Humanism

Tony Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134104338
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Definitions of humanism have evolved throughout the centuries as the term has been adopted for a variety of purposes – literary, cultural and political – and reactions against humanism have contributed to movements such as postmodernism and anti-humanism. Tony Davies offers a clear introduction to the many uses of this influential yet complex concept and this second edition extends his discussion to include:

• a comprehensive history of the development of the term and its influences
• theories of post-humanism, cybernetics and artificial intelligence
• implications of concepts of humanism and post-humanism on political and religious activism
• discussion of the key figures in humanist debate from Erasmus and Milton to Chomsky, Heidegger and Foucault
• a new glossary and further reading section.

With clear explanations and poignant discussions, this volume is essential reading for anyone approaching the study of humanism, post-humanism or critical theory.

1

THE INVENTION OF HUMANITY

To be radical is to grasp things by the root. But for man the root is man himself.

(Karl Marx)

The Parthenon, the ancient temple of the warrior-goddess Athena that dominates the limestone crag of the Acropolis in Athens, is certainly one of the most photographed buildings in the world. But among the innumerable snapshots of that famous ruin there is one in particular that haunts the memory. In the background stands the eastern facade of the great temple, its eight Doric columns and broken pediment catching the early sun, with the Athenian suburbs and the Aegalean hills faintly visible in the haze to the west. In the foreground, on a circular floor that once supported a temple consecrated to the Roman emperor Augustus, a dozen men in uniform are standing around a makeshift flagpole, up which a large flag, swelling gently in the morning breeze, is being raised. Over the centuries many soldiers – Persians, Spartans, Macedonians, Romans, Goths, Byzantines, Franks, Catalans, Venetians, Ottomans, Bavarians – have stood on that spot. But this is different. The date is 27 April 1941; the soldiers wear the uniform of the sixth armoured division of the German Wehrmacht; and the flag that billows above the occupied city bears the insignia of Adolf Hitler’s would-be thousand-year Third Reich, the Hakenkreuz or swastika (Bullock 1985: 174).

For most people to whom it means anything at all, the photograph probably records one of the elemental confrontations of the modern period: on the one hand, the Parthenon, supreme symbol of Athens and the wider Hellenic world, the ‘cradle of civilisation’, the birthplace of democracy (the very word is Athenian) and rationality, the unsurpassable paradigm of human beauty and wisdom; on the other, the despotic savagery and irrationality of the Third Reich, a new barbarism of blood and iron. The twentieth century, for all its later horrors, produced none to equal those that came out of Germany between 1933 and 1945; and the cool Pentelic marble whose stupendous symmetries have witnessed and survived so many conquering empires here submits to the latest and most terrible of them all. It is as if Matthew Arnold’s worst nightmare, the final overthrow of culture, with its Hellenic ‘sweetness and light’, by the ‘ignorant armies’ of anarchy and darkness, has taken concrete form on that spring morning in 1941.

But although photographs never lie, that may only be because they never say anything unequivocal at all. Interpretation is everything; and a little digging can always yield another reading. The part-time secretary of the small Nazi Party organisation in Athens was the forty-one-year-old Walter Wrede, who worked as a classical archaeologist at the German Archaeological School in the city. For Wrede, 27 April was a big day, rich compensation for the months of anti-German abuse that had driven him to take up almost permanent refuge in the School. Wrede it was who had the honour of meeting the advance party of the occupying sixth division when they drove into the city that morning and conducting them in person to the Acropolis. Later he posed for photographs with Field-Marshal Brauchitsch, General von Stumme and other staff officers, ardent Nazis every one of them, and, like most middle-class Germans, enthusiastic philhellenes. All Germans, wrote General Lanz, ‘admire the great past and lofty culture of Hellas’ (Mazower 1993: 158). Hitler himself, in a letter to his ally Benito Mussolini, recorded with pride this epochal encounter between a resurgent Germany and the ‘symbol of modern culture’ (Mazower 1993: 8). Had not the great Richard Wagner, Teutonic nationalist and anti-Semite, been acclaimed by his disciple Friedrich Nietzsche as the contemporary incarnation of the Hellenic spirit? Was not the very notion of the ‘Aryan’ type, so central to the National Socialist doctrine of racial purity, borrowed from the work of the German philologists and Hellenists of the previous century (Bernal 1987: 330–36)? Had not the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger only the other day hailed Greek civilisation as ‘the beginning of our spiritual-historical being’, a destiny which ‘awaits us, as a distant command bidding us catch up with its greatness’ (Guignan 1993: 32)? And as for the Führer himself, had he not declared that, amidst all the trash and filth produced by degenerate races through the ages, the only authentic artistic heritage was the Greco-German? From one point of view, at least, that sunny morning in 1941 witnessed not a tragic confrontation between Hellenic culture and barbaric anarchy, but the historic affirmation of an ancient continuity, in which the invading Germans appear not as the destroyers of Greek civilisation but as its liberators, the heirs and custodians of its sacred flame.

