Humanism

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Humanism

In the widest sense, humanism is conceived as referring to an approach to understanding the world and of living in that world focused first and foremost on humans rather than on God or on nature. Although individualistic, never organized in the form of a movement, and highly variegated and including religious and nonreligious forms, humanisms have exhibited various combinations of freedom and responsibility, learning and observation, reason and values. The term itself only dates from the mid-nineteenth century. The descriptive term, humanist, however, gained wide currency from the late 1400s, and the advent of humanism in the West is usually associated with the classical revival of what has come to be known since the nineteenth century, now often contentiously, as the Italian Renaissance.

Humanists were particularly scholars of the Greek and Latin literae humaniores and engaged in teaching what Cicero (106–43 bce) had termed studia humanitatis based on a liberal education, especially grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and philosophy. From early in the fourteenth century, they began to develop a periodization of history that, unlike the continuity experienced in the Middle Ages, was marked by a break with the civilizations of Greece and Rome. Thus in antiquity could be found alternative models for thought and life. Humanist scholars then, with Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch, 1304–1374) and his friend Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) in the lead and establishing a model widely emulated, were engaged in the recovery of classical texts. Using a philological method, humanists further sought to establish the integrity and the original meaning of the classics in the context in which they were written.

Their passion for antiquity and the proclaimed break with the medieval world presented Renaissance humanists with the problem of reconciling Christian and pagan values in a new historical and intellectual climate. Humanists had attacked scholasticism and, instead of in Aristotle (384–322 bce), eventually found more congenial philosophical bases in Plato (427–347 bce). An associated question was that of an active versus contemplative life and the role of the scholar in public affairs. Lino Coluccio di Piero Salutati (1331–1406, chancellor of the Florentine Republic 1375–1406) and the generation of the first half of the fifteenth century tipped the balance toward civic virtue, civic humanism, and made Florence the center of humanist studies. The life and work of Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) epitomized humanism in the arts. Personifying the Renaissance ideal of the “universal man,” he shared with many humanists a taste for archaeological studies and campaigned for a return to classical models. He advanced realistic representation, systematized perspective, advocated for principles of harmony and the social function of architecture, and put these into practice himself as an architect. The humanists’ interests in perspective, anatomy, and the mathematical bases of proportion and harmony (including that of music) provided material groundwork for the development of the natural sciences as an autonomous domain of knowledge production.

Humanist thought and practice spread widely beyond the original center in Florence to other parts of Italy and, following the invasion of the Italian Peninsula in 1494, extended rapidly to the north as the new learning. Education, the key to the discovery of one’s humanitas, was a fundamental element in the development of “humanism.” Although the old universities remained in the grip of scholasticism, existing schools were revitalized and new ones established all over Europe to make available a classical education, at least to an elite, and humanist thought prospered in informal groups, correspondence networks, and academies.

While the violence and dislocations of the Wars of Religion of the late 1500s and the attacks on what was considered the heretical idea of personal freedom of thought in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation shook optimism and faith in fundamental human dignity, a renewed sense of confidence and the possibility of progress; a belief in freedom, including freedom of thought and expression, in reason, and in science; and especially an emphasis on a critical outlook marked the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The corollary to the accent on emancipation and the individual was secularism, indeed an anticlericalism and atheism—different from the accommodation that had satisfied Renaissance humanists. However, the reaction to the French Revolution (1789–1799) offered a sharp rebuff to the way the Enlightenment philosophes had envisioned the world. The ineluctable reality of change brought forth contradictory attitudes toward the meaning of “progress” and was translated into the mutually exclusive politics—based on conflicting value sets—of conservatives and radicals. Nonetheless, a belief in the centrality of the human experience and the value of reason and education continued to color nineteenth-century attitudes.

