Is "Man" Used to Represent All of Humanity in Philosophy and Psychology

[u/Vampirexp67]

In many philosophical and psychological texts, especially older works, the term "man" often appears to refer to humanity as a whole. However, I'm curious: was this truly intended to represent all human beings, regardless of gender, or was it primarily centered on men when discussing concepts like the "Übermensch" (Nietzsche) or key ideas in Jung's writings?

Did these thinkers view "man" as inclusive of the entire species, or were their ideas implicitly or explicitly limited to men? How should we approach these texts today when interpreting such terminology?

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[u/icarusrising9]

Of course, this is dependent on source language, but in English the word "man" has been used in a gender-neutral manner until relatively recently in our language's history, in addition to the now-commonplace and inherently gendered manner exclusively in use today.

In theory (barring valid feminist critiques that are sort of unrelated to your question here) these thinkers meant, in literal terms, "person" or "humankind" when they used what we translate as "man", and might make it clear when they did not mean "man" in this general sense and it was not already clear from context. (You can see this, going off of one of your examples, in sections when Nietzsche contrasts gendered "man" and "woman".)

[Edit: All that being said, Nietzsche himself, as a person, probably did not consider a woman as a potential Ubermensch, just judging by his attitudes toward women in his writing. Just fyi.]

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[u/EdenRomaine]

The answer is both. For most of Western history, 'man' did, in many contexts, refer to humanity as a whole, but this is intrinsically tied to the fact that women were not thought of as full human subjects with things such as free will, natural rights, agency, the faculty of reason, etc. When analyzing historical texts through a contemporary lens, in which (hopefully) people of all genders are understood as full human subjects, 'man' should be interpreted to mean 'human,' but the fact that the text was originally written in a context in which only men (and in many cases, only European men of high socioeconomic status) were included in that 'universal subject' category should not be obfuscated.