The idea of the human, which played a central role in the thought-world of Rabindranāth Tagore, was invoked by him in ‘Sabhyatār sangkat’ (‘Crisis in Civilization’, 1941), his last address in Santiniketan, to envisage a possible future on the other side of a global civilizational crisis:

Tagore did not live to see the full genocidal impact of the Nazi regime, but had he done, he might still not have endorsed the anti-humanist sweep of Adorno's famous observation on the silencing of poetry, the most refined expression of human language: ‘[T]o write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today.’ To revivify civilization cannot be anything but a human project; crisis, however deep, can only be contested in Rabindranath's thinking by the figure of the human. Yet the idea of the human, at least in its essentialist formulation, has been under severe pressure in recent times. The attack took its sustenance from Nietzsche, one of the first architects of the anti-humanist gesture.

In European modernity, the human, in its essentialist formulation, travels from Renaissance painters and thinkers to the Cartesian discovery of the centred cogito to the ethics of human dignity propounded by Kant. Each of these conceptions argues for a common presence of the human across histories and cultures, subverting the idea of difference. Nietzsche famously questioned this idea of ‘man as an aeterna veritas [eternal truth], as something constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure measure of things’ by noting the lack of historical sense in philosophers and concluding that there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths.