Humanism is a perspective common to a wide range
of
ethical stances that attaches importance
to human dignity, concerns, and capabilities, particularly
rationality. Although the word has many senses,
its meaning comes into focus when contrasted to the
supernatural or to appeals to
authority. Since the nineteenth century, humanism
has been associated with an
anti-clericalism inherited from the
eighteenth-century
Enlightenment philosophes. Twenty-first century Humanism
tends to strongly endorse
human rights,
including
reproductive rights,
gender equality,
social justice, and the
separation of church and
state. The term covers
organized
non-theistic religions,
secular
humanism, and a
humanistic
life stance.
Religion
Members of twentieth-century and 21st Century Humanist
organizations disagree among themselves as to whether Humanism is a
religion or not, categorizing themselves in one of three ways:
religious humanists, in the
tradition of the earliest Humanist organizations in the UK and US,
saw Humanism as fulfilling the traditional social role of religion.
Secular Humanists consider all
forms of religion, including religious Humanism, to be superseded.
In order to sidestep disagreements between these two factions
recent Humanist proclamations define Humanism as a
life stance. See
Humanism . Regardless of
implementation, the philosophy of all three groups rejects
deference to supernatural beliefs and addresses ethics without
reference to them recognizing ethics as a human enterprise. It is
generally compatible with
atheismand
agnosticismbut being atheist or agnostic
does not make one a Humanist.
Knowledge
Modern Humanists, such as
Corliss
Lamont or
Carl Sagan, hold that
humanity must seek for truth through reason and the best observable
evidence and endorse
scientific
skepticism and the
scientific
method. However, they stipulate that decisions about right and
wrong must be based on the individual and common good. As an
ethical process, Humanism does not consider metaphysical issues
such as the existence or nonexistence of immortal beings. Humanism
is engaged with what is human.
Optimism
Contemporary Humanism entails a qualified
optimism about the capacity of people, but it does
not involve believing that human nature is purely good or that all
people can live up to the Humanist ideals without help. If
anything, there is the recognition that living up to one's
potential is hard work and requires the assistance of others. The
ultimate goal is
human flourishing;
making life better for all humans, and as the most conscious
species, also promoting concern for the welfare of other sentient
beings and the planet as a whole. The focus is on doing good and
living well in the here and now, and leaving the world a better
place for those who come after, but Humanists hold humanity as the
primary concern of humanity. In 1925 the English mathematician and
philosopher,
Alfred North
Whitehead cautioned that "The prophecy of
Francis Bacon has now been fulfilled; and man,
who at times dreamt of himself as a little lower than the angels,
has submitted to become the servant and the minister of nature. It
still remains to be seen whether the same actor can play both body
parts."
History
The term "humanism" is ambiguous. Around 1806
humanismus
was used to describe the classical curriculum offered by German
schools, and by 1836 "humanism" was borrowed into English in this
sense. In 1856, the great German historian and philologist
Georg Voigt used
humanism to describe
Renaissance Humanism, the
movement that flourished in the Italian
Renaissance to revive classical learning, a use
which won wide acceptance among historians in many nations,
especially Italy.This historical and literary use of the word
"humanist" derives from the 15th century Italian term
umanista, meaning a teacher or scholar of Classical Greek
and Latin literature and the ethical philosophy behind it.
In the mid-eighteenth century, however, a different use of the term
"humanism" began to emerge. In 1765, the author of an anonymous
article in a French Enlightenment periodical spoke of "The general
love of humanity . . . a virtue hitherto quite nameless among us,
and which we will venture to call ‘humanism’, for the time has come
to create a word for such a beautiful and necessary thing.” The
latter part of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries
saw the creation of numerous grass-roots "philanthropic" and
benevolent societies dedicated to human betterment and the
spreading of knowledge (some Christian, some not). After the
French Revolution the idea that
human virtue could be created by human reason alone independently
from traditional religious institutions, attributed by opponents of
the Revolution to Enlightenment
philosophes such as
Rousseau, was violently attacked by influential
religious and political conservatives, such as
Edmund Burke and
Joseph de Maistre, as a deification or
idolatry of man. Humanism began to acquire a negative sense. The
Oxford English Dictionary records the use of the word
"humanism" by an English clergyman in 1812 to indicate those who
believe in the "mere humanity" (as opposed to the divine nature) of
Christ, i.e.,
Unitarians and
Deists. In this polarized atmosphere, in which
established ecclesiastical bodies tended to circle the wagons and
reflexively oppose political and social reforms like extending the
franchise, universal schooling, and the like, liberal reformers and
radicals embraced the idea of Humanism as an alternative religion
of humanity. The anarchist
Proudhon (best
known for declaring that "
property is
theft") used the word "humanism" to describe a "
culte,
déification de l’humanité" ("cult, deification of humanity")
and
Ernest Renan in
L’avenir de la
science: pensées de 1848 (
The Future of Knowledge:
Thoughts on 1848") (1848-49), states: "It is my deep
conviction that pure
humanism will be the religion of the
future, that is, the cult of all that pertains to man all of life,
sanctified and raised to the level of a moral value.“ At about the
same time the word humanism as a philosophy centered around man (as
opposed to institutionalized religion) was also being used in
Germany by the so-called
Left
Hegelians,
Arnold Ruge, and
Karl Marx, who were critical of the close
involvement of the church in the repressive German government.
There has been a persistent confusion between the several uses of
the terms: philosophical humanists look to human-centered
antecedents among the Greek philosophers and the great figures of
Renaissance history, often assuming somewhat inaccurately that
famous historical humanists and champions of human reason had
uniformly shared their militantly anti-theistic stance.
Greek humanism
Sixth century BCE
pantheists Thales of Miletus and
Xenophanes of Colophon prepared the
way for later Greek humanist thought. Thales is credited with
creating the maxim "Know thyself", and Xenophanes refused to
recognize the gods of his time and reserved the divine for the
principle of unity in the universe. Later
Anaxagoras, often described as the "first
freethinker", contributed to the
development of science as a method of understanding the universe.
These Ionian Greeks were the first thinkers to recognize that
nature is available to be studied separately from any alleged
supernatural realm.
Pericles, a pupil of
Anaxagoras, influenced the development of democracy, freedom of
thought, and the exposure of superstitions. Although little of
their work survives,
Protagoras and
Democritus both espoused agnosticism and
a spiritual morality not based on the supernatural. The historian
Thucydides is noted for his scientific
and rational approach to history. In the third century BCE,
Epicurus became known for his concise
phrasing of the
problem of evil,
lack of belief in the afterlife, and human-centered approaches to
achieving
eudaimonia. He was also the
first Greek philosopher to admit women to his school as a
rule.
Ancient Asian humanism
Human-centered philosophy that rejected the supernatural can be
found as early as 1000 BCE in the
Lokayata system of Indian philosophy. In
the sixth century BCE,
Taoist teacher
Laozi brought such philosophy to China, where
Confucius also taught secular ethics. The
"silver rule" of Confucianism, from
Analects XV.24, is an example of ethical philosophy
based on human values rather than the supernatural. Also in the
sixth century BCE,
Gautama Buddha
expressed, in the
Pali literature, a
skeptical attitude toward the supernatural:
Since neither soul nor aught belonging to soul can
really and truly exist, the view which holds that this I who am
'world,' who am 'soul,' shall hereafter live permanent, persisting,
unchanging, yea abide eternally: is not this utterly and entirely a
foolish doctrine?
Renaissance humanism
Renaissance humanism was an intellectual movement in
Europe of the later
Middle
Ages and the
Early Modern period.
It was the nineteenth century German historian
Georg Voigt (1827-91) who identified
Petrarch as the first Renaissance humanist.
Paul Johnson agrees that
Petrarch was "the first to put into words the notion that the
centuries between the fall of Rome and the present had been the age
of Darkness.” According to Petrarch, what was needed to remedy this
situation was the careful study and imitation of the great
classical authors. For Petrarch and
Boccaccio the greatest master was
Cicero, whose prose became the model for both learned
(Latin) and vernacular (Italian) prose.
Once the language was mastered grammatically it could
be used to attain the second stage, eloquence or
rhetoric.
This art of persuasion [Cicero had held] was not art
for its own sake, but the acquisition of the capacity to persuade
others — all men and women — to lead the good life.
As Petrarch put it, 'it is better to will the good than
to know the truth.'
Rhetoric thus led to and embraced
philosophy.
Leonardo Bruni
(c.1369-1444), the outstanding scholar of the new generation,
insisted that it was Petrarch who “opened the way for us to show
how to acquire learning", but it was in Bruni’s time that the word
umanista first came into use, and its subjects of study
were listed as five: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, moral philosophy,
and history.”
The basic training of the humanist was to speak well and write
(typically, in the form of a letter). One of Petrarch’s followers,
Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406) was
made chancellor of Florence, "whose interests he defended with his
literary skill. The Visconti of Milan claimed that Salutati’s pen
had done more damage than 'thirty squadrons of Florentine
cavalry.'”
Contrary to a still widely current interpretation that originated
in Voigt's celebrated contemporary,
Jacob Burckhardt and which was adopted
wholeheartedly, especially by those moderns calling themselves
"humanists"For example the
Cambridge Dictionary of
Philosophy, adhering to the tenacious nineteenth-century
narrative (or myth) of the Renaissance as a complete break with the
past established in 1860 by
Jacob
Burckhardt, describes the liberating effects of the
re-discovery of classical writings this way:
Here, one felt no weight of the supernatural pressing
on the human mind, demanding homage and allegiance. Humanity—with
all its distinct capabilities, talents, worries, problems,
possibilities—was the center of interest. It has been said that
medieval thinkers philosophized on their knees, but, bolstered by
the new studies, they dared to stand up and to rise to full
stature.
