HUMANISM

Humanism is a philosophy and way of life (a lifestance) based on empathy, reason, and experience. To humanists, empathy—which is the starting point for compassion and social action—is a product of human nature: the fact that humans are highly developed social animals. Reason is a product of human intelligence that, when combined with experience, leads to the scientific method. And humanists regard the scientific method as the only reliable tool for both acquiring and validating the knowledge necessary to realize the aims of human compassion. To the twentieth-century philosopher Bertrand Russell, the whole concept could be summed up this way: "The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge" (Russell 1957, p. 56).

Given this premise, humanism is an essentially proscience outlook. And because science becomes socially beneficial primarily through technology, humanists tend to be supportive of technology. Nevertheless, because empathic concerns are basic to humanism, and consequently to humanist ethics, any technology that proves itself more harmful than good in regard to humanity and living nature will be challenged by humanists. This is why humanists have been active in efforts to protect the environment, outlaw certain weapons, ensure product safety, minimize negative social impacts evident in widespread technologies, and so on.

On the other hand, because of the humanist focus on science as the primary means of knowing, there is no place for supernatural belief in humanist thought. Humanism is a completely naturalistic and nontheistic worldview. As such, it leaves humanists with the recognition that humanity alone must take responsibility for making the world better. Along these lines, Humanist Manifesto II (1973) states: "No deity will save us; we must save ourselves." Therefore humanists tend to be relatively fearless in the face of admonitions against scientific hubris and dire warnings that given technologies will allow humans to "play god." In the humanist view, science and technology are tools that allow humans to take charge of their lives, protect themselves from diseases and other dangers, and generally improve the human condition. Therefore, emerging technologies of great promise have tended to be welcomed by humanists rather than feared.

The roots of the humanist worldview are complex, so much so that this background is most clearly understood when pursued as three separate histories: that of the word humanism, the ideas of humanism, and the organized humanist movement.

The Word

The Roman grammarian Aulus Gellius, who flourished circa 160 c.e., noted (in Noctes Atticae [Attic nights] the dual usage of the Latin humanitas (humanity). One usage was comparable to the Greek concept of philanthropia and indicated an attitude of general benevolence or humanitarian sympathies, while the other was comparable to the Greek paideia and indicated the achievement of being humanized (humanissimi) through acquired learning in the liberal arts. Because this latter usage was seen as a capability that separated humans from animals—giving humans the power of independent judgment—it had been favored by the Roman orator and philosopher Cicero (106–43 b.c.e.) and the Roman scholar Varro (116–27 b.c.e.) as a civilizing force.

Such an autonomous, cultured view of life fell largely out of fashion during the Middle Ages, replaced by a notion that human beings were defined players within set hierarchies of the cosmic order, as maintained by the authority of the church, the empire, and the feudal system. But as a few cities and communes gained political independence in the fourteenth century, intellectual independence followed. And with it came a revival of the ancient Greco-Roman spirit. This took the form of a Renaissance literary and philosophic movement of scholars calling themselves humanists. Through a revival of classical letters and a focus on the humanities, Renaissance humanists promoted religious tolerance, worldly ethics, a sense of history, and an interest in nature. In the latter case, what had begun as a revival of humane letters became an impetus for the advancement of science, thus broadening humanism's meaning. Additional broadening occurred as humanist ideas came to be advocated not only by Roman Catholics but also by Protestants, Jews, and nonreligious skeptics.

During the subsequent period of the Enlightenment the term was little used. But in 1853 a democratic organization appeared in England, calling itself the Humanistic Religious Association of London and declaring emancipation "from the ancient compulsory dogmas, myths and ceremonies borrowed of old from Asia and still pervading the ruling churches of our age." Around the same time, in France, the pioneer sociologist Auguste Comte (1798–1857) formulated a "religion of humanity" out of his science-oriented, nontheistic philosophy of positivism.

In 1867 a group of radical Unitarians and freethinkers in the United States formed the Free Religious Association and eventually, by the end of the century, many came to propound what they called humanistic theism—essentially a mix of the most liberal Unitarianism, Universalism, and Reformed Judaism of the time together with freethought critiques of more traditional faith. Among the radical Unitarians was Edward Howard Griggs who in 1899 wrote a popular book, The New Humanism: Studies in Personal and Social Development, advocating science (particularly Darwinism), "the Greek ideal," Christian spirituality, and social change (including women's rights). These positions were all rolled into an idea for a new religion that would "teach the divinity of common things" and proclaim "the infinite significance of humanity." Another radical Unitarian was the Reverend Frank Carlton Doan, whose 1909 Religion and the Modern Mind set forth a more inner-directed, psychological humanism that promoted meditative self-awareness as the starting point for social progress.

Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, Irving Babbitt (1865–1933), Paul Elmer More (1864–1937), and Norman Foerster (1887–1972) developed what has been variously termed academic humanism, literary humanism, and the new humanism. This reactionary outlook called for a return to a classics-based education, declared the humanities superior to science, proclaimed human beings superior to nature, and advanced a puritanical morality of decorum. Vestiges of this viewpoint remain in the early twenty-first century among some specialists in the humanities (who sometimes term themselves humanists), often expressed through a distrust of science and technology.

Among philosophers, F. C. S. Schiller in England published Humanism: Philosophical Essays in 1903 and Studies in Humanism in 1907, advocating a subjectivist form of pragmatism. Later, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) developed an existential humanism and Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) a theocentric Catholic humanism drawing on the thought of Thomas Aquinas. There have even been both Marxists and Social Darwinists who have taken the humanist label.

While many or all of the above have been regarded as representing different types of humanism, it would be more correct to understand them as different usages of the same word. From this perspective, it is possible to see the current usage of the term humanism as more or less serendipitous and possessing largely superficial rather than substantive connections to the ideas of those who had used the word earlier. The origin of current usage is as follows.

During World War I, the American Unitarian minister John H. Dietrich (1878–1957), having doubts concerning his earlier Christian convictions, adopted a naturalistic, pro-science, ethical worldview linked to a progressive social outlook. But he had no name for this combination of ideas until he read a 1915 article by a positivist, Frederick M. Gould, published in a magazine of the British Ethical Societies. Gould used the term humanism to express a belief and trust in human effort. This was somewhat different from the Renaissance usage already familiar to Dietrich—which suggested that the word could be adapted to his own nontheistic form of Unitarianism. So Dietrich began using it.

Independently, in 1916, another American Unitarian minister, Curtis W. Reese, arrived at similar conclusions. His term of choice, however, was the religion of democracy. He argued that democratic religion is human centered in contrast with the authoritarianism of theocratic religion. Edwin H. Wilson, in his 1995 book, The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto, tells how the two men met in 1917 at the annual Western Unitarian Conference: "While Reese was speaking … on 'The Religion of Democracy,' Dietrich pointed out: 'What you are calling the religion of democracy, I am calling humanism.' It was a momentous convergence of minds—and at that moment, a movement was launched" (pp. 7–8).

The Ideas

In The Philosophy of Humanism (1997), Corliss Lamont sees a number of historic ideas, trends, and movements as converging over time to create contemporary humanist thought: these being empirical science, ancient and modern philosophies of materialism and naturalism, free thought, liberal religion, democracy and civil liberties, Renaissance humanism, and literature and the arts—in other words, most of the Western intellectual tradition. There are similar trends in the histories of non-Western cultures, together with cross-pollination with the West, so Lamont also draws attention to relevant intellectual traditions in China, India, and the Middle East. This sort of approach, however, can be accused of creating a pedigree out of ancestors adopted for their compatibility.

Therefore, William F. Schulz, in his 2002 book, Making the Manifesto, focuses on more proximate antecedents: nineteenth-century science, the impact of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), cultural anthropology and the higher criticism of the Bible, free thought and religious modernism, progressivism and the social gospel, and the philosophies of pragmatism and critical realism. Nevertheless, because humanism is not the sum of these things, and because it continues to evolve, it is best described less in terms of its origins and more in terms of what it is: a worldview with the following features.

Humanism's epistemology is derived from the Instrumentalism (the view that the abstract concept of "truth" is best replaced by the more empirical concept of a "warranted assertion") of the American educator and philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952). Metaphysically it is naturalistic (the view that the universe is natural and there is no supernatural). Its worldly ethic is essentially altruistic but because of the humanist commitment to reason, it also involves elements of the Utilitarianism of the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), which holds that acts are good only to the extent that they have practical social benefits that can be rationally decided. Thus humanist ethics are situational (changing with situations) in a context of compassion as well as egoistically consequentialist (taking consequences into account from the standpoint of enlightened self-interest). In the social and political realm this dichotomy reveals itself in a recognition of the inherent conflict between individual liberty and social responsibility, leading to the conclusion that moral dilemmas are real and a necessary part of life and law. Democratic values—including social justice, the enfranchisement of the disenfranchised, and the open society—are central to humanism as an expression of the Golden Rule (do to others as you would have them do to you), which is itself a formula derived from the human capacity for empathy. In matters of personal self-development toward a meaningful life, humanism has been informed by Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness (1930).

The Movement

In 1876 the Society for Ethical Culture was founded by Felix Adler, a Reform Jew who was active in the Free Religious Association. Ethical Culture was a new religion that promoted ethical behavior and social service—deed above creed—with its values derived from neo-Kantian principles. By around 1950, however, the various Ethical Culture societies in the United States and England had evolved Adler's philosophy into humanism or had come to understand it as such. As a result, the American Ethical Union became one of the founding member organizations of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), the world coalition of humanists.

