humanism

n.

1. A system of thought that rejects religious beliefs and centers on humans and their values, capacities, and worth.
2. Concern with the interests, needs, and welfare of humans: "the newest flower on the vine of corporate humanism" (Savvy).
3. Medicine. The concept that concern for human interests, values, and dignity is of the utmost importance to the care of the sick.
4. The study of the humanities; learning in the liberal arts.
5. Humanism A cultural and intellectual movement of the Renaissance that emphasized secular concerns as a result of the rediscovery and study of the literature, art, and civilization of ancient Greece and Rome.

For more information on humanism, visit Britannica.com.

Humanism was an intellectual and cultural movement based on the recovery, interpretation, and imitation of Greek and Roman antiquity. It began in the fourteenth century and continued to flourish until the seventeenth, making an impact not only on scholarship but also on literature, art, and science. A variety of different attitudes towards the body can be found in the writings of humanists. What all these views have in common, however, is that they derive from the study of the classical past.

Many humanists were teachers, and in their pedagogical theory and practice they devoted attention to physical development as well as to intellectual formation. The Education of Boys (1450), for example, by Enea Silvio Piccolomini (1405-64), later to become Pope Pius II, is divided into two parts: the first concerned with the body, the second with the mind. Piccolomini stressed the necessity of developing a sturdy physique by avoiding feather beds, silk clothing, and other luxurious items which encouraged softness and effeminacy. Youths were advised to obey Plato's dictum, as recounted by St Basil, that the body should be indulged with food and drink only to the extent that it was of service to philosophy. Relying on the Roman rhetorician Quintilian and the Greek moralist Plutarch (to whom an influential pedagogical treatise was falsely attributed), Piccolomini counselled against corporal punishment, ‘since boys must be led to virtue by rational arguments, and admonitions, not by wounds and blows’. He was nevertheless a keen advocate of energetic physical training and martial exercises, as practised by the ancient Spartans and described by the Roman military theorist Vegetius, since these helped to develop a strong and vigorous body, which his noble and princely students would need for future exploits in battle.

In addition to the pedagogical value of physical exercise, humanists took an interest in its health-giving benefits. The physician Hieronymus Mercurialis (1530-1606) drew on an enormous range of Greek and Latin texts in his Six Books on the Gymnastic Art, Famous among the Ancients but Unknown in Our Times (1559). Although Mercurialis wanted to revive this lost art, he recommended exercising only in the morning and taking a nap in the afternoon, because man's physical constitution had weakened considerably since antiquity on account of changed eating habits and daily routines.

For the French medical humanist Jacobus Sylvius (1478-1555), the difference between ancient and modern bodies was more than a matter of physical condition. A passionate defender of Galen, Sylvius argued that where the Greek physician's anatomical descriptions differed from those of his critic Andreas Vesalius (1514-64), which were based on dissection, it was due to the fact that the massive Roman frame had degenerated over the centuries into the puny body of contemporary man. Despite such cases of misguided devotion to antiquity, the philological study of Greek medical works, many newly available in print in the Aldine editions of Galen (1525) and Hippocrates (1526), contributed in no small measure to the increasing knowledge of human anatomy in the first half of the sixteenth century.

Humanists also gained knowledge of the body through their study of Greek and Latin tracts on physiognomy, which taught them to infer mental and moral characteristics from corporeal signs. In On Good Manners for Boys (1530), Erasmus (c.1469-1536) maintained that a smooth brow indicated a good conscience and that a well-ordered mind would reveal itself through calm, steady eyes. In addition, he showed how to decode body language: crossing one's legs when sitting was a sign of uneasiness, while standing with one's legs wide apart was the hallmark of a braggart. Among the bodily habits for which Erasmus laid down behavioural guidelines were spitting, nose-wiping, and answering the call of nature (to be done in private, but even so with modesty and decency, ‘for the angels are always near’).

Another ancient source from which humanists took ideas about the body was Greek philosophy. Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) translated all of Plato's dialogues into Latin, thus making generally available the Platonic belief that the body occupied the lowest level of reality, that it was the prison of the soul, and that the truly wise man would attempt to escape its material confines through contemplation of immaterial ideas, such as Truth and Beauty. From Epicurus, on the other hand, humanists such as Thomas More (1478-1535) learned to appreciate the value of corporeal pleasures. In his Utopia (1516) More imagined an ideal society, whose entirely rational inhabitants had a high regard for the stable and calm pleasures which derive from health, beauty, and strength, and even took unashamed delight in those which come by way of the senses.

A popular humanist genre was the praise