, most specialists do not now characterize Renaissance humanism as
a philosophical movement, nor in any way as anti-Christian or even
anti-clerical. A modern historian has this to say:
Humanism was not an ideological programme but a body of
literary knowledge and linguistic skill based on the “revival of
good letters”, which was a revival of a late-antique philology and
grammar, This is how the word “humanist" was understood by
contemporaries, and if scholars would agree to accept the word in
this sense rather than in the sense in which it was used in the
nineteenth century we might be spared a good deal of useless
argument.
That humanism had profound social and even political
consequences of the life of Italian courts is not to be
doubted.
But the idea that as a movement it was in some way
inimical to the Church, or to the conservative social order in
general is one that has been put forward for a century and more
without any substantial proof being offered.
The nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt, in
his classic work, The Civilization of
the Renaissance in Italy, noted as a “curious fact” that
some men of the new culture were “men of the strictest piety, or
even ascetics.” If he had meditated more deeply on the meaning of
the careers of such humanists as Abrogio Traversari (1386-1439),
the General of the Camaldolese Order, perhaps he would not have
gone on to describe humanism in unqualified terms as “pagan”, and
thus helped precipitate a century of infertile debate about the
possible existence of something called “Christian humanism” which
ought to be opposed to “pagan humanism”.
--Peter Partner, Renaissance Rome, Portrait of a
Society 1500-1559 (University of California Press 1979)
pp.
14-15.
The
umanisti criticized what they considered the barbarous
Latin of the universities, but the revival of the humanities
largely did not conflict with the teaching of traditional
university subjects, which went on as before.
Nor did the humanists view themselves as in conflict with
Christianity. Some, like Salutati, were the Chancellors of Italian
cities, but the majority (including Petrarch) were ordained as
priests, and many worked as senior officials of the Papal court.
Humanist Renaissance popes
Nicholas
V,
Pius II,
Sixtus IV, and
Leo
X wrote books and amassed huge libraries.
In the high Renaissance, in fact, there was a hope that more direct
knowledge of the wisdom of antiquity, including the writings of the
Church fathers, the earliest known Greek texts of the Christian
Gospels, and in some cases even the Jewish
Kabbala, would initiate an harmonious new era of
universal agreement. With this end in view, Renaissance Church
authorities afforded humanists what in retrospect appears a
remarkable degree of freedom of thought. One humanist, the
Greek Orthodox Platonist
Gemistus Pletho (d.
1952), based in
Mystras
, Greece (but in contact with humanists in Florence,
Venice, and Rome) taught a Christianized version of pagan polytheism.
Back to the sources
The humanists' close study of Latin literary texts soon enabled
them to discern historical differences in the writing styles of
different periods. By analogy with what they saw as decline of
Latin, they applied the principle of
ad
fontes, or back to the sources, across broad areas of
learning, seeking out manuscripts of
Patristic literature as well as pagan authors.
In 1439,
while employed in Naples
at the court
of Alfonso V of Aragon (at the
time engaged in a dispute with the Papal States) the humanist
Lorenzo Valla used stylistic textual
analysis, now called philology, to prove
that the Donation of
Constantine, which purported to confer temporal powers on the
Pope of Rome, was an eighth-century forgery. For the next
seventy years, however, neither Valla nor any of his contemporaries
thought to apply the techniques of philology to other controversial
manuscripts in this way. Instead, after the fall of the
Byzantine Empire to the Turks in 1453,
which brought a flood of Greek Orthodox refugees to Italy, humanist
scholars increasingly turned to the study of
Neoplatonism and
Hermeticism, hoping to bridge the differences
between the Greek and Roman Churches, and even between Christianity
itself and the non-Christian world. The refugees brought with them
Greek manuscripts, not only of Plato and Aristotle, but also of the
Christian Gospels, previously unavailable in the Latin West. After
1517, when the new invention of printing made these texts widely
available, the Dutch humanist
Erasmus, who
had studied Greek at the Venetian printing house of
Aldus Manutius, began a philological analysis
of the Gospels in the spirit of Valla, comparing the Greek
originals with their Latin translations with a view to correcting
errors and discrepancies in the latter. Erasmus, along with the
French humanist
Jacques Lefèvre
d'Étaples, began issuing new translations, laying the
groundwork for the Protestant Reformation. Henceforth Renaissance
humanism, particularly in the German North, became concerned with
religion, while Italian and French humanism concentrated
increasingly on scholarship and philology addressed to a narrow
audience of specialists, studiously avoiding topics that might
offend despotic rulers or which might be seen as corrosive of
faith. After the Reformation, critical examination of the Bible did
not resume until the advent of the so-called
Higher criticsm of the nineteenth-century German
Tübingen school.
Consequences of the Renaissance humanist movement
The
ad fontes principle also had many applications. The
re-discovery ancient manuscripts brought a more profound and
accurate knowledge of ancient philosophical schools such as
Epicureanism, and
Neoplatonism, whose Pagan wisdom the humanists,
like the Church fathers of old, tended, at least initially, to
consider as deriving from divine revelation and thus adaptable to a
life of Christian virtue. The line from a drama of
Terence,
Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum
puto (or with
nil for
nihil), meaning "I am
a man [i.e. human, not 'male'], I think nothing human alien to me",
known since antiquity through the endorsement of Saint Augustine,
gained renewed currency as epitomizing the humanist attitude.The
statement, in a play modeled or borrowed from a (now lost) Greek
comedy by Menander, may have originated in a lighthearted vein --
as a comic rationale for an old man's meddling -- but it quickly
became a proverb and throughout the ages was quoted with a deeper
meaning, by Cicero and Saint Augustine, to name a few, and most
notably by
Seneca. Richard Bauman writes:
"
Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto., I am a man:
and I deem nothing pertaining to man is foreign to me.' The words
of the comic playwright P. Terentius Afer reverberated across the
Roman world of the mid-second century BC and beyond. Terence, an
African and a former slave, was well placed to preach the message
of universalism, of the essential unity of the human race, that had
come down in philosophical form from the Greeks, but needed the
pragmatic muscles of Rome in order to become a practical reality.
The influence of Terence’s felicitous phrase on Roman thinking
about human rights can hardly be overestimated. Two hundred years
later Seneca ended his seminal exposition of the unity of mankind
with a clarion-call:
There is one short rule that should regulate human
relationships. All that you see, both divine and human, is one. We
are parts of the same great body. Nature created us from the same
source and to the same end. She imbued us with mutual affection and
sociability, she taught us to be fair and just, to suffer injury
rather than to inflict it. She bid us extend or hands to all in
need of help. Let that well-known line be in our heart and on our
lips: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto". --Bauman,
Human Rights in Ancient Rome, Routledge Classical
Monographs, 1999, page 1).
Better acquaintance with Greek and Roman technical writings also
influenced the development of European science (see the
history of science in the
Renaissance). This was despite what
A. C. Crombie (viewing the Renaissance in the
nineteenth-century manner as a chapter in the heroic March of
Progress) calls "a backwards-looking admiration for antiquity", in
which Platonism stood in opposition to the
Aristotelian concentration on the observable
properties of the physical world. Renaissance humanists, however,
who considered themselves as restoring the glory and nobility of
antiquity, had no interest in scientific innovation. By the
mid-to-late sixteenth century, however, even the universities,
though still dominated by Scholasticism, began to demand that
Aristotle be read in accurate texts edited according to the
principles of Renaissance philology, thus setting the stage for
Galileo's quarrels with the outmoded habits of Scholasticism.
Just as artist and inventor
Leonardo
da Vinci -- partaking of the
zeitgeist though not himself a
humanist—advocated study of human anatomy, nature, and weather to
enrich Renaissance works of art, so Spanish-born humanist
Juan Luis Vives (c. 1493-1540) advocated
observation, craft, and practical techniques to improve the formal
teaching of Aristotelian philosophy at the universities, helping to
free them from the grip of Medieval Scholasticism. Thus, the stage
was set for the adoption of an approach to
natural philosophy, based on
empirical observations and experimentation of the
physical universe, making possible the advent of the age of
scientific inquiry that followed the Renaissance.
It was in education that the humanists' program had the most
lasting results, their curriculum and methods:
were followed everywhere, serving as models for the
Protestant Reformers as well as the Jesuits.
The humanistic school, animated by the idea that the
study of classical languages and literature provided valuable
information and intellectual discipline as well as moral standards
and a civilized taste for future rulers, leaders, and professionals
of its society, flourished without interruption, through many
significant changes, until our own century, surviving many
religious, political and social revolutions.
It has but recently been replaced, though not yet
completely, by other more practical and less demanding forms of
education.
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
The phrase the "religion of humanity" is sometimes attributed to
American
Founding Father,
Thomas Paine, though as yet unattested in his
surviving writings. According to Tony Davies:
Paine called himself a theophilanthropist, a
word combining the Greek for "God", "love," and "man", and
indicating that while he believed in the existence of a creating
intelligence in the universe, he entirely rejected the claims made
by and for all existing religious doctrines, especially their
miraculous, transcendental and salvationist
pretensions.
The Parisian "Society of Theophilanthropy" which he
sponsored, is described by his biographer as "a forerunner of the
ethical and humanist societies that proliferated later"
...
[Paine's book] the trenchantly witty Age of
Reason (1793) ... pours scorn on the supernatural pretensions
of scripture, combining Voltairean mockery with Paine's own style
of taproom ridicule to expose the absurdity of a theology built on
a collection of incoherent Levantine folktales.
