[Sarah Bakewell’s sweeping new survey of the philosophical
tradition, “Humanly Possible,” says that putting your faith in
human behavior means confronting complacency and nihilism — but it
can be worth it.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE TRICKY THING WITH HUMANISM, THIS BOOK IMPLIES, IS HUMANS  
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Jennifer Szalai
March 29, 2023
The New York Times
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_ Sarah Bakewell’s sweeping new survey of the philosophical
tradition, “Humanly Possible,” says that putting your faith in
human behavior means confronting complacency and nihilism — but it
can be worth it. _

,

 

Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking,
Inquiry, and Hope
Sarah Bakewell
Penguin Press
ISBN: 9780735223370

“I am human, and consider nothing human alien to me”: The famous
line from the Roman playwright Terence, written more than two
millenniums ago, is easy to assert but hard to live by, at least with
any consistency. The attitude it suggests is adamantly open-minded and
resolutely pluralist: Even the most annoying, the most confounding,
the most atrocious example of anyone’s behavior is necessarily part
of the human experience. There are points of connection between all of
us weirdos, no matter how different we are. Michel de Montaigne liked
the line so much that he had the Latin original — _Homo sum, humani
nihil a me alienum puto_ — inscribed on a ceiling joist in his
library.

But as Sarah Bakewell notes in her lively new book, “Humanly
Possible,” Terence wrote the line as a joke. It’s said by a
busybody character after being asked why he cannot seem to keep his
nose out of everybody else’s beeswax. This sly double meaning is
what makes the line so fitting for the capacious tradition known as
humanism that Bakewell writes about. On the one hand, the quote offers
a high-minded philosophical sentiment; on the other, it’s a playful
gag. Humanism, too, has always had to negotiate between noble ideals
of humanity and the peculiarities of actual humans. Paradox and
ambiguity aren’t to be rejected but embraced. “Dispute and
contradiction, not veneration and obedience, are the essence of
intellectual life,” Bakewell writes.

The value of debate and skepticism sounds fairly unobjectionable now,
but as Bakewell shows, this turned out to be a radical way of
apprehending the world. She begins her story in earnest in the 1300s,
during the early Renaissance, and ends with the present day.
“Understanding human life non-supernaturally,” as she puts it, was
— even for those humanists who didn’t reject religion outright —
a startling rebuke to religious doctrine. Immediate kindnesses should
be valued for being immediate kindnesses, not because they brought any
kind of glory in an afterlife. A focus on the here and now made for an
intrinsic irreverence. The poet Petrarch wrote letters to classical
authors he admired and signed off with the words “From the land of
the living.” His friend Boccaccio wrote about pantless priests and
bawdy nuns.

Bakewell is the author of several books, including the marvelous
“How to Live” (a biography of Montaigne) and the terrific “At
the Existentialist Café.” Her new book is filled with her
characteristic wit and clarity; she manages to wrangle seven centuries
of humanist thought into a brisk narrative, resisting the traps of
windy abstraction and glib oversimplification. But covering such
enormous terrain means that “Humanly Possible” doesn’t quite
have the bracing focus of her earlier work, even if there are several
points of overlap. “Humanism is personal, and it is a semantic cloud
of meanings and implications, none attachable to any particular
theorist or practitioner,” she writes. Saying that humanists “all
look to the _human_ dimension of life” narrows it down somewhat, but
only up to a point. To put it another way, how do you keep your story
contained when nothing human could be alien to humanism?

Still, Bakewell identifies commonalities in humanist thought. The
thinkers in this book did what they could to promote the conditions
for happiness and fellow-feeling while also trying to mitigate
suffering. For the most part, they abhorred injustice, not to mention
cruelty, though sometimes these commitments came into conflict with
one another. Bakewell gives several examples of humanists who
sympathized with attempts to change the status quo (Condorcet and the
French Revolution; Erasmus and Lutheranism) only to recoil once those
attempts turned violent.
 

But the humanist tendency toward moderation has often turned out to be
helpless against the anti-humanist forces of extermination. In 1935,
as Nazism was ascendant, Thomas Mann noticed that in “humanism there
is an element of weakness,” which he predicted “may be its
ruin.” Bakewell puts the charge against humanists another way:
“They always try to see the other side of any question. When dealing
with murderous fanaticism, that is not necessarily helpful.” They
risked both-sidesing themselves into oblivion.

Bakewell concedes that the anti-humanist critique is important, so
that humanists don’t become too smug or complacent. But she
identifies in anti-humanism a kind of complacency, too — a nihilism,
or fatalism, which assumes that the impossibility of perfection should
drive us into a quest for domination or else the depths of despair.
Humanists put a lot of stock in reason, although a good humanist will
also admit that when it comes to reason, nobody has a monopoly on it.
This is why rhetoric isn’t a matter of wily persuasion but “a
moral activity,” she says. Writing about Frederick Douglass, whose
skills as a writer and orator were a matter of life and death,
Bakewell extols the power of language to connect us.

To that end, Bakewell practices what she preaches — or, since
preaching would be anathema to a humanist, she does what she suggests.
She puts her entire self into this book, linking philosophical
reflections with vibrant anecdotes. She delights in the paradoxical
and the particular, reminding us that every human being contains
multitudes.

This can lead her to some wonderful asides. In his book “On Good
Manners for Boys,” Erasmus included some tips on what to do if one
needs to pass gas in polite company, advising the flatulent boy to
keep his brow unfurrowed, “not irresolute like a hedgehog’s; not
menacing like a bull’s.” When Bertrand Russell was in a seaplane
accident in Norway and a journalist called him afterward to ask
whether his brush with death had led him to think about such
high-flown concepts as mysticism and logic, he said no, it had not.
“I thought the water was cold.”

Bakewell is such a companionable storyteller that it was only toward
the end of the book, when she makes passing mention of the ecological
destruction we humans have wrought, that I wondered what a satisfying
humanist response to our current climate predicament might be.
Bakewell, for her part, cautions against the siren calls of
posthumanism (the world will be better off without us) and
transhumanism (we can technologically innovate ourselves out of our
pesky bodies). She prefers “the richness of actual life.”
 
There is a beauty to this, even if it doesn’t quite answer the
question of how to rein in all the godlike powers we have already
unleashed — not infrequently in our attempts to make the world more
hospitable to our desires and amplify “the richness of actual
life,” at least as it is enjoyed by humans. But perhaps it comes
down to recognizing what we share with other creatures. Blandly
optimistic statements about human potential sound less inspiring than
an unflinching recognition of our limits. “One is responsible to
life,” James Baldwin wrote. “It is the small beacon in that
terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall
return.”
 
_Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.
__@jenszalai_ [[link removed]]

* humanism
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* Philosophy
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* History of philosophy
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