His book, Becoming Human: Philosophy as Science and Religion from Plato to Posthumanism, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.
A New Story of the Human
Before the False Division
of Science, Religion, & Philosophy
there was the
HUMAN
Who Works with Samuel?
In all his work, Samuel empowers individuals and institutions to place human meaning at the center of every vision, creating personal lives and corporations that are self-consciously integrated philosophical projects.
Those who work with Samuel learn how to create an existential vision and strategy to achieve high impact results that contribute to global human flourishing.
Join a community of scientists, professors, artists, industry leaders, and others creating a human-centered life.
“Samuel is asking the most important questions our culture needs to answer, and he brings historical context and wisdom to the conversation that our questions require.”
Jon Morgan
Founder & Principal
Sound Fund Advisors
“Samuel Loncar is smart and persuasive and a joy to listen to. His writing is both lively and profound. And his erudition is so contagious that it makes you want to drop everything...”
Costica Bradatan, Ph.D.
Philosophy Editor, LA Review of Books
Professor of the Humanities in the Honors College at Texas Tech University & Honorary Research Professor of Philosophy
at the University of Queensland
An Ancient Path for the Modern Life
We live in the most complex society in history.
Insights fragment as the need for unity and coherence increases.
Enduring questions about the meaning of human life, the nature of society, and the pursuit of happiness are increasing in importance. Dimensions of culture such as politics, religion, art, the university, and business widen these gaps instead of closing them.
An ancient innovation made new, the Becoming Human Project revives the revolutionary birthplace of our greatest ideas and most enduring institutions: the philosophical school.
A cross between a contemporary research institute, consulting firm, spiritual community, book club, and social revolution, this way of life took shape in philosophical communities dedicated to becoming human.
Over 3000 years ago, philosophy
emerged as a distinct way of life
in the ancient Mediterranean world.
By the claims of its own founders and their disciples—like Thales, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Socrates, and Plato—this way of life was derived from many other cultures, including the religious practices of the Egyptians, the Persians, and the teachings and traditions ascribed to Orpheus.
Philosophy was thus from its foundations so concerned with religious things that a great scholar could even claim the word “philosophy” to be the only word in Greek antiquity that comes close to corresponding to our sense of “religion” today. Philosophy found its highest expression in its reflection on the gods, which it called theology…
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Christians took over this idea of philosophy and emerged as a powerful alternate tradition of philosophy in the Roman Empire, one that, through its political triumph, would end up preserving and transforming the ancient idea of philosophy. This was so much that case that monasticism, the highest life of the Christian church, was referred to as the philosophical life from its earliest history well into the Middle Ages.
This tradition of philosophy was transformed by the rise of the European university but only in the nineteenth-century would philosophy undergo a conscious crisis of identity as it sought to position itself as a field of comprehensive knowledge and one academic discipline among others. Theology and philosophy were formally separated in subject matter and, with the secularization of the university system, theology’s cultural importance diminished even as philosophy increasingly forgot its history and aspiration to help humans become “as much like the divine as possible.”
The last fragments of philosophy’s religious origins in academia lie in an area that first concerned itself with the truth and coherence of religious claims (a task academic theologians largely abandoned), and later dissolved into a variety of pursuits whose principle of unity seemed to fade into academic convenience.
“The Myth of Secular Philosophy: Philosophy of Religion’s Origin and Fate.” Religions, 14.3 (2023): 356.
Education requires clarity
about what we believe humans are,
for education is the process of becoming human.
The wisdom required for living life well comes from seeing the whole, yet how is the possible today?
Education embodies our ideal of humanity, and it is the means by which we become ourselves. When we have forgotten who we are, or no longer agree as a culture, we cannot educate. For a democracy to flourish, its citizens must be offered the skills needed to participate fully in economic and civil life. That is a demand of the common good, a requisite of our republic.
But training is different than education. Our confusion has led us to conflate schooling, job-training, and certification with education…
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Schooling stops at a certain age; degrees end and are restricted to those with the power to pay. True education ends when we do; it is a life-long process and should not be restricted to the privileged and elite.
At the heart of every educational venture must be a clear answer to the question: what does it mean to be human? Humans are philosophers, destined to achieve the freedom to understand themselves and determine the kind of person they wish to become. Philosophy is a way of life, not an academic discipline; philosophers are a species, homo sapiens, not a professional class.
Education is a philosophical enterprise. To become human is to practice philosophy as a way of life.
“Why Listen to Philosophers? A Constructive Critique of Disciplinary Philosophy.”Metaphilosophy 47.1 (2016): 3-25.
A Global Commons
Samuel’s Institutions & Projects
Marginalia Review of Books
A gathering of flowers, in Latin, becomes the lovely word, florilegium,
in botany a bouquet, and in the literary culture of the middle ages, the humble and refreshing basis of Marginalia.
As scholars scribbled marginal notes on their anthologies, florilegia, of academic and literary classics, they created a new culture of scientific learning, bringing all the world into conversation through dialogue and commentary. The medieval university and scientific revolution were the fruits of these flower-gatherers of knowledge, and the Marginalia Review of Books is their flower-gathering child, the digital evolution of the university and its endless quest for knowledge and coherence, bringing the best insights from science, art, and scholarship into a higher wholeness.
Institute for the Meanings of Science
Science is our most powerful source of knowledge;
it has answers to issues of fundamental human importance.
New forms of knowledge and scientific breakthroughs happen every day,
yet this knowledge often has no path to reach those who need it.
The Institute for the Meanings of Science is dedicated to advancing fundamental science and its systematic development by collaboration between leading scientists and scholars in the physical sciences, life sciences, and humanities, while integrating and publishing their insights to create a new culture of scientific literacy and debate.
featured at the Max Plank Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
The Writing College
mind over machine
transformation over transaction
substance over speed
quality over clicks
knowledge over information
The root of individual power in the human is language. Language is a vehicle for human curiosity and discovery. That’s why reading and writing are two of the most powerful technologies available to humans for spiritual transformation that liberates the mind. At The Writing College, we use Deep Literacy to train your logos, cultivating your ability for empathy, compassion, holistic thinking, and nuance. Through the practice of Deep Literacy, we offer you a path to becoming human in a machine dominated world.
Becoming Human Project
We imagine completeness.
We imagine a kind of perfection in ourselves and other people,
and that gives us confidence. It gives us power. We know who we are.
And we're told that we should know who we are, that this is part of being grown up.
Strangely, in the midst of this certainty we have about ourselves, the confidence we have in our completeness, we find the world is full of pain. The world is full of suffering. The world is full of evil, caused by humans. We not only hurt each other, but as collectives, as cultures, we have conspired to destroy the very world we depend upon. So something doesn't seem quite right about the idea that we are complete, the idea that we have achieved our identity.
But if we take seriously the failure to be complete, or maybe more gently, the fact that we haven't become who we are, then we're forced to face a simple reality: that all of our dreams and aspirations all of our achievements, all of our accomplishments, still don’t add up. And this incompleteness does not undermine our identity. I would argue it's the beginning…
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…of achieving our identity to recognize that we aren't everything that we wish to be, that we fall so far short of the ideals that we hold ourselves and others to impresses upon us humility and gratitude.
In disagreement, where we are so confident we're right, and so sure that the other person is wrong, and maybe even wicked, our incompleteness could remind us of something we share with them: a necessary imperfection of a species in transition, affecting every individual and afflicting us, not with failure, but with the reminder that our dreams exceed ourselves—and must—and that if we cannot recognize our incompleteness as humans, we can not recognize the need to have dreams beyond what we currently are.
So we become trapped in a miserable contentment, with an inadequate present, a culture, a person, a time that could be more than it is, but that is neglected into a state of decrepitude because we regarded as complete or good enough. So incompleteness marks the project of being human.
The awareness of our incompleteness teaches us to strive for our humanity as something that we haven't achieved. And that's a project that doesn't exclude anyone.
All people are included in this project regardless of their abilities, or their backgrounds in any way, ethnic, social, gender, sexual because all people are striving to be the best version of who they are. And the very fact of that pursuit reminds us, if we're honest, and if we're humble, that it's a project that has not finished, and that it's a project that we share with other people, that the measure of our incompleteness binds us to the rest of humanity.
The most dangerous condition is imagining that we are everything that we want to be, and that we as a people, or as an individual group, have achieved all the things that we wish to achieve, and therefore have the right to look down on other people for being different or disagreeing with us. And in my view, this recognition of the incompleteness of the human life, and the human life as a project that we must self consciously pursue, is the essence of the philosophical life as the love of wisdom.
Wisdom is this recognition of our incompleteness in pursuit of greater wholeness.
We’re not content with incompleteness. We're not ceasing to strive. But neither are we indifferent or hostile to the necessity of our current imperfection.
I think that balance between pursuing wholeness and recognizing that the very need to pursue it must temper our own arrogance in our accomplishments and must make us more kind and gentle to those who differ from us and disagree with us. I think that gives us a perspective to think about the most pressing problems in the world and in our culture, in ways that partisan politics or conventional religions, and creeds, don't permit us.
It’s from that perspective that I think and speak about what it means to be human. And to invite you into that conversation.
This is the beginning. It's an invitation. It's an opportunity to reflect on that one thing we all need to reflect on: what does it mean to become human?
Dedication
One rainy day on a tiny Okinawa island called Yagaji, my grandmother, Akiko Furugen Kasprzak,
set my feet on the path of philosophy because of her piety.
All of my work is dedicated to her life and memory.
(1935-2024)