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Humanism: an Over-View ISSN 0972-11695 July 2000, Vol Humanism: An Over-View ISSN 0972-11695 July 2000, Vol. 1/I Humanism: An Over-View — G.B. Gupta he history of humanism is that of a continual effort on the part of man to redeem himself as one Tcreated in the image of God or as a creature of rich potentiality—an endeavour that is directed towards making man human in its most comprehensive sense. In all its phases or variations humanism has had to reckon with forces or factors that have been subversive of its characteristic thrust towards the betterment of the human condition. The fact that man today is not content to “live off the conceptual capital” of his ancestors is what makes one believe that newer forms of it will appear in order that in tone, character and quality life on this earth may improve for the ultimate good of man. What is most encouraging is that the humanistic impulse is often found transcending the tendencies which have brought to the fore new modes and even new prescriptions. Humanism: Its Origin and Development Humanism has been so closely identified with the temper and mode of thought of contemporary man that our age may be regarded as an age of humanism.1 Modern science has knit all countries into a community of nations and made isolationism and parochialism tendencies that may spell universals ruin. And no current philosophy can afford to ignore the profound importance of Man as central to all values and schemes of things. This explains the ascendancy of humanism as a philosophy of contemporary mankind. The history of humanist philosophy is long and involved, and the term ‘humanism’ continues to entertain several and diverse connotations. The origins of humanism in the West are in Hellenic thought which has led to “the high valuation of the possibilities in men”. The earliest humanists were sophists, the philosophers who turned their attention from ontological and cosmological problems to the problems of Man and his conduct and thus proclaimed the intrinsic importance of Man. Most of the humanists start with at least an allusion to Protagoras whose popular, if controversial, dictum, “Man is the measure of all things”, has been so influential that it has successfully persuaded some critics to give the appellation of neo-Protagoreanism to humanism. Simply interpreted, the dictum admits of no distinction between sense and reason. Sensory perception is the only test of truth and reason is ruled out of court. So, there remains nothing like objective truth. What is true to me is true to me and what is true to you is true to you. This inevitably results in nothing but stark anarchy and utter chaos, Mr. Stace tries to give an acceptable interpretation: “Man is the measure of all things”; Global Religious Vision, Vol. I/I 6 G.B. Gupta certainly, but man as a rational being, not man as bundle of particular sensations, subjective impressions, impulses, irrational prejudices, self-will, mere eccentricities, oddities, foibles, and fancies.2 Whether one agrees with this interpretation or not, the aphorism makes it amply clear that with Protagoras, Greek philosophy veered from theology and cosmology to man and thus, sowed the seed of humanism which was to grow sooner or later into a huge tree of myriad branches. It was Socrates who prevented the sophistic idea of the greatness of human personality from degenerating into narrow subjectivism by arguing that objective standards of truth were not incompatible with the individualism of the Sophists. The quintessence of his thought lay in his firm faith in human personality as the fundamental reality whereas all social and political institutions were at best aids to human development. Virtue, knowledge and human happiness were all identical to Socrates. Right knowledge ought to lead man to right action, and right action to unsullied happiness. And hence, Socrates pleaded for the acquisition of the knowledge of one’s self. Thus his axiom, “Know thyself”, forms an important tenet of humanism. The contribution of Socrates lies in the fact that his philosophy, which he never cared to commit to writing, tried to conjoin man with the eternal and this through right knowledge which is virtue. The humanism of Plato consists, if in anything clearly, in his ethics. He advocates the development of man’s highest faculties, and symmetry of life, by which he means the establishment of proper balance between reason, spirit, and desire. Man arrives at virtue when reason controls and guides him to knowledge. Thus, we find that both Socrates and Plato make clear thinking, right perception and right action the centre of their ethical teachings. Reason, according to Aritotle, is man’s highest attribute and his glory; and man must be viewed as man, neither as angel nor as devil. Obviously, the virtue we must study is human virtue. To quote