On Humanism

Richard Norman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138834828
• eBook ISBN: 9781136706585
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Humanism in Philosophy

What is humanism and why does it matter? Is there any doctrine every humanist must hold? If it rejects religion, what does it offer in its place? Have the twentieth century's crimes against humanity spelled the end for humanism?

On Humanism is a timely and powerfully argued philosophical defence of humanism. It is also an impassioned plea that we turn to ourselves, not religion, if we want to answer Socrates' age-old question: what is the best kind of life to lead? Although humanism has much in common with science, Richard Norman shows that it is far from a denial of the more mysterious, fragile side of being human. He deals with big questions such as Darwinism and 'creation science', matter and consciousness, euthanasia and abortion, and then argues that it is ultimately through the human capacity for art, literature and the imagination that humanism is a powerful alternative to religious belief.

This revised second edition includes a new chapter on the debates between 'the New Atheists' such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and their religious critics, asking why the two sides in the debate so often seem to be talking past one another, and suggesting how the conversation could be made more fruitful.

Richard Norman is a committed humanist and the author of many books including The Moral Philosophers and Ethics, Killing and War. He was formerly Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kent, Canterbury

Introduction

One

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!¹

Is this a statement of something we could call ‘humanism’? It comes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and it is often quoted as a celebration of the qualities that make us human, perhaps also with the suggestion that recognising these qualities can inspire us to use them to the full. If we look further, however, we find that things are not so simple. The context of Hamlet’s words is not a declaration of faith in human life, but an expression of despair. Our quoted passage is preceded by these words:

I have of late, – but wherefore I know not, – lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

What looked like an optimistic affirmation of human potentialities was after all, then, part of a classic expression of how human life can come to seem meaningless. Having enumerated the qualities which make a man ‘the paragon of animals’, Hamlet continues:

And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me; no, nor woman neither, though, by your smiling, you seem to say so.

Already, then, we are presented with some challenging questions for humanism. Whatever we may say, in the abstract, about the powers of reason and action which human beings possess, is this enough to sustain us in the practical business of making sense of our lives? There is also a serious question lurking in the throwaway phrase ‘no, nor woman neither’. In the play we can recognise an allusion to Hamlet’s already troubled relationship with Ophelia. There is also, however, a deeper question about the ambiguity of ‘man’. It can be used neutrally to refer to human beings in general. It can also be used more narrowly to mark the contrast between the genders ‘man’ and ‘woman’. Hamlet’s half-jesting remark can therefore also be seen as posing a genuine problem: is humanism a philosophy of exclusion? In setting up an ideal of ‘man’, is it giving a privileged status to one part of the human species, and relegating to an inferior status those human beings – women, or perhaps the members of non-European cultures – who are excluded by the favoured model?

Finally we should look again at the words ‘What a piece of work is a man’. If a human being is ‘a piece of work’, this suggests a workman who fashioned us – presumably a divine creator. The words ‘angel’ and ‘god’ likewise imply that this celebration of the human is located within a system of religious belief. How necessary is this? Can we maintain this elevated view of the human species only by thinking of man as created by God ‘in his own image’? Or might we, on the contrary, suggest that humanism comes into its own when belief in God is rejected, when man usurps the place of God and is no longer seen as subservient to a higher, supernatural authority?

We can pursue this question by turning to another influential piece of writing, by someone who has certainly been called a ‘humanist’. This is the Italian Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, writing a century before Shakespeare. In his oration On the Dignity of Man of 1486, Pico claims to identify ‘the reason why man is rightly said and thought to be a great marvel and the animal really worthy of wonder’. Man, he says, was the last of living things to be created by God, and was then addressed by his creator in these words:

‘We have given to thee, Adam, no fixed seat, no form of thy very own, no gift peculiarly thine, that thou mayest feel as thine own, have as thine own, possess as thine own the seat, the form, the gifts which thou thyself shalt desire. A limited nature in other creatures is confined within the laws written down by Us. In conformity with thy free judgment, in whose hands I have placed thee, thou art confined by no bounds; and thou wilt fix limits of nature for thyself. I have placed thee at the center of the world, that from there thou mayest more conveniently look around and see whatsoever is in the world. Neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal have We made thee. Thou, like a judge appointed for being honorable, art the molder and maker of thyself; thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape thou dost prefer. Thou canst grow downward into the lower natures which are brutes. Thou canst again grow upward from thy soul’s reason into the higher natures which are divine.’²

According to Pico, then, the elevated status of human beings consists not in the possession of some fixed nature but in the capacity for free choice. Pico then urges us to use this freedom in order to distance ourselves from our animal desires, and to aspire to the condition of the angels, by cultivating the intellect for the study of philosophy and theology and thereby drawing closer to God. The second half of his oration is a proposal for a public disputation of nine hundred philosophical and theological theses which Pico has drawn up, appealing to the authority of the Christian and Hebrew scriptures, of the ancient Greek philosophers, of the writings of Islamic thinkers and of Zoroastrianism (the ancient religion of Persia), and of works on magic and the occult. Not only, then, is Pico’s celebration of the dignity of man firmly located in a religious context. It is associated by him with what many modern humanists would regard as a motley collection of beliefs and superstitions, some of them bizarre.

Contrast this with a very different version of humanism. Here is a passage from a lecture Why I Am Not a Christian, delivered by the philosopher Bertrand Russell to a meeting of the National Secular Society in 1927:

Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look round for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the Churches in all these centuries have made it. We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world – its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is, and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings.³

For Russell, as for Pico, the dignity of human beings resides in their capacity to use their intelligence and to act as free men, but there the similarities end. According to Russell the natural ally of humanism is not religion but science. Religion and science are seen to be in conflict with one another, and a belief in the powers of human beings to make a good world for themselves is contrasted with the craven tendency of human beings to abase themselves before a god.

To complete my preliminary survey of some contrasting versions of humanism I turn to another lecture delivered by a twentieth-century philosopher. This is the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s lecture Existentialism is a Humanism, given in Paris in 1945. ‘Existentialism’ was the label – not of his own choosing – which had come to be applied to Sartre’s own philosophy. In linking it with humanism, Sartre suggests that ‘the word humanism has two very different meanings’. One of these, he says, is the view ‘which upholds man … as the supreme value’ (and it may remind us of Pico’s talk of man as ‘a great marvel and the animal really worthy of wonder’):

Humanism in this sense appears, for instance, in Cocteau’s story Round the World in 80 Hours, in which one of the characters declares, because he is flying over mountains in an aeroplane, ‘Man is magnificent!’ This signifies that although I, personally, have not built aeroplanes I have the benefit of those particular inventions and that I personally, being a man, can consider myself responsible for, and honoured by, achievements that are peculiar to some men.It is to assume that we can ascribe value to man according to the most distinguished deeds of certain men. That kind of humanism is absurd, for only the dog or the horse would be in a position to pronounce a general judgment upon man and declare that he is magnificent, which they have never been such fools as to do – at least, not as far as I know.⁴

Sartre’s second sense of ‘humanism’ can remind us of Pico in another way; it focuses on the idea that human beings have no fixed nature but can make of themselves what they choose through their exercise of freedom.

This is humanism, because we remind man that there is no legislator but himself; that he himself, thus abandoned, must decide for himself.

(pp. 55–56)

Like Russell, Sartre sees this version of humanism as presupposing atheism. It is ‘nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position’ (p. 56). In speaking of man as ‘abandoned’, Sartre means ‘that God does not exist, and that it is necessary to draw the consequences of his absence right to the end’ (pp. 32–33):

When we think of God as the creator, we are thinking of him, most of the time, as a supernal artisan. … God makes man according to a procedure and a conception, exactly as the artisan manufactures a paper-knife, following a definition and a formula. … Atheistic existentialism … declares that … there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. … Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.

(pp. 27–28)

Sartre and Russell, then, share a humanism which is a belief in the ‘human’ in opposition to a belief in a god. Sartre would, however, be more hesitant about Russell’s faith in science. He argues (more particularly in other writings) that the appropriate way of understanding human actions is importantly different from a scientific understanding of causally determined events in the natural world. Accordingly, in the lecture, he links his emphasis on human freedom with a sharp contrast between human beings and natural objects:

this theory alone is compatible with the dignity of man, it is the only one which does not make man into an object. All kinds of materialism lead one to treat every man including oneself as an object – that is, as a set of pre-determined reactions, in no way different from the patterns of qualities and phenomena which constitute a table, or a chair or a stone. Our aim is precisely to establish the human kingdom as a pattern of values in distinction from the material world.

(pp. 44–45)

We have now accumulated a number of questions to be asked about any view of the world to which we might be inclined to apply the label ‘humanism’:

1. Does humanism imply a belief in a god who created human beings with a special status, or does it belong with the rejection of belief in a god?
2. Is humanism the natural ally of religion, or of science, or of both, or of neither?
3. Does humanism involve the belief that there are certain qualities unique and special to human beings and not possessed by any other entities in the natural world?
4. Does a belief in the ideal of ‘man’ function to exclude groups of human beings who do not match this favoured model of what it is to be human?
5. Is humanism a view of the world which we can live by and with which we can make sense of our lives?