Davies identifies Paine's
The Age
of Reason as "the link between the two major narratives of
what
Jean-François
Lyotard calls the narrative of legitimation": the rationalism
of the eighteenth-Century
Philosophes and the radical,
historically-based German nineteenth-century Biblical criticism of
the
Hegelians David Friedrich Strauss and
Ludwig Feuerbach. "The first is political,
largely French in inspiration, and projects 'humanity as the hero
of liberty'. The second is philosophical, German, seeks the
totality and autonomy of knowledge, and stresses
understanding rather than freedom as the key to human
fulfillment and emancipation. The two themes converge and compete
in complex ways in the nineteenth century and beyond and between
them set the boundaries of its various humanisms.
Homo homini
deus est ("Man is a god to man" or "god is nothing [other
than] man to himself"), Feuerbach had written..
Victorian novelist Mary Ann Evans, known to the world as
George Eliot, translated Strauss's
Das
Leben Jesu (
The Life of Jesus, 1846) and Ludwig
Ludwig Feuerbach's
Das Wesen Christianismus (
The
Essence of Christianity). She wrote to a friend:
the fellowship between man and man which has been the
principle of development, social and moral, is not dependent on
conceptions of what is not man .
.
. the idea of God, so far as it has been a high
spiritual influence, is the ideal of goodness entirely human (i.e.,
an exaltation of the human).
Eliot and her circle, who included her companion
George Henry Lewes (the biographer of
Goethe) and the abolitionist and social
theorist
Harriet Martineau, were
much influenced by the
Positivism of
Auguste Comte, whom Martineau had
translated. Comte had proposed an atheistic
culte founded
on human principles—a secular
Religion of Humanity (which worshiped
the dead, since most humans who have ever lived are dead), complete
with holidays and liturgy, modeled on the rituals of a what was
seen as a discredited and dilapidated Catholicism. Although Comte's
English followers, like Eliot and Martineau, for the most part
rejected the full gloomy panoply of his system, they liked the idea
of a religion of humanity. Compte's austere vision of the universe,
his injunction to "
vivre pour altrui" ("live for others",
from which comes the word "
altruism"), and
his idealization of women inform the works of Victorian novelists
and poets from George Eliot and
Matthew
Arnold to
Thomas Hardy.
The British Humanistic Religious Association was formed as one of
the earliest forerunners of contemporary chartered Humanist
organizations in 1853 in London. This early group was
democratically organized, with male and female members
participating in the election of the leadership and promoted
knowledge of the sciences, philosophy, and the arts.
In February 1877, the word was used pejoratively, apparently for
the first time in America, to describe
Felix Adler.
Adler, however, did not embrace the term, and instead coined the
name "
Ethical Culture" for his new
movement a movement which still exists in the now
Humanist-affiliated New York Society for Ethical Culture. In 2008,
Ethical Culture Leaders wrote "Today, the historic identification,
Ethical Culture, and the modern description, Ethical Humanism, are
used interchangeably."
Active in the early 1920s,
F.C.S.
Schiller labeled his work "humanism"
but for Schiller the term referred to the
pragmatist philosophy he shared with
William James. In 1929
Charles Francis Potter founded the
First Humanist Society of New York whose advisory board included
Julian Huxley,
John Dewey,
Albert
Einstein and
Thomas Mann. Potter was
a minister from the
Unitarian tradition
and in 1930 he and his wife, Clara Cook Potter, published
Humanism: A New Religion. Throughout the 1930s Potter was
an advocate of such liberal causes as, women’s rights, access to
birth control, "civil divorce laws", and an end to capital
punishment.
Raymond B. Bragg, the associate editor of
The New
Humanist, sought to consolidate the input of
L. M. Birkhead,
Charles Francis Potter, and several
members of the Western Unitarian Conference. Bragg asked
Roy Wood Sellars to draft a document based
on this information which resulted in the publication of the
Humanist Manifesto in
1933. Potter's book and the Manifesto became the cornerstones of
modern humanism, the latter declaring a new religion by saying,
"any religion that can hope to be a synthesizing and dynamic force
for today must be shaped for the needs of this age. To establish
such a religion is a major necessity of the present." It then
presented fifteen theses of humanism as foundational principles for
this new religion.
In 1941 the
American
Humanist Association was organized. Noted members of The AHA
included
Isaac Asimov, who was the
president from 1985 until his death in 1992, and writer
Kurt Vonnegut, who followed as honorary
president until his death in 2007.
Gore
Vidal became honorary president in 2009.
Robert Buckman was the head of the
association in Canada, and is now an honorary president.
After
World War II, three prominent Humanists became the first directors
of major divisions of the United
Nations: Julian Huxley of UNESCO
, Brock Chisholm of the World Health Organization, and
John Boyd-Orr of the Food and Agricultural
Organization.