Herschell Baker: “His (Aristotle’s) humanism is the most urbane kind of humanism, one that candidly names as its object an attainable good”.3 So, we find that humanistic ideas have formed the core of the teachings of the greatest of thinkers of ancient Greece, like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. A discerning eye cannot miss the point that in most of the classical Greek literature there runs a strain of humanism. It is to be seen, for instance, in the pathos resulting from man’s constant struggle against the inevitable cosmic forces as, say, in the Iliad. The ancient Greek humanism, though not antagonistic to religion, conclusively shows that the ancient Greeks had profound respect for man, man as such. We find that it is the resolute struggle of man against Fate that forms the core of the Greek tragedies. Prometheus, for instance, was a glorious model of a humanist. He wished to remain chained to the rock rather than become a slave of Zeus. The figures of Zeus and Venus in marble are the representations of human personality at its sublimest. And the Sophoclean adage is too fundamental to humanism to be ignored: “Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man”. Herschell Baker has admirably summed up the Greek view of humanism thus: “To understand his own morphology as well as that of the universe is man’s highest function, and leads to the state of well-being which is virtue”. This is a apogee of humanism—which, for the Greek, was an attitude and habit of mind rather than a philosophical system or cult.4 The second stream of ancient humanism is to be found in the first flush of Christianity and the person of Jesus Christ, an ideal humanist, who clearly declared to the Hebrew world that Sabbath July 2000 Humanism: An Over-View 7 was meant for man and not the other way round. But the essentially humanistic teachings of Christ were soon practically ignored and forgotten and the dignity of human personality was almost entirely forgotten till the time of the Renaissance. It was during the period of the Renaissance that man again became the centre of values and an end in himself. Human freedom became the ideal of man. Renaissance humanism was an intellectual impulse, a cultural and educational programme for the moulding of a desirable type of man in the fashion of the man glorified in the classics, which revealed a magnificent civilisation built by the ancient Greeks and Romans who lived happily for hundreds of years sans any assistance from revelation or supernatural sanctions. This turned the Renaissance man’s attention from the problem of what might become of man after death to the question of how best he could make his earthly existence happy. As B.A.G. Fuller says: “It was that Western Europe awoke to the possibilities latent in the natural man and that the individual became actually self-conscious and engrossed with his own particular temperament and capacities and with the problem and means of expressing them to the utmost. For this reason, the epoch is known as the Renaissance, or the period of rebirth and its pre-occupation with the development of human self-realisation here and now, in this world, within the limits set by birth and death, has given to its spirit the name of humanism”.5 The most distinctive feature of Renaissance humanism is, of course, its classicism. Humanism here means the study of ‘humane letters’. This involved an avid collection, editing and translation of the ancient Greek and Latin classics, as also efforts at self-expression with those classics as models. This trend is clearly manifest in Petrarch, its inaugurator and “the proto-typal embodiment of the rising zeal for classical study”.6 Petrach, himself a moral philosopher, believed that the sole aim of philosophy ought to be to teach the art of living well and happily. He was followed by a veritable host of humanists such as Boccaccio, Salutati, Bruni, Poggio, Pomponazzi, Lorenzo Valla, Ficino and Mirandola—to mention only a few of them. Anti-scholasticism and anti-medievalism are the two other important characteristics of Renaissance humanism. But in the nineteenth century, humanism received a death-blow at the hands of Naturalism according to which physical and chemical forces constituted the whole reality and man only a by- product and then at the hands of Absolutism which reduced man to a shadow of the Absolute. Both Naturalism and Absolutism denied the importance of human personality. What is described as “Christian humanism” is best represented by Erasmus, the prince of the northern humanists. His “philosophy of Christ” is essentially an attempt at turning away from scientific questions to the problems of moral life and religious imagination. He insisted on the dignity of man and argued that man was important vicariously through Christ’s atonement and God’s grace.
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