So many stories, wrote Bertolt Brecht, so many questions. But what has all this to do with humanism? Well firstly, as we have already seen, the word itself is of German coinage; and secondly, its credentials are Greek. Humanismus was a term devised, probably by the educationalist Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, in the early nineteenth century to describe a high-school and university curriculum based on what had been known since the Middle Ages as the ‘humanities’: the study of ancient Greek and Latin, and of the literature, history and culture of the peoples who spoke them. The word was soon taken up by cultural historians like Georg Voigt and Jacob Burckhardt to describe the humanistic ‘new learning’, a ‘Renaissance’ or rebirth of Greco-Roman civilisation and its associated values promoted by the umanisti or professional teachers and scholars in fifteenth-century Italy. And since the notion of the Renaissance, and with it a whole way of thinking about the relations between past and present, antiquity and modernity, continues in its turn to exert an enduring influence, these early nineteenth-century German debates about education and culture, history and politics, will repay a closer look.

ROMANTIC HUMANISM

The neo-humanistic (neuhumanistisch) syllabus pioneered by educational reformers like Niethammer, along with better-known contemporaries like the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt, creator of the modern Gymnasium (high school) system and founder of the University of Berlin, was an attempt to civilise the crudely practical and chauvinistic (the poet Heinrich Heine called it philister, ‘philistine’) ethos of the North German ruling and middle classes. Like the Florentine umanisti from whom they borrowed their watchword, the German reformers of the early nineteenth century grounded their curriculum in ‘classics’: Latin and, especially, Greek language, literature and culture, refracted through the romantic Hellenism of the art historian Winckelmann and the poets Goethe and Hölderlin. ‘Our study of Greek history’, wrote Humboldt,

is a matter quite different from our other studies ... Knowledge of the Greeks is not merely pleasant, useful or necessary to us – no, in the Greeks alone we find the ideal of what we should like to be and produce.

(Bernal 1987: 287)

And in the same spirit, the curriculum of Hegel’s Egidium Gymnasium in Nuremberg gave due weight to mathematics, history and physical education; but half of its twenty-seven hours of weekly instruction were devoted to the study of Greek and Latin.

The Hellenism of these neo-humanist educators was as far from the reactionary pedantry of Oxford ‘classics’ as it was from the merely ornamental neoclassicism of so much post-Renaissance English poetry, of the kind that Samuel Johnson dismissed contemptuously as a ‘train of mythological imagery such as a college easily supplies’ (Johnson 1906). The Hellenic ideal belonged, for Hegel and Humboldt as for Goethe and Schiller, not to the remote past and the post-mortem formalities of an ancient language, but to the future. For them, the modern Germany they were engaged in building, cultured, orderly and rational, would be a modern-day Hellas, the fruition of what the ancient Greeks had dreamed. ‘The name of Greece’, Hegel wrote, ‘strikes home to the hearts of men of education in Europe, and more particularly is this so with us Germans’ (Bernal 1987: 295). And his most famous and most insubordinate disciple inherited his Hellenism, if not his enthusiasm for the authoritarian ethos of the Prussian state. ‘Man’s self-esteem,’ wrote the young Karl Marx in 1843,

his sense of freedom, must be awakened in the breast of [the German] people. This sense vanished from the world with the Greeks, and with Christianity it took up residence in the blue mists of heaven, but only with its aid can society ever again become a community of men that can fulfil their highest needs, a democratic state.

(Marx 1975: 201)

Marx himself was soon to turn sharply against the Hegelian idealism of supposing that people’s lives can be transformed simply by reawakening the passion for freedom in their heads and hearts. Already by 1844 he was formulating a radical humanism (‘to be radical is to grasp things by the root. But for man the root is man himself.’) based not on the speculative abstraction of Hegelian logic but on the dynamic identity of man and nature, revealed in ‘the inexhaustible, vital, sensuous, concrete activity’ of human labour:

Communism is the positive supersession of private property as human self estrangement, and hence the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man; it is the complete restoration of man to himself as a social, i.e. human, being ... This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature, and between man and man, the true resolution of the conflict between existence and being, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be the solution.

(Marx 1975: 348)

Later still, after the revolutionary hopes of 1848–9 have been dashed, this vein of utopian enthusiasm will be submitted in its turn to the astringent discipline of historical actuality. But the fascination with ancient Greece, the sense that it represents a still-unfulfilled ideal, persists. In an early draft of the work that will become Das Kapital, Marx has been arguing that Greek art can only be understood in the context of the social relations and conditions that produced it, a ‘Marxist’ commonplace that is hardly likely to arouse much argument even today. ‘But the difficulty’, he continues,

lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model.

(Marx 1973a: 111)

The ancient Greeks, he suggests, represent ‘the historic childhood of humanity’; and although ‘a man cannot become a child again’, he can still ‘find joy in the child’s naïveté’, and even ‘strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage’.

The veteran theorist of class struggle understood perfectly well, of course, that Athenian democracy was built with bricks of slavery, and cemented with a xenophobic contempt for non-Greek-speaking ‘barbarians’ as virulent as the jingoism of any Tory imperialist; but for the moment, caught in the potent enchantment of the old temple on its rock, he had forgotten. The passage, written in London in 1857, the year of the Indian ‘Mutiny’ and the British seizure of Canton, suggests how deeply even the most radical thought of the period was saturated by the Hellenocentric ideals of Goethean romanticism and Humboldtian Humanismus.