In 2004
American Humanist
Association, along with other groups representing agnostics,
atheists, and other freethinkers, joined to create the
Secular Coalition for America
which advocates in Washington, D.C. for separation of church and
state and nationally for the greater acceptance of nontheistic
Americans. The Executive Director of Secular Coalition for America
is
Sean Faircloth a long-time state
legislator from Maine.
Humanism (life stance)
Humanism (capital 'H', no adjective such as "secular") is a
comprehensive
life stance that upholds
human
reason,
ethics,
and
justice, and rejects
supernaturalism,
pseudoscience, and
superstition.
The
International Humanist
and Ethical Union (IHEU) is the world union of more than one
hundred Humanist, rationalist, secular, ethical culture, and
freethought organizations in more than 40 countries. The Happy
Human is the official symbol of the IHEU as well as being regarded
as a universally recognised symbol for those that call themselves
Humanists (as opposed to "humanists"). In 2002 the IHEU General
Assembly unanimously adopted the
Amsterdam Declaration 2002 which
represents the official defining statement of World Humanism.
All member organisations of the IHEU are required by IHEU bylaw 5.1
to accept the IHEU Minimum Statement on Humanism:
Humanism is a democratic and
ethical life stance, which affirms that
human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and
shape to their own lives. It stands for the building of a more
humane society through an ethic based on
human and other natural values in the spirit of reason and free
inquiry through human capabilities. It is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality.
Other forms of humanism
Educational humanism
Humanism, as a current in education, began
to dominate U.S. school systems in the 17th century. It held that
the studies that develop human intellect are those that make humans
"most truly human". The practical basis for this was faculty psychology, or the belief in
distinct intellectual faculties, such as the analytical, the
mathematical, the linguistic, etc. Strengthening one faculty was
believed to benefit other faculties as well (transfer of training).
A key player in the late 19th-century educational humanism was U.S.
Commissioner of Education William
Torrey Harris, whose "Five Windows of the Soul" (mathematics, geography,
history, grammar, and
literature/art) were
believed especially appropriate for "development of the faculties".
Educational humanists believe that "the best studies, for the best
kids" are "the best studies" for all kids. While humanism as an
educational current was widely supplanted in the United States by
the innovations of the early 20th century, it still holds out in
some preparatory
school and some high school
disciplines (especially in literature).
Inclusive Humanism
Humanism increasingly designates an inclusive sensibility for our species, planet and lives.
While retaining the definition of the IHEU with
regard to the life stance of the
individual, inclusive Humanism enlarges its constituency
within homo sapiens to consider Man's broadening powers and
obligations.
This accepting viewpoint nonetheless recalls Renaissance Humanism in that it
presumes an advocacy role for Humanists towards species
governance and this proactive stance is charged with a
commensurate responsibility surpassing that of individual Humanism.
It identifies pollution, militarism, nationalism, sexism, poverty
and corruption as being persistent and addressable human
character issues incompatible with the interests of our
species. It asserts that human governance must be unified and
is inclusionary in that it does not exclude any person
by reason of their collateral beliefs or personal religion
alone. As such it can be said to be a container for undeclared
Humanism, instilling a species credo to complement the personal
tenets of individuals.
It contrasts with contemporary American and British Humanism, which
tend to be centered on religion to the extent that "Humanism" in
these societies is too often being equated with simple atheism,
especially by novitiates. This over-identification with a singular
non-belief is now seen to be an unwarranted truncation of one of
Humanity's most valuable and promising intellectual traditions,
possibly damping out Humanism's wider and deserving adoption.
Humanism may be the only philosophy likely to be adopted by our
species as a whole - it is thus incumbent on inclusive Humanists to
not place unwarranted or self-interested conditions on its
prospective adherents, nor associate it with religious
acrimony.
See also
Manifestos and statements setting out Humanist viewpoints
Related philosophies
Organizations
Other
Notes
- Typically, abridgments of this definition omit all senses
except #1, such as in the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary,
Collins Essential English Dictionary, and
- This book quotes the constitution of the Humanistic Religious
Association of London, founded in 1853, as saying, "In forming
ourselves into a progressive religious body, we have adopted the
name 'Humanistic Religious Association' to convey the idea that
Religion is a principle inherent in man and is a means of
developing his being towards greater perfection. We have
emancipated ourselves from the ancient compulsory dogmas, myths and
ceremonies borrowed of old from Asia and still pervading the ruling
churches of our age."
- . The world coordinating body, the International Humanist and
Ethical Union, London, recommends use of "Humanism," with no
qualifying adjective at all, and with the capital "H" befitting a
well-defined worldview clearly established after three quarters of
a century of scholarly study and exposition.
- Note: The topic of this article has a small initial character
as Wikipedia guidelines prescribe for the name of a philosophy. The
life stance named Humanism is capitalized as prescribed
for the name of a religion in its dedicated article, but left
lower-case elsewhere to encompass life-stance, religious, and
secular "humanism."
- Science and the Modern World (New York: Simon and
Schuster, [1925] 1997) p. 96.