In 1916 Reese and Dietrich began preaching humanist ideas from the pulpits of their Unitarian churches. Slowly humanism spread among Unitarians, aided by the creation of the Humanist Fellowship at the University of Chicago in 1927 and the founding of the New Humanist magazine one year later. In 1929 the Unitarian minister Charles Francis Potter left the denomination to found the independent First Humanist Society of New York, a church that would eventually count among its members Albert Einstein and Helen Keller.

Meanwhile in India in 1925 Periyar launched Self-Respect, a humanist political and social reform movement devoted to human rights and opposed to the caste system. Openly nontheistic and critical of Hindu and other religious beliefs, it was and remains a proponent of scientific and technological development.

A Humanist Manifesto, published in the New Humanist in 1933, was the first major document to lay down the basic principles of humanism. It was signed by prominent academic philosophers (including Dewey), clerics (Ethical Culture, Jewish, Unitarian, and Universalist), educators, journalists, scientists, and social reformers.

In 1941 a number of the manifesto signers founded the American Humanist Association and its magazine, the Humanist. Both continue into the twenty-first century, and the organization has counted among its presidents the Nobel Prize–winning geneticist Herman J. Muller and the science popularizer Isaac Asimov.

Following World War II a number of humanist organizations sprung up in Europe, India, and elsewhere. This international growth led to the founding of the IHEU in 1952 at a humanist conclave in Amsterdam chaired by the English biologist Julian Huxley. In the early 2000s the IHEU indirectly represents millions of humanists worldwide in national and local organizations on six continents.

In his 1957 book, New Bottles for New Wine, Huxley coined the term transhumanism out of a recognition that humanity "is in point of fact determining the future direction of evolution on this earth" and therefore a term is needed to signify "man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature" (pp. 14, 17). Huxley's word has been taken up by futurist-oriented humanists engaged in exploring the possibilities of radical improvements in the human condition and human capabilities through the likes of cyber-, bio-, and nanotechnology. To foster dialogue and advance this pursuit, the World Transhumanist Association was founded in 1998. Since then a growing number of people have been calling themselves transhumanists.

FRED EDWORDS

SEE ALSO Humanization and Dehumanization;Science, Technology, and Society Studies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

American Humanist Association. (1973). "Humanist Manifesto II." The Humanist 33(5): 4–9. Though out of date, this remains the most frequently cited expression of humanism and its social applications.

American Humanist Association. (2003). "Humanism and Its Aspirations: Humanist Manifesto III." The Humanist 63(3): 13–14. The most recent basic expression of humanism.

Bragg, Raymond B., ed. (1933). "A Humanist Manifesto." The New Humanist 6(3): 1–5. The original, basic expression of humanism, with multiple authors and signatories.

Doan, Frank Carleton. (1909). Religion and the Modern Mind, and Other Essays in Modernism. Boston: Sherman, French & Company. An early example of the effort to make personal psychology and emotional well being a starting point for ethics.

Griggs, Edward Howard. (1908). The New Humanism: Studies in Personal and Social Development, 6th edition. New York: B.W. Hubesch. Modern religious liberals would find much to agree with in this expression of humanistic theism. First edition published in 1899.

Huxley, Julian. (1957). New Bottles for New Wine. New York: Harper & Brothers. Science intersects with moral and social questions in this popular collection of essays.

Kurtz, Paul. (2000). Embracing the Power of Humanism. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Offers an exuberant expression of humanism as a positive and personally rewarding lifestyle.

Lamont, Corliss. (1997). The Philosophy of Humanism, 8th edition. Amherst, NY: Humanist Press. Recognized as the standard work on humanism. First edition published in 1949.

Olds, Mason. (1996). American Religious Humanism, rev. edition. Minneapolis, MN: Fellowship of Religious Humanists. The most complete survey of the early history of religious humanism.

Russell, Bertrand. (1958 [1930]). The Conquest of Happiness. New York: Bantam Books, Inc. A practical book on achieving happiness that doesn't insult the intelligence of philosophically-minded readers.

Russell, Bertrand. (1957). Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, ed. Paul Edwards. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc. A significant number of humanists and freethinkers name this book as the one most influential in bringing about their break with traditional religion.

Schiller, F. S. C. (1903). Humanism: Philosophical Essays. London and New York: Macmillan. The first book to approach humanism academically as a philosophy.

Schiller, F. S. C. (1907). Studies in Humanism. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited. The author further develops his philosophy of humanism as a subjective form of pragmatism.

Schulz, William F. (2002). Making the Manifesto: The Birth of Religious Humanism. Boston: Skinner House Books. An analytical history of the first Humanist Manifesto by a Unitarian universalist minister who personally interviewed a number of the original signers, all who are now deceased.

Wilson, Edwin H. (1995). The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto. Amherst, NY: Humanist Press. The history of the first Humanist Manifesto told by one of the people most responsible for it.