1857, the year in which Marx wrote the unpublished Grundrisse, is also, as it happens, the year of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. The humanist ethos had already found its way into British intellectual culture through the advocacy of Germanophiles like Samuel Coleridge, his disciple Connop Thirlwall, whose massive History of Greece was an early monument to the influence in England of German classical scholarship, and Thomas Arnold. Arnold above all, through his innovative regime as headmaster of Rugby School, established the now-familiar public school curriculum, with its twin pillars of classics and competitive games (the second no less ‘Hellenic’ in inspiration than the first), that continues to dominate the education of the English ruling class to the present day. And Dr Arnold’s most famous and influential pupil, we may guess, was not his son Matthew, enthusiastic Goethean and energetic propagandist for a culture of Hellenic ‘sweetness and light’ to redeem the philistinism of the propertied classes and the looming anarchy of capitalist class war, but his fictional contemporary Tom Brown, whose Rugby schooldays, as described in Thomas Hughes’ idyllically nostalgic narrative, did more than anything else in the period to establish Arnold’s peculiarly English hybrid of German Bildung and British heartiness in the popular imagination. In one particularly poignant scene, Tom and his friend Arthur, waiting their turn to bat against a visiting eleven, are discussing with a young master the importance of grasping the finer points of Greek syntax. Out on the pitch a skilful stroke is played, to applause.

‘How well they are bowling, though,’ said Arthur, ‘they don’t mean to be beat, I can see.’

‘There now,’ struck in the master, ‘you see that’s just what I have been preaching this half-hour. The delicate play is the true thing. I don’t understand cricket, so I don’t enjoy those fine draws which you tell me are the best play, though when you or Raggles hit a hard ball away for six I am as delighted as anyone. Don’t you see the analogy?’

‘Yes, sir,’ answered Tom, looking up, roguishly, ‘I see; only the question remains whether I should have got most good by understanding Greek particles or cricket thoroughly. I’m such a thick, I never should have had time for both.’

‘I see you are an incorrigible,’ said the master with a chuckle, ‘but I refute you by an example. Arthur there has taken in Greek and cricket too.’

(Hughes 1989: 353)

‘We are all Greeks’: Shelley’s words might serve as a motto for generations of young middle-class Englishmen – English men, since the Hellenic ideal, like the public schools themselves, is overwhelmingly male territory. From the champions of Greek independence in the 1820s like Shelley’s friend Byron, to the officers who sent their troops into combat in the 1915 Dardanelles campaign with lines from Homer’s Iliad ringing in their ears, they modelled their ideas of conduct on an improbable but potent compound of the Trojan War and the Varsity match, epic poetry and the laws of cricket and rugby (the latter a version of football reputedly invented at Arnold’s school). Few if any would have called themselves ‘humanists’, a word that in England carried uncomfortable connotations of Unitarianism or even downright atheism, and was certainly incompatible with the profession of Christian and gentleman (Hughes himself was a Christian Socialist). But all were the legitimate offspring of Humanismus nonetheless, translated into an English cultural register, to be sure, but still bearing the unmistakable features of its Prussian and romantic lineage.

RENAISSANCE MAN: A NINETEENTH-CENTURY CREATION

Jacob Burckhardt, a German-speaking Swiss and himself a devoted child of the same tradition, defined humanism as ‘the discovery of the world and of man’; but this was a humanism whose roots lay not in the ancient Greece of Winckelmann and Humboldt but in the city-states of fifteenth-century Italy. His central historical question, the same question posed by other social thinkers like Karl Marx and Max Weber, was about the conditions that made possible, or inevitable, the bourgeois revolution of modernity. Why, they asked, did the characteristic features of modern liberal capitalism, dynamic, innovative and expansive, develop in Europe and North America rather than in the ancient societies, no less elaborate in culture or technology, of Asia and the Orient? Marx found his explanation in the expansion of merchant capital and the emergence of a class of ambitious burghers in late-medieval towns. Weber located his in the frugal domestic economy and Calvinist independence of the Protestant middle classes in post-reformation Europe (Weber 1930). For Burckhardt the explanation lay in a particular interplay between the political and military necessities of independent Italian cities and the secular individualism, nurtured by a humanist interest in antiquity but essentially quite new, of their middle-class citizenry and its rulers. This is the theme of his best-known and most influential work, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, published in 1860.

Germany in Burckhardt’s time was evolving painfully from an agglomeration of small principalities towards a unified national state; and the title he gave to the first part of the work, ‘The State as a Work of Art’, spoke to contemporary preoccupations with statehood and national unity. Emergent Germany found her reflection and inspiration here in the writings of Renaissance humanist historians, political theorists and jurists like Guiccardini, Machiavelli, Grotius and Bodin, and in the embattled but fiercely independent states like Florence and Geneva in and about which they wrote. Behind all these, still, stood the unsurpassable paradigm of Periclean Athens, supreme instance of ‘the state determined by culture’, the city of which Burckhardt remarked wistfully that, alone in world history, she ‘has no te...