- As J. A. Symonds remarked, “the word humanism has a German
sound and is in fact modern” (See The Renaissance in Italy
Vol. 2:71n, 1877). Vito Giustiniani writes that in the
German-speaking world “Humanist” while keeping its specific meaning
(as scholar of Classical literature) “gave birth to further
derivatives, such as humanistisch for those schools which
later were to be called humanistische gymnasien, with
Latin and Greek as the main subjects of teaching (1784). Finally,
Humanismus was introduced to denote ‘classical education
in general' (1808) and still later for the epoch and the
achievements of the Italian humanists of the fifteenth century
(1841). This is to say that ‘humanism’ for ‘classical learning‘
appeared first in Germany, where it was once and for all sanctioned
in this meaning by Georg Voigt (1859)", Vito Giustiniani, "Homo,
Humanus, and the Meanings of Humanism", Journal of the History
of Ideas 46 (vol. 2, April-June, 1985): 172.
- “L’amour général de l’humanité . . . vertu qui n’a point de
nom parmi nous et que nous oserions appler ‘humanisme’,
puisque’enfin il est temps de créer un mot pour une chose si belle
et nécessaire"; from the review Ephémérides du citoyen ou
Bibliothèque raisonée des sciences morales et politiques,
(Jan. 16, 1765): 247, quoted in V. Giustiniani, op. cit., p.
175n.
- Although Rousseau himself devoutly believed in a personal God,
his book, Emile: or, On Education, does
attempt to demonstrate that atheists can be virtuous. It was
publicly burned. During the Revolution Jacobins instituted a cult of the Supreme
Being along lines suggested by Rousseau. In the nineteenth century
French Positivist
philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857) founded a "religion
of humanity", whose calender and catechism echoed the former
Revolutionary cult. See Comtism
- "Ma conviction intime est que la religion de l’avenir sera
le pur humanisme, c’est-à-dire le culte de tout ce qui est
de l’homme, la vie entière santifiée et éléve a une valeur
moral.”, quoted in Giustiniani, op. cit.
- An account of the evolution of the meaning of the word
humanism from the point of view of a modern philosophical
humanist can be found in Nicolas Walter's Humanism What's in the
Word.Walter, Nicolas, 1997 Humanism What's in
the Word, Rationalist Press Association,
London, ISBN 0-301-97001-7.
- The influence of Jacob Burckhardt's classic masterpiece of
cultural history, The Civilization of
the Renaissance in Italy (1860) on subsequent Renaissance
historiography is traced in Wallace K. Ferguson's The
Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Historical
Interpretation (1948).
- "The term umanista was associated with the revival of
the studia humanitatis "which included
grammatica, rhetorica, poetics, historia
, and philosophia moralis, as these terms were understood.
Unlike the liberal arts of the eighteenth century, they did not
include the visual arts, music, dancing or gardening. The
humanities also failed to include the disciplines that were the
chief subjects of instruction at the universities during the Later
Middle Ages and throughout the Renaissance, such as theology,
jurisprudence, and medicine, and the philosophical disciplines
other than ethics, such as logic, natural philosophy, and
metaphysics. In other words, humanism does not represent, as often
believed, the sum total of Renaissance thought and learning, but
only a well-defined sector of it. Humanism has its proper domain or
home territory in the humanities, whereas all other areas of
learning, including philosophy (apart from ethics), followed their
own course, largely determined by their medieval tradition and by
their steady transformation through new observations, problems, or
theories. These disciplines were affected by humanism mainly from
the outside and in an indirect way, though often quite
strongly."Paul Oskar Kristeller,
Humanism, pp. 113-114, in Charles B. Schmitt,
Quentin
Skinner (editors), The Cambridge History of Renaissance
Philosophy (1990).
- See their respective entries in Sir John Hale's Concise
Encyclopaedia of the Italian Renaissance (Oxford University
Press, 1981).
- To later generations, the Dutch humanist, Desiderius
Erasmus, epitomized this reconciling tendency). According to
the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, "Enlightenment thinkers remembered
Erasmus (not quite accurately) as a precursor of modern
intellectual freedom and a foe of both Protestant and Catholic
dogmatism."[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/erasmus/. Erasmus
himself was not much interested in the Kabbala, but several other
humanists were, notably Pico della Mirandola. See Christian
Kabbala.)
- "Only thirteen of Pico della Mirandola's nine hundred theses
were thought theologically objectionable by the papal commission
that examined them.... [This] suggests that, in spite of his
publicly expressed contempt in his Apologia for their
intellectual inadequacies, the Curial authorities hardly saw these
theses as the work of a dangerous theological modernist like Luther
or Calvin. Unorthodox though they were, most of the issues raised
in them had been the subject of theological dispute for centuries
and the commission . . . condemned him not for innovations but for
'reviving several of the errors of gentile philosophers which are
already disproved and obsolete.'” Davies (1997), p 103.
- Richard H. Popkin (editor), The
Columbia History of Western Philosophy (1998), p. 293 and p.
301.
- More than a hundred years earlier, Dante in the Divine Comedy (c.
1308-1321) had pinpointed the Donation of Constantine (which he
accepted as genuine) as a great mistake and the cause of all the
political and religious problems of Italy, including the corruption
of the Church. Although Dante had thunderously attacked the idea
that the Church could have temporal as well as spiritual powers, it
remained to Valla to conclusively prove that the legal
justification for such powers was spurious.
- Ironically, it was a humanist scholar, Isaac Casaubon, in the
seventeenth century, who would use philology to show that the
Corpus
Hermeticum was not of great antiquity, as had been asserted in
the fourth century by Saint Augustine and Lactantius, but dated from the
Christian era. See Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The
Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800
(Harvard University Press, 1991).
- "Renaissance humanists rejoiced in the mutual compatibility of
much ancient philosophy and Christian truths", M. A. Screech,
Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (1997), p. 13.
- A. C.
Crombie, Historians and the Scientific Revolution, p.
456 in Science, Art and Nature in Medieval and Modern
Thought (1996).
- P.O. Kristeller (op cit.), p. 114.
- Tony Davies, Humanism (Routledge, 1997) p. 26-27.
- In La Condition postmoderne
- Davies (1997), p. 27.
- ibid, p 28
- quoted in Davies (1997), p. 27.
- "Comte's secular religion is no vague effusion of humanistic
piety, but a complete system of belief and ritual, with liturgy and
sacraments, priesthood and pontiff, all organized around the public
veneration of Humanity, the Nouveau Grand-Être Suprême
(New Supreme Great Being), later to be supplemented in a positivist
trinity by the Grand Fétish (the Earth) and the Grand
Milieu (Destiny)" According to Davies (p. 28-29), Comte's
austere and "slightly dispiriting" philosophy of humanity viewed as
alone in an indifferent universe (which can only be explained by
"positive" science) and with no where to turn but to each other,
was even more influential in Victorian England than the theories of
Charles Darwin or Karl Marx.
- ibid p. 29
- New York Society
for Ethical Culture
- American Humanist Association
- Jones, Dwight (2009) Essays in the Philosophy of
Humanism,Volume 17 (1) www.essaysinhumanism.org
References
- Bauman, Richard. Human Rights in Ancient Rome.
Routledge Classical Monographs, 1999 ISBN 0415173205
- Berry, Philippa and Andrew Wernick. The Shadow of Spirit:
Post-Modernism and Religion. Routledge, (1992) 2006. ISBN
0415066387
- Burckhardt, Jacob. Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy'.
1860.
- Davies, Tony. Humanism The New Critical
Idiom. Drakakis, John, series editor. University of Stirling,
UK. Routledge, 1997 ISBN 0415110521
- Ferguson, Wallace K. The Renaissance in Historical
Thought. Five Centuries of Interpretation. New York:
Nachdruck: AMS, 1981 (Boston: Mifflin, 1948)
- Gay, Peter. The Party of Humanity:
Essays in the French enlightenment. New York: W. W. Norton
(1971).
- Gay, Peter. Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom. New
York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1996 ISBN 0393313662
- Giustiniani,Vito. "Homo, Humanus, and the Meanings of
Humanism", Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (vol. 2,
April June, 1985): 167 95. [288407] [288408]
- Grafton, Anthony. Defenders
of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science,
1450-1800. Harvard University Press, 1991
- Grendler, Paul F. '"Georg Voigt: Historian of Humanism", in:
Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance: Essays in Honor of
Ronald G. Witt. Christopher S. Celenza und Kenneth
Gouvens, Editors. Leiden 2006, pp. 295-326 ISBN 90-04-14907-4
- Hale, John. A Concise
Encyclopaedia of the Italian Renaissance. Oxford University
Press, 1981 ISBN 0500233330.
- Johnson, Paul. The
Renaissance. Modern Library Chronicles. New York:
Modern Library, 2002 ISBN 0812966190
- Kristeller, Paul Oskar.
The Renaissance Philosophy of Man. The University of
Chicago Press, 1950.
- Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Renaissance Thought and its
Sources. Columbia University Press, 1979 ISBN 0231045131
- Partner, Peter. Renaissance Rome, Portrait of a Society
1500-1559 University of California Press 1979
- Proctor, Robert. Defining the Humanities. Indiana
University Press, 1998 ISBN 0253212197
- Vernant, Jean-Pierre.
Origins of Greek Thought. Cornell University Press, (1962)
1984 ISBN 0801492939
- Schmitt, Charles B. and Quentin
Skinner, Editors. The Cambridge History of Renaissance
Philosophy. Cambridge, 1990.
- Wernick, Andrew. Auguste Comte and the Religion of
Humanity: The Post-theistic Program of French Social Theory.
Cambridge University Press, 2001 ISBN 0521662729
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