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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Humanism presents an edited collection of essays that explore the nature of Humanism as an approach to life, and a philosophical analysis of the key humanist propositions from naturalism and science to morality and meaning. * Represents the first book of its kind to look at Humanism not just in terms of its theoretical underpinnings, but also its consequences and its diverse manifestations * Features contributions from international and emerging scholars, plus renowned figures such as Stephen Law, Charles Freeman and Jeaneanne Fowler * Presents Humanism as a positive alternative to theism * Brings together the world's leading Humanist academics in one reference work
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title page
Notes on Contributors
Foreword
1 What Is Humanism?
The History of the Word
What Sort of Thing Is Humanism?
What Is Humanism?
The Humanist Approach 1: Understanding Reality
The Humanist Approach 2: Understanding Ourselves
The Humanist Approach 3: The Good Life and the Whole Person
The Humanist Approach 4: Morality
The Humanist Approach 5: Practical Action
Humanism and Religion
Further Reading
Part I: Essentials of Humanism
2 Naturalism
What Is Naturalism and Why Does It Matter?
Is Naturalism True?
What Is Spooky?
Further Reading
3 Science, Reason, and Scepticism
What Are Science and Reason?
Non-Scientific Approaches to Rationally Assessing Beliefs
What’s So Great about Reason and Science?
Science as a Threat to Religious Belief
Other Rational Threats to Religious Belief
Immunizing Strategies
Acknowledgements
Further Reading
4 Death as Annihilation
Rejection of Afterlife Living
Death as Harm
Living with Death
Further Reading
5 The Good and Worthwhile Life
Further Reading
Part II: Diverse Manifestations
6 The Materialists of Classical India
The Charvakas
Conclusion
Further Reading
7 Humanism in the Classical World
The Vitality of Life
The Search for Fundamental Principles
Athens, Sophists, and Dramatists
Plato and Aristotle: The Two Strands of Greek Philosophy
The Scientists and Philosophers of Alexandria
The Spread of Rome
The Coming of Christianity to the Classical World
Further Reading
8 Ancient China
Confucianism
Classical Taoism
Buddhism
Further Reading
9 Humanistic Thought in the Islamic World of the Middle Ages
Introduction
What Were the Circumstances under which Humanistic Views Flourished in Islam?
How Did This Thinking Develop?
What Were the Consequences?
Conclusion
Part III: Implications
10 Counselling and the Humanist Worldview
Introduction
Four ‘Humanism-Rooted’ Approaches to Counselling
Central Dimensions of Present-Day Humanist Counselling
Concluding Remarks
Further Reading
11 Making a Home in This World
I
II
III
IV
Further Reading
12 Humanist Ceremonies
The British Humanist Association
Humanist Funerals Today
‘The words you spoke’: The Person and Beyond in Humanist Funerals
Further Reading
13 Humanism and Education
Does Humanist Education Exist?
Humanism and History
Society as Educator
Family Upbringing
School Education
Aims and Curricula
Knowledge, Imagination, and Emotion
The Protestant Tradition
Aesthetic Activities
Sex Education
Physical Education
Education for Personal Well-Being and Moral Sensitivity
The Work Ethic
Selection, Giftedness, and Life-Planning
Children’s Experience of School
Examinations
Learning Arrangements and Timetabling
School Leadership
An Individualist Inheritance
Religious Education, Faith Schools, and Parents’ Rights
Conclusion
14 Humanism and the Political Order
The Secular Polity
The Anti-Secularist Case
Humanism in the Modern World
15 Humanism in Recent English Fiction
A Secular Pilgrimage
Perspectives from Immigration
A Condition-of-England Novel
Two Novels of Ideas
A Humanist Hero?
Jesus v. Christ
Further Reading
Part IV: Debates
16 Feminism and Humanism
Adventures of Feminism and Humanism
Critical Humanism
Thinking with Critical Humanism: Feminist Appropriations of Enlightenment
Conclusion
17 Life Without Meaning?
Finding the Right Beliefs?
Meaning: Not Discovered but Made?
Agnosticism and Mystery
What Makes Life Meaningful?
Meaning and Stories
Further Reading
18 Spirituality
Divorcing Spirituality from Religion
Historical Precedents for Postmodern Spirituality
The Nature of the Self
The Nature and Facets of Spirituality
Meditation
Pragmatic Spirituality
Conclusion
Further Reading
19 Is Humanism Too Optimistic? An Analysis of Religion as
R
eligion
Hitchens v. Blair
Religion with a Capital ‘R’
Blair is no Catholic
Vicarious Redemption
Hitchens v. Alistair McGrath
Again: Humanism Too Optimistic?
The ‘
R
eligion’ of Queen Noor of Jordan
The Legal Concept of Religion (
R
eligion)
On Limiting Freedom of Religion
The Relationship between the First Paragraph and the Second Paragraph
How Do Courts Interpret ‘Religion’?
Unstunned Ritual Slaughter
A ‘Humanist’ Reading of Human Rights
20 Humanism, Moral Relativism, and Ethical Objectivity
The Lure of Absolutism
Moral Naturalism
What Morality Is
Moral Naturalism and Moral Relativism
Cultural Objectivism and Cosmopolitan Humanism
Further Reading
21 The Future of Humanism
What Is Humanism?