During the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, humanism evolved in the Germanies with an emphasis on the individual (even to the detriment of social concerns), the pursuit of classicism in the arts, education reform, and the assertion of classical roots as a fundamental element in the establishment and development of the German state. In England in the early 1880s, the relative merits of the arts (especially schooling in the classics) and the sciences (and the unbiased “truths” they produced) in education were debated by Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), champion of “culture” and a “liberal of the future,” and T. H. Huxley (1825–1895), Charles Darwin’s (1809–1882) apologist. But their positions were not so far apart; both were needed. Indeed after mid-century, liberal humanism was characterized by a confidence in a future of incremental material and social progress, supported by the emerging social sciences, whose principle actor or “subject,” however, was an autonomous, entrepreneurial, propertied white male. By the end of the century, the new liberalism had co-opted much of both the conservative and radical agendas, and the “common culture” espoused by Arnold was offered as a substitute for equality.

From the late nineteenth century, the European avant-garde contested realist representation (associated with a bourgeois establishment) and the positivist attitude by figuring an internal world, and the twentieth-century wars undermined confidence in an innate human decency and the improvements to be expected from scientific “progress.” Furthermore, over the second half of the twentieth century, the humanist tradition was assailed in a series of developments in the production of knowledge itself. In 1946 Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) extolled existentialism as a humanism, not the liberal/bourgeois humanism with its metaphysical assumptions but a humanism grounded in choice and commitment that linked the individual to the community. In 1947 Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) responded, rejecting humanism and existentialism as metaphysical; instead of the thinking subject, he placed the accent on “being.”

The scope of critiques of the possibility of any universal humanism widened from the 1950s through the mid-1960s. Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) pronounced négritude, a direct attack on universalizing, Eurocentric culture at the world scale, to be a humanism. Alain Robbe-Grillet, speaking for the nouveau roman and in a debate with Sartre, pointed to the double-edged and paralyzing nature of existentialism that underwrote a hegemony of “man,” a fundamental ideological pillar of modern thought. For Michel Foucault (1926–1984), conceding the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), not only had humanism as a philosophy reached an end but “man,” a concept of recent invention, would also have to be abandoned (Foucault 1966).

In response to the crisis on the left occasioned by the events of 1956—Hungary, Suez, Nikita Khrushchev’s (1894–1971) secret speech—E. P. Thompson (1924–1993) promoted socialist humanism, which was “humanist because it places once again real men and women at the centre of socialist theory and aspiration … socialist because it re-affirms the revolutionary perspectives of Communism … faith in real men and women” (1957, p. 109). The movement, founded on the early Karl Marx (1818–1883), attracted wide support. In 1964 Louis Althusser (1918–1990) took the couplet to task, associating the terms socialist with science and humanism with ideology by singling out what he called Marx’s break with “every theory that based history or politics on an essence of man” ([1965] 1986, p. 227). Althusser argued that Marx’s “structural” account of social relations gave rise to theoretical antihumanism, which, however, did not rule out ethical commitments. Despite the many valid criticisms, Althusser’s work was the primary source for what came to be known as structuralist Marxism and rendered “humanist” agendas on the left suspect.

By far the most far-reaching development was that of structuralism. Based on the work in linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), the structuralisms offered the promise of a new rigor and scientific status, nonreductionist and nonpositivist, for the human sciences. But the emphasis on “constructedness” spelled the end for any humanism founded in essentialist categories, whether human or material. Saussure insisted that languages, systems of signs that express meaning, should be studied not just in terms of their individual parts, diachronically as philologists had, but also in terms of the relationship between those parts, synchronically. The model rehabilitated a version of relational thinking and was appropriated by the social sciences and applied to nonlinguistic phenomena.

The term secular humanism is generally applied to those who embrace humanist principles and contend that these lead to secularism and who reject the supernatural, especially religious faith, while maintaining a belief in the inherent dignity of humankind. It has at times acquired a pejorative tonality, especially when used by religious conservatives to describe nonreligious opponents such as some scientists and intellectuals.

Edward Said (1935–2003) reclaimed the term humanism in a positive sense to describe a practice for what is in the end a defense against inhumanity: historical, rational, and critical thinking (which includes the philological method) informing responsible, activist social agency.

SEE ALSO Althusser, Louis; Aristotle; Enlightenment; French Revolution; Hungarian Revolution; Plato; Poststructuralism; Revolution; Said, Edward; Schooling; Social Science; Socialism; Structuralism; Thompson, Edward P.