I do not think that we can give a definitive answer to any of these questions, because I do not think that there is any definitive set of beliefs called ‘humanism’. There are many humanisms. Apart from the possible versions which we have already glanced at, there are, as we shall see, other uses of the word which I have not yet mentioned. In the next section of this chapter I shall attempt to introduce some order into the apparent chaos, by tracing briefly some of the stages in the history of the word. I shall then, in the subsequent section, identify the sense in which I shall be using the term, and the version of humanism which I shall aim to defend in the rest of the book.

‘HUMANISM’ AND ITS HISTORY

The Italian word ‘umanista’ was coined, probably in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, to denote a scholar or teacher of the humanities – the disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy.⁵ These studies were referred to by the Latin label studia humanitatis, a phrase which probably goes back to the fourteenth century and which implies a contrast between the study of ‘humanity’ and the study of divinity, of natural philosophy, and of vocational disciplines such as law and medicine. The humanists of the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, in Italy and in other European countries, were in particular interested in the study of the classical literature of ancient Greece and Rome, finding in it an ideal of human life which they wished to revive. Pico della Mirandola was one of these humanists, and On the Dignity of Man was, as we have seen, an explicit statement of the programme of reconciling the literature and thought of the ancient world with Christian religious belief. With his celebration of the distinctive human capacity for free choice, however, Pico does put a new slant on traditional Christian views of human nature, and more generally the Italian humanists represent a new emphasis on the value of human achievements in this life rather than seeing it simply as preparation for the life to come.

The first use of the corresponding abstract noun ‘humanism’ is in German. The word ‘Humanismus’ was similarly used in an educational context, in early nineteenth-century Germany, to refer to the traditional classical education built around the humanities. The retrospective application of the German noun to the thought and culture of fifteenth-century Italy was influentially established by Jacob Burckhardt’s famous book Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, published in 1860. He speaks of humanism not just as an educational curriculum but as a broader cultural phenomenon, and he hints at the potential conflict with the Christian church.

But now, as competitor with the whole culture of the Middle Ages, which was essentially clerical and was fostered by the Church, there appeared a new civilization, founding itself on that which lay on the other side of the Middle Ages.⁶

The same conception of ‘Renaissance humanism’ was propagated in English by John Addington Symonds in his multivolume work The Renaissance in Italy. Volume II, ‘The Revival of Learning’, published in 1877, contains the following passage:

As I cannot dispense with the word Humanism in this portion of my work, it may be well to fix the sense I shall attach to it. The essence of humanism consisted in a new and vital perception of the dignity of man as a rational being apart from theological determinations, and in the further perception that classical literature alone displayed human nature in the plenitude of intellectual and moral freedom. It was partly a reaction against ecclesiastical despotism, partly an attempt to find the point of unity for all that had been thought and done by man, within the mind restored to consciousness of its own sovereign faculty. Hence the singlehearted devotion to the literature of Greece and Rome that marks the whole Renaissance era. Hence the watchword of that age, the Litterae Humaniores. Hence the passion for antiquity, possessing thoughtful men, and substituting a new authority for the traditions of the Church. Hence the so-called Paganism of centuries bent upon absorbing and assimilating a spirit no less life-giving from their point of view than Christianity itself. Hence the persistent effort of philosophers to find the meeting-point of two divergent inspirations. Hence, too, the ultimate antagonism between the humanists, or professors of the new wisdom, and those uncompromising Christians who, like S. Paul, preferred to remain fools for Christ’s sake.⁷

What is interesting here is Symonds’s attempt to insert a wedge between the umanisti and the Christian church, to point up what he sees as the latent anti-ecclesiastical tenor of Renaissance humanism and the implicit conflict with Christianity itself.

In order to trace the process by which the term ‘humanism’ came to be linked more closely with the rejection of religious belief, I need first to refer to another historical movement which feeds more directly into modern secular humanism – that of the Enlightenment, and especially of those eighteenth-century French Enlightenment thinkers referred to as ‘les lumières’ or ‘les philosophes’. Though there are important differences between them, they share an attitude of scepticism towards, or outright rejection of, religious belief. They appeal to reason and experience against tradition, in order to criticise prejudice and superstition, to reject ideas of the supernatural and with them the tyranny of religious authority and political authority, each of which they see as reinforcing the other. A classic Enlightenment text is Baron d’Holbach’s Système de la Nature of 1770.^8...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Second Edition
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Why Science Undermines Religion
• 3. What’s So Special About Human Beings?
• 4. Morality in a Godless World
• 5. The Meaning of Life and the Need for Stories
• 6. The ‘God Debate’: Dead End or Dialogue?
• Postscript: Organised Humanism
• Notes
• Index