The Future of Humanism and the Humanist Movement
Acknowledgements
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 11
Table 11.1 Selected national cremation rates for 2012
List of Illustrations
Chapter 11
Figure 11.1 Plaque on former Public Health Department building in Walworth Road, London, opened on 27 September 1937, expressing the commitment to democratic well-being.
Figure 11.2 Former public building in Tilburg, the Netherlands, a fine example of the Amsterdam school of civic architecture.
Figure 11.3 The John Scott Health Centre, Woodberry Down Estate, north London. The first purpose-built health centre in London, opened in 1952, in an architectural style heavily influenced by the Amsterdam school of civic architecture.
Figure 11.4 The new public library at Canada Water in London’s former docklands, designed by Piers Gough of CZWG Architects, one of a new generation of public library buildings in the UK.
Figure 11.5 Woodland burial site close to River Stour in north Essex. Dozens of bodies are buried below this increasingly naturalised woodland forest setting.
Figure 11.6 Durham Crematorium, designed by J. P. Chaplin, opened in 1960, in a twentieth-century new building type that struggled to find a secular architectural style, even though the popularity of cremation was a sign of increased secularization. This has references to Durham Cathedral but also to fortified border manor houses and castles.
Figure 11.7 St Christopher's Hospice, Sydenham, south London, opened in 1967 by Cicely Saunders, a pioneer in what is now a world-wide movement. Increased public funding to hospices has come on the condition of greater secularization.
Figure 11.8 Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centre at Raigmore Hospital, Inverness, opened in 2005 and designed by Page/Park Architects.
Figure 11.9 Domestic interior of Maggie’s Centre, Inverness. Design and build quality are very high, providing a welcome respite from institutional care.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Humanism
Edited by
Andrew Copson and A. C. Grayling
This edition first published 2015© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Wiley Blackwell handbook of humanism / edited by Andrew Copson and A.C. Grayling. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-119-97717-9 (cloth)1. Humanism. I. Copson, Andrew, editor. B821.W447 2015 144–dc23
2015000044
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Robert Taylor, Andrea and Amber. © Robert Taylor Photography
Notes on Contributors
Peter Cave is a philosopher and author who lectures for the Open University and New York University (London). His published works include numerous philosophy papers, some light, some seriously academic. His books include a trilogy of 33 Perplexing Philosophy Puzzles, as well as Beginners’ Guides to Humanism, Philosophy, and, most recently, Ethics.
Paul Cliteur is Professor of Jurisprudence, University of Leiden (the Netherlands) and Guest Professor of Philosophical Anthropology, University of Ghent (Belgium). He is the author of (among others) The Secular Outlook: In Defense of Moral and Political Secularism (Wiley-Blackwell 2010). He specializes in human rights, animal rights, and secularism.
Andrew Copson is Chief Executive of the British Humanist Association, Vice President of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, and a former director of the European Humanist Federation. His writing and speaking on humanism has appeared in a range of journals, books, and other media.
Peter Derkx has been associated with the University of Humanistic Studies at Utrecht in the Netherlands since its founding in 1989. Until 2003 he was Senior Lecturer in the History of Humanism and since 2003 has been Professor of Humanism and Worldviews. He is a senior fellow of the Institute for Humanist Studies in Washington, DC, and a member of the editorial board of the journal Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism. He is the head of the research program ‘Humanist Tradition, Meaning in Life and Ageing Well’.
Matthew Engelke teaches anthropology at the London School of Economics. In addition to his work on humanism, he has conducted major research projects on Christianity in Zimbabwe and in England. He is the author of A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church (2007), which won the 2008 Clifford Geertz Prize and the 2009 Victor Turner Prize, and God’s Agents: Biblical Publicity in Contemporary England (2013). Dr Engelke was editor of the journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 2010 to 2013.
Peter Faulkner became involved with the humanist movement in the early 1950s, as a student reading English at Cambridge; he taught at Fircroft College, Birmingham, the University of Durham, and the University of Exeter. He published Humanism in the English Novel in 1975; his other publications mostly concern William Morris and his circle.
Jeaneane Fowler was formerly head of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Newport, South Wales, where she later became an Honorary Research Fellow. She has written extensively on the philosophical, sociological, and religious beliefs of a variety of cultures. In the Beliefs and Practices series of Sussex Academic Press, she has published works on Hinduism, Humanism, T’ai Chi Ch’üan (with Keith Ewers), Chinese Religions, and The Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin with her husband and co-author, Merv Fowler, and, outside the Beliefs and Practices series, World Religions (editor and co-author), The Philosophy of Hinduism, and the Philosophy of Taoism. Her most recent work is a translation and commentary of a Sanskrit text, the Bhagavad Gita.
Merv Fowler was formerly Head of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wales. His many publications include two books on Buddhism, one of which, Zen Buddhism: Beliefs and Practices was the Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2006. He is the co-author of Chinese Religions: Beliefs and Practices, as well as a sociological study of Nichiren Buddhism, a school of atheistic Buddhism in the UK.
Charles Freeman is a freelance academic with a longstanding interest in the history of European thought. For many years he was a teacher and senior examiner of the International Baccalaureate’s Theory of Knowledge course, a program designed to encourage critical thinking. His bestselling The Closing of the Western Mind (2002) deals with the impact of Christianity on Greek traditions of rational thought.
A. C. Grayling is Professor of Philosophy and Master of the New College of the Humanities, London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s College Oxford. His most recent books include The Good Book, Ideas That Matter, Liberty in the Age of Terror, To Set Prometheus Free, and The God Argument.
Alan Haworth is Emeritus Research Fellow at London Metropolitan University, where he taught ethics, political philosophy, and the history of ideas. His most recent book is Understanding the Political Philosophers: From Ancient to Modern Times, now in its second edition (2012).
Pauline Johnson is Head of the Sociology Department at Macquarie University, Sydney. The author of several books, her most recent works include Habermas: Rescuing the Public Sphere (2006) and Modern Privacy: Shifting Boundaries: New Forms (2010). Current publications include essays on sociology and critique, populism, and feminism.
Brendan Larvor is Reader in Philosophy and Head of Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire. Most of his writing is about either the philosophy of mathematical practice or the philosophy of education. He has been a member of the Humanist Philosophers Group since 1999.
Stephen Law is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London, and Provost of Centre for Inquiry UK. He has published numerous academic papers, including several in the philosophy of religion, and his popular books include A Very Short Introduction to Humanism, The Philosophy Gym, and The Great Philosophers.
Abdelilah Ljamai is an Associate Professor at University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht. He has written numerous books and scientific articles in the fields of Islamic studies, anthropology, and psychology. He is the author of Ibn Hazm et la polémique islamo-chrétienne dans l'histoire de l’islam (2003), and of Introduction to the Study of the Qur’an: Legislative History and Methods of the Qur’an Exegesis (2005).
Richard Norman is Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Kent. His publications include The Moral Philosophers: An Introduction to Ethics (1983, 2nd edn. 1998) and On Humanism (2004, 2nd edn. 2012). He is a Vice President of the British Humanist Association, and a member of East Kent Humanists.
Carmen Schuhmann is Assistant Professor at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht. Previously she worked as a counsellor, allied to the Dutch Humanist Association, in several penitentiary institutions in the Netherlands. She started her career as a mathematician and received her doctorate in mathematics in 1997. Her current research focuses on the exploration of relational and narrative dimensions of counselling, with a view to the humanization of counselling practices.
John R. Shook was a Professor of Philosophy at Oklahoma State University from 2000 to 2006, and then joined the faculty of the Science and the Public online EdM program for the University at Buffalo, New York. He also has worked with several secular and humanist organizations, including the Center for Inquiry, the American Humanist Association, the Humanist Institute, and the Institute for Humanist Studies, and for several years he was President of the Society of Humanist Philosophers. Among his books is The God Debates: A 21st Century Guide for Atheists and Believers (and Everyone in Between).
John White is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education in London. His interests are in the mind of the learner and in interrelationships among educational aims and school curricula. He is a member of the Humanist Philosophers Group and is a former humanist delegate to the Religious Education Council of England and Wales. His most recent books include An Aims-Based Curriculum (co-authored with Michael Reiss, 2013); and Exploring Well-Being in Schools: A Guide to Making Children’s Lives More Fulfilling (2011).
Ken Worpole is Emeritus Professor at the Cities Institute, London Metropolitan University, and the author of many books on social policy, landscape, and architecture. He was a member of the UK government's Urban Green Spaces Task Force, and adviser to the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). His publications include Here Comes the Sun: Architecture and Public Space in 20th Century European Culture (2001), Last Landscapes: The Architecture of the Cemetery in the West (2003), Modern Hospice Design: The Architecture of Palliative Care (2009), and Contemporary Library Architecture (2013).
Foreword
Being asked to provide a foreword for this book of essays was a great privilege. Echoing humanism’s own history, the essays begin with a simple idea – a view of the world that is clear and penetrating, open-minded and unassuming – but that then takes on a life of its own and propels us, through history, to the present day with consequences that ramify.
Today, humanism has profound implications for how we live our lives, and how we stand to face the biggest issues of our time and of our immediate futures. This fact, the growing prevalence of the humanist view of life throughout societies the world over, and the enormous historical effect of humanism’s values and principles on global culture, all make it an increasingly vital subject of study and understand.
As the president of a humanist association I welcome this volume, and as a working academic I’m excited to see the fertile territory of humanism marked out for greater study as a philosophy in its own right. Both humanists and non-humanists need to engage further in this endeavour, and I believe that humanism needs to be more taught about in schools and in universities; it needs to form a greater part of the research agenda of social scientists and students of the humanities.
As you read this collection, you will find yourself first digging deeper into humanism as an approach, and into its basic values, in contributions by leading humanist philosophers. These essays combined explain how rejecting the supernatural and embracing reason and evidence as guiding forces provides each of us with powerful motivators for ethical behaviour – as well as a much deeper and richer appreciation of life itself.
It is all too easy for us to think of this approach as simply a product of the Enlightenment, so in the second section of this book we take a closer look at humanism’s much earlier beginnings. These contributions, from leading authors in their fields, trace a lineage for humanism stretching back to the ancient philosophers and scientists of India, Greece, and China, and tell of how this learning was kept alive and expanded by scholars in the Arab and Persian world for hundreds of years before the Renaissance brought it to Europe.
Since that time, the humanist view of life has become as deeply embedded within our culture as any religion can claim to be. It has found its way into our common discourse, influencing how each of us tackles questions of right and wrong; it has shaped our understanding of the human character and the human heart; and it continues to assist us with problem-solving as we continue on our journey as a species, and as we uncover wholly new ethical problems.
In its third section, the collection pores over these further implications of humanism in our daily lives and social responsibilities, with essays exploring what humanism has meant for ceremonies, for counselling, for education, and for politics, and the impact of humanism on writers and architects.
The last section of this book shines a light on bigger debates about humanism. These essays – like all the essays in this volume – are an introduction to a much wider, largely unexplored territory. Andrew Copson and A. C. Grayling have assembled an intriguing array of chapters. I hope, with them, that it will be a beguiling invitation to future research as well as providing an essential reference for current scholars. As more and more people recognize their personal philosophies as being essentially humanist ones, and as society as a whole becomes increasingly non-religious, it seems inevitable that in the years to come, these questions will continue to demand further and prolonged attention from scholars.
Professor Jim Al-KhaliliPresident, British Humanist AssociationSouthsea, May 2014
1What Is Humanism?
Andrew Copson
What we now call a ‘humanist’ attitude has found expression around the world for at least 2,500 years (which is about as long as we have written records from many places) and in civilizations from India, to China, to Europe; but the use of a single English word to unify these instances of a common phenomenon is comparatively recent. Before we consider what ‘humanism’ is, it is therefore worth examining the history of the word itself.
The History of the Word
The first use of the noun ‘humanist’ in English in print appears to be in 1589.1 It was a borrowing from the recent Italian word umanista and it referred for many years not to the subject matter of this volume but narrowly2 to a student of ancient languages or more widely to sophisticated academics of any subjects other than theology. There was no use of the word ‘humanism’ to partner this use of ‘humanist’ but, if there had been, it would have denoted simply the study of ancient languages and culture. As the decades passed, and the ‘humanists’ of the sixteenth century receded into history, they were increasingly seen as being not just students of pre-Christian cultures but advocates for those cultures. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, ‘humanist’ denoted not just a student of the humanities – especially the culture of the ancient European world – but a holder of the view that this curriculum was best guaranteed to develop the human being personally, intellectually, culturally, and socially.3
The first appearances of the noun ‘humanism’ in English in print were in the nineteenth century and were both translations of the recent German coinage humanismus. In Germany this word had been and was still deployed with a range of meanings in a wide variety of social and intellectual debates. On its entry into English it carried two separate and distinct meanings. On the one hand, in historical works like those of Jacob Burckhardt and J. A. Symonds,4 it was applied retrospectively to the revival of classical learning in the European Renaissance and the tradition of thought ignited by that revival. Its second meaning referred to a more contemporary attitude of mind. It is ‘humanism’ in this second sense that we are concerned with here. Throughout the nineteenth century the content of this latter ‘humanism’, the holders of which attitude were now also called ‘humanists’, was far from systematized, and the word often referred generically to a range of attitudes to life that were non-religious, non-theistic, or non-Christian. The term was mostly used positively but could also be disparaging. The British prime minister W. E. Gladstone used ‘humanism’ dismissively to denote positivism and the philosophy of Auguste Comte,5 and it was not with approval that the Dublin Review referred to ‘heathen-minded humanists’.6
Within academia the use of ‘humanism’ to refer to the Renaissance movement (often: ‘Renaissance humanism’) persisted and still persists; outside academia, it was the second meaning of ‘humanism’ and ‘humanist’ that prevailed in the twentieth century. By the start of that century the words were being used primarily to denote approaches to life – and the takers of those approaches – that were distinguished by the valuing of human beings and human culture in contrast with valuing gods and religion, and by affirming the effectiveness of human reason applied to evidence in contrast with theism, theological speculation, and revelation.7 At this time the meaning of ‘humanism’, though clarified as non-theistic and non-religious, was still broad. It was only in the early and mid-twentieth century that men and women began deliberately systematizing and giving form to this ‘humanism’ in books, journals, speeches, and in the publications and agendas of what became humanist organizations.8 In doing so, they affirmed that the beliefs and values captured by this use of the noun ‘humanism’ were not merely the novel and particular products of Europe but had antecedents and analogues in cultures all over the world and throughout history,9 and they gave ‘humanism’ the meaning it has today.10
Although now most frequently used unqualified and in the sense outlined above, the use of both ‘humanism’ and ‘humanist’ has been complicated by a later tendency to prefix them with qualifying adjectives. To some extent these usages are the result of false etymological or historical assumptions (a conflation between the earlier and later usages of the word ‘humanist’ outlined above, for example); but there is often something polemical involved.11 The word ‘secular’ seems first to have been added to ‘humanism’ as an elaborator intended to amplify disapproval, rather than as a qualifier, but it was after it appeared as a phrase in the US Supreme Court’s 1961 judgment in Torcaso v. Watkins that it was taken up as a self-description by some (mainly US-based) humanist organizations. However that may be, the usage encouraged a tendency which was already establishing itself of adding religious adjectives to the plain noun. The hybrid term ‘Christian humanism’,12 which some from a Christian background have been attempting to put into currency as a way of co-opting the (to them) amenable aspects of humanism for their religion, has led to a raft of claims from those identifying with other religious traditions – whether culturally or in convictions – that they too can claim a ‘humanism’. The suggestion that has followed – that ‘humanism’ is something of which there are two types, ‘religious humanism’ and ‘secular humanism’, has begun to seriously muddy the conceptual water, especially in these days when anyone with a philosophical axe to grind can, with a few quick Wikipedia edits, begin to shift the common understanding of any complicatedly imprecise philosophical term.
Language, of course, is mutable over time, but there are good reasons to try to retain coherence and integrity in the use of the nouns ‘humanist’ and ‘humanism’ unqualified. Subsequent to their earlier usage to describe an academic discipline or curriculum (whose followers, obviously, might well be religious), ‘humanism’ and ‘humanist’ have been used relatively consistently as describing an attitude that is at least quite separate from religion and that in many respects contrasts and conflicts with religion(s). Of course, many of the values associated with this humanism can be held and are held by people as part of a wider assortment of beliefs and values, some of which beliefs and values may be religious (people are complicated and inconsistent). There may also be people who self-identify as ‘Christian’ (or ‘Sikh’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Jewish’, or whatever) for ethnic or political reasons but who have humanist convictions and no religious beliefs. These vagaries of human behaviour and self-description are a poor reason for dismembering such a useful single conceptual category as ‘humanism’ is in practice, especially when there are words more suitable to combine with the religious qualifiers that would lead to no such verbal confusion. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper used ‘humanitarianism’ for this purpose, urging co-operation between ‘humanists’ and religious ‘humanitarians’.13 The use of ‘humanistic’ in front of the religious noun in question is also preferable (e.g. ‘humanistic Islam’ or ‘humanistic Judaism’). It performs the necessary modification but also conveys the accurate sense that what is primary is the religion at hand and that the qualification is secondary.14
There are two further usages of the words ‘religious humanism’ with which to deal before we move on from verbal occupations. Both are uses of the phrase by humanists who are humanists in the sense of this volume: holders of the views that constitute a humanist approach to beliefs, values, and meaning – and with no conflicting religious beliefs. By the use of the word ‘religious’ they most commonly wish to convey either (1) that humanism is their religion, using the word ‘religion’ somewhat archaically and expansively, in the manner of George Eliot, Julian Huxley, or Albert Einstein, to denote the fundamental worldview of a person, or (2) that they themselves participate in humanist organizations in a congregational manner akin to the manner in which a follower of a religion may participate in such a community. The first of these usages is so obviously metaphorical as to need no further attention; the second is more diverting. In the United States and Europe, including the United Kingdom, it was the inspiration behind a brief flourishing of humanist ‘churches’ at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.15 Now this use of the words ‘religious humanism’ is extinct almost everywhere, although the phenomenon of non-theistic ‘congregations’ that the phrase describes is not entirely exhausted.16 The congregational model was consciously and deliberately abandoned by humanist organizations in most of Europe.17 It does still have purchase in the United States, where the idea of humanist congregations is actively promoted by some humanist organizations, but it is not widespread anywhere, and it remains to be seen whether present attempts to revive it will bear fruit.
In this volume we use the single words ‘humanism’ and ‘humanist’ unqualified, to denote a non-religious, non-theistic, and naturalistic approach to life, the essentials of which we shall shortly consider. This is the mainstream and contemporary meaning of the unqualified nouns and the way in which most standard works of reference define them:
a morally concerned style of intellectual atheism openly avowed by only a small minority of individuals … but tacitly accepted by a wide spectrum of educated people in all parts of the Western world.18
A philosophy or set of beliefs, that holds that human beings achieve a system of morality through their own reasoning rather than through a belief in any divine being.19
an appeal to reason in contrast to revelation or religious authority as a means of finding out about the natural world and destiny of man, and also giving a grounding for morality … Humanist ethics is also distinguished by placing the end of moral action in the welfare of humanity rather than in fulfilling the will of God.20
any position which stresses the importance of persons, typically in contrast with something else, such as God, inanimate nature, or totalitarian societies.21
a commitment to the perspective, interests and centrality of human persons; a belief in reason and autonomy as foundational aspects of human existence; a belief that reason, scepticism and the scientific method are the only appropriate instruments for discovering truth and structuring the human community; a belief that the foundations for ethics and society are to be found in autonomy and moral equality …22
Believing that it is possible to live confidently without metaphysical or religious certainty and that all opinions are open to revision and correction, [humanists] see human flourishing as dependent on open communication, discussion, criticism and unforced consensus.23
What Sort of Thing Is Humanism?
Even within this single sense of a non-religious, human-centred approach to life and meaning as defined above, there is a spectrum of ways in which the words ‘humanism’ and ‘humanist’ are used in practice, from the denoting of an implicit attitude to life which its possessor sees as merely common sense, to a fully worked out and personally explicit worldview, recognized by its possessor as ‘humanist’, which may also be a self-identity. In a Western world where labels are increasingly resisted and identities acknowledged as multiple, those at the latter end of this spectrum are few, but polls and social attitude surveys reveal a large number of people whose humanism may be unnamed and implicit, but whose attitude is identical with that of people for whom humanism is an explicit worldview.24
So, in light of this, what sort of thing can we say humanism is? As we have said, the word was first applied to a certain set of beliefs and values long after those beliefs and values had already emerged. ‘Humanism’ is a post hoc coinage: a label intended to capture a certain attitude, which the first user of the word did not invent but merely identified. In this sense, ‘humanism’ and ‘humanist’ are akin to an analyst’s categories. The word ‘humanist’ applies to people who may not know it but who are humanists no less than a human being is a member of Homo sapiens whether he or she knows that this is the technical binomial nomenclature for his or her species or not. Thus, humanism is quite different from religions and a great many non-religious philosophies, which begin at a particular point in time and whose names originate at or soon after the genesis of the ideology itself.
The fact that ‘humanist’, since the word has been used, has also been, for a growing number of people, a conscious commitment and a self-identifying label does not disrupt this view of ‘humanism’ as an analytical category. In fact the testimony of many of those who have ‘discovered’ their humanism buttresses this view of it. Time and again we find this discovery presented as one that arises out of a process of self-examination leading to the self-attribution of the label in a way analogous to the attachment of it by a disinterested analyst.25
So, no one invented humanism or founded it. The word describes a certain set of linked and interrelated beliefs and values that together make up a coherent non-religious worldview, and many people have had these beliefs and values all over the world and for thousands of years. These beliefs and values do not constitute a dogma, since – as we shall see – their basis is in free and open enquiry. But they do recur throughout history in combination as a permanent alternative to belief systems that place the source of value outside humanity and posit supernatural forces and principles. In spite of this recurrence, they do not constitute a tradition in the sense of an unbroken handing on of these ideas down the generations – humanism arises in human societies quite separate from each other in time and space and the basic ideas that comprise humanism can be discerned in China and India from ancient times as much as in the ancient Mediterranean and the modern West.
Humanism has been variously termed a ‘worldview’, an ‘approach to life’, a ‘lifestance’, an ‘attitude’, a ‘way of life’, and a ‘meaning frame’. All these phrases have aspects that recommend them. At this stage, however, it will be more beneficial to move on to what the content of ‘humanism’ actually is.
What Is Humanism?
A hundred years of advocates and critics have refined and defined humanism in ways that give it clearer boundaries and greater substance. A ‘minimum definition’ has even been agreed by humanist organizations in over forty countries:
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.26
This minimum definition is a good attempt at a short summary of the humanist approach, but no complete worldview can be explained in one paragraph. In the five sections that follow, we will look in greater depth at the related beliefs and values in the overlap of which – like the circles of a Venn diagram27 – we can discern the essence of the humanist approach.
The Humanist Approach 1: Understanding Reality
Starting with the human being
The notion that a man28 shall judge for himself what he is told, sifting the evidence and weighing the conclusions, is of course implicit in the outlook of science. But it begins before that as a positive and active constituent of humanism. For evidently the notion implies not only that man is free to judge, but that he is able to judge. This is an assertion of confidence which goes back to a contemporary of Socrates [Protagoras], and claims (as Plato quotes him) that ’man is the measure of all things’. In humanism, man is all things: he is both the expression and the master of the creation.29
Humanism begins with the human being and asserts straight away that the active deployment of his or her senses is the way to gain knowledge (albeit provisional). This claim invites the instant objection that it is an unfounded assumption, but humanist philosophers have defended it by pointing out that it is manifestly the functional basis for our daily engagement with reality, the truth of which we have lived with from birth:
What sort of thing is it reasonable to believe without proof? I should reply: the facts of sense-experience and the principles of mathematics and logic – including the inductive logic employed in science. These are things which we can hardly bring ourselves to doubt, and as to which there is a large measure of agreement among mankind.30
Sights, sounds, glimpses, smells and touches all provide reasons for beliefs. If John comes in and gets a good doggy whiff, he acquires a reason to believe that Rover is in the house. If Mary looks in the fridge and sees the butter, she acquires a reason for believing that there is butter in the fridge. If John tries and tries but cannot clear the bar, he learns that he cannot jump six feet. In other words, it is the whole person’s interaction with the whole surround that gives birth to reasons. John and Mary, interacting with the environment as they should, are doing well. If they acquired the same beliefs but in the way that they might hear voices in the head, telling them out of a vacuum that the dog is in the house or the butter in the fridge, or that the bar can or cannot be jumped, they would not be reasonable in the same way; they would be deluded …31
Naturalism
The universe thus discerned by our senses appears a natural phenomenon, behaving according to principles that can be observed, determined, predicted, and described. This is the universe inhabited by the humanist. Its opposite, which humanists reject, was well described by one mid-twentieth-century popularizer of humanism:
Behind the tangible, visible world of Nature there is said to be an intangible, invisible world. Not, of course, in the sense that atomic particles are hidden from sight; they belong to the same world as the grosser objects of everyday experience. They are physical because they obey the laws of physics. But the supersensible world of the dualistic religions is outside nature; it is supernatural, or if you are squeamish about the word, supra-natural.32
For the one who believes in the intangible realm of this double reality, knowledge can come from building a bridge between this world and the other. We might touch this realm through our own spiritual efforts to commune with it, or beings might come out from it to commune with us, whether ghosts, angels, or deities. For those who accept the universe as a tangible natural phenomenon, knowledge comes through the evidence of our senses.
Science and free inquiry
Of course, we may be misled on occasion by our senses, and so humanists go further than what we have said so far and argue that we should ‘not trust the evidence of our senses blindly’ but ‘use it as a basis to predict future events’33 or at least to test the theories we have invented. This process gives our sense-experience a greater reliability over time through corroboration. We investigate the world and propose theories to account for our experience; we subject our theories to further experience, in particular under experimental conditions designed to either refute or corroborate theories; this allows us to answer questions about how the world works, and reject erroneous theories. This in outline is the ‘scientific method’, which humanists accept as the way to produce provisional descriptions of reality and hone the body of our knowledge in the direction of truth. It automatically precludes assent to propositions that rely solely on inherited dogma, claims of revelation, or arguments from personal and un-replicable experience. As a way of looking for truth it may still rest on assumptions, but as one humanist scientist pointed out to counter this criticism, these assumptions stand after centuries of sustained and successful growth in our knowledge:
It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man’s insecurity before himself and before nature … the Greeks for the first time wrought a system of thought whose conclusions no one could escape. The scientists of the Renaissance then devised the combination of systematic experiment with mathematical method … there was no longer room for basic differences of opinion in natural science … Since that time each generation has built up the heritage of knowledge and understanding, without the slightest danger of a crisis that might jeopardize the whole structure … [we] can register at least one great and important gain: confidence that human thought is dependable and natural law universal.34
As a more important counter, humanists will also point out that, although an assumption, it is itself is up to be questioned and is only to be accepted for as long as it continues to satisfy its own rigorous criteria for acceptance:
nothing is exempt from human question. This means that there is no immemorial tradition, no revelation, no authority, no privileged knowledge (first principles, intuitions, axioms) which is beyond question because beyond experience and which can be used as a standard by which to interpret experience. There is only experience to be interpreted in the light of further experience, the sole source of all standards of reason and value, for ever open to question. This radical assumption is itself, of course, open to question, and stands only in so far as it is upheld by experience.35
So it is frankly admitted by the humanist that the descriptions of reality offered by science are provisional and never entirely and totally certain – at any time evidence may present itself that renders old explanations redundant and new explanations preferable: ‘We must constantly check the results of our reasoning process against the facts, and see if they fit. If they don’t fit, we must respect the facts, and conclude that our reasoning was mistaken.’36 Given that this is so, humanists are committed to open and free enquiry, and have been amongst the most vigorous defenders of the right to freedom of thought and expression in all ages.
Valuing truth
To think in this way takes courage and self-discipline and is not easy. Some may ask, in consequence of this cost, why one should value truth at all or bother to seek it out. What have been the humanist responses? Answers have been presented to do with the practical utility of the truth – that it is the progenitor of so many technologies of benefit to humanity, whether medical or labour-saving or culturally enriching. Other humanists have stressed the social utility of the truth: that it is, in the words of one philosopher and social reformer, ‘one of the most important bases of human society. The due administration of justice absolutely depends upon it; whatever tends to weaken it, saps the foundations of morality, security, and happiness’.37 One humanist social justice campaigner stressed the personally empowering nature of the truth: ‘I appeal to you to be rational, critical, inspired with the spirit of enquiry. Don’t take things simply for granted … you shall never be able to be free on this earth so long as you remain a voluntary subject to forces unknown and unknowable.’38
These defences of truth all have something in them but they do not seem entirely necessary. Curiosity is inherent in the human being, as anyone on the receiving end of a young child’s questions knows. Almost as prevalent appears to be the desire not just to be told but actually to experience and to know for yourself. Of course, it is not universal but it is very widespread. Most of us do not want to live our lives on the basis of untruths, and this is a sentiment enthusiastically affirmed by humanists: ‘A happiness derived from beliefs not justified on any ground except their pleasantness is not a kind of happiness that can be unreservedly admired.’39 The idea that we have a psychological need for truth is not novel – it is present in humanist thought even two millennia ago: ‘It isn’t possible to get rid of our anxieties about essentials if we do not understand the nature of the universe and are apprehensive about some of the theological accounts. Hence it is impossible to enjoy our pleasures unadulterated without natural science.’40 It remains today an important part of the humanist proposition not only that truth can be discovered by human beings working hard to do so, but also that human life individually and collectively is enriched as a result of this enterprise.
The Humanist Approach 2: Understanding Ourselves
Back to the human being again
Taking a naturalistic and scientific view of things has consequences for how the humanist views the human being. To start with, the humanist sees the human being as not distinct from the rest of nature.41 The human being is a product of purposeless natural processes over the course of billions of years of development and change: we are unambiguously of this world. As one academic writer on humanism points out, even the ‘hum-’ in ‘humanism’ ultimately reflects this earthiness, cognate as it is with the Latin humus for ‘soil’ and homo meaning ‘earth-being’.42
Such a view of human beings as intrinsically part of this local realm may be uplifting and give a sense of profound wellbeing and security:
The humanist has a feeling of perfect at-homeness in the universe. He is conscious of himself as an earth-child. There is a mystic glow in this sense of belonging … Rooted in millions of years of planetary history, he has a secure feeling of being at home, and a consciousness of pride and dignity as a bearer of the heritage of the ages and growing creative centre of cosmic life.43
Or it may simply be seen as something to be understood and accepted, in the words of one humanist scientist:
We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher answer’– but none exists.44
Either way, it is a true description of ourselves as far as humanists are concerned. Equally universally, however, humanists point out that this recognition of our material nature implies no reduction of the human being. The humanist educator James Hemming indicated this with characteristic eloquence:
Our entire bodies and brains are made of a few dollars’ worth of common elements: oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, enough calcium to whitewash a chicken coop, sufficient iron to make a two-inch nail, phosphorous to tip a good number of matches, enough sulphur to dust a flea-plagued dog, together with modest amounts of potassium, chlorine, magnesium and sodium. Assemble them all in the right proportion, build the whole into an intricate interacting system, and the result is our feeling, thinking, striving, imagining, creative selves. Such ordinary elements; such extraordinary results!45
Understanding the material composition of the human being is not, for humanists, the end of the story:
We possess forethought and will … Uniquely among organisms, human beings are both objects of nature and subjects that can shape our own fate. We are biological beings, and under the purview of biological and physical laws. But we are also conscious beings with purpose and agency, traits the possession of which allow us to design ways of breaking the constraints of biological and physical laws. We are, in other words, both inside nature and outside of it.46
The ordinary nature of the parts is one thing, but the extraordinary nature of the whole is just as important.47 Although we are a tiny part of an enormous material universe, we are the most sophisticatedly self-conscious part of the universe of which we are aware; as such we are complicated and developing characters as well as physical entities. These are important statements to the humanist. What is it to be human? Many humanists would say that the answer lies in even the ability to ask that question: ‘the core of our humanity is our reflexiveness, our ability and need to take ourselves as the objects of our own inquiry’.48 When they begin to answer the question more fully, they do so not just with a biological account of origins but with a psychological account of the individual person and a sociological account of the individual person’s relatedness to others.
Death49
Whatever else the human being may be, the humanist conception of the self is of a mind irretrievably wrapped up in a body. The reasons why a humanist thinks this to be so should be fairly clear – the more we learn about the human body, the clearer it becomes that self-consciousness no less than consciousness is a product of our biology like everything else about us, and there is no reason to suppose that there is anything of us that could endure through death and beyond. For the humanist, therefore, physical death brings with it the annihilation of the individual personality:
The mind grows like the body; like the body, it inherits characteristics from both parents; it is affected by diseases of the body and by drugs; it is intimately connected with the brain. There is no scientific reason to suppose that after death the mind or soul acquires an independence of the brain which it never had in life.50
There is a widespread acceptance in much humanist thought that this view of death will naturally be a disquieting, if not frightening, view. The general response, from ancient times to the present day, is to urge fortitude and satisfaction in the sense of personal integrity that courage in the face of truth can bring. This is crystallized in a passage from Bertrand Russell much quoted by today’s humanists:51
I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation … Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about our place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver … in the end fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.52
Of course, the idea of annihilation is not viewed with timidity by all – to some it has been seen as better than the alternative. Among those who think we survive death, there is not a universal expectation of paradise – some fear that the afterlife exists and is a wretched fate. If this fear of future suffering can be dispelled by the acknowledgement of death as nothingness, than that may have a comforting effect rather than a chilling one. The flames of hell that could terrify the guilt-ridden schoolboy of nineteenth-century Christian England, or the empty, wraithlike character of the dead in mainstream ancient Greek thought (an equally horrifying prospect for any warm-blooded person) were less cheerful prospects than the annihilation promised by an Epicurus or a Bertrand Russell.
So, annihilation may be better than at least some alternatives, and of course it may itself bring release from pain or suffering in life, making it in extremis a resolution to be desired.53 Still, it is not in itself a consoling thought to those still vigorous and with no fear of hell. Nonetheless, frightening or not, for humanists this annihilation is a fact of life – and if we are not to simply collapse in horror, we have to face up to it, we have to make the best of it. All the evidence tells us that the human being is a physically complicated product of natural selection and a psychologically complicated product of inheritance and environment, capable of great things – but finite. This is the reality a humanist must deal with and the context in which the humanist must live.
Consequently, humanists have generated a range of responses to death which all seek to place this reality in a consoling context. They may point out that the finite nature of life is actually necessary to give life any shape and meaning at all:
Take the idea that life can only have a meaning if it never ends. It is certainly not the case that in general only endless activities can be meaningful. Indeed, usually the contrary is true: there being some end or completion is often required for an activity to have any meaning.54
The humanist knows that he relies on the temporal order for his life, for the power to learn from experience, to draw on the past for standards and means by which to enjoy the present and create the future.55
They may go further and say that the boundaries offered by death not only give life meaning but are the very thing that makes any individual personality possible:
The dictator … can grind down his citizens till they are all alike, but he cannot melt them into a single man … The memory of birth and the expectation of death always lurk within the human being, making him separate from his fellows and consequently capable of intercourse with them.56
They may stress the continuities that death illustrates, perhaps by speaking of the memories of our deeds that live in the minds of those we leave behind, or emphasizing the immortality of the particles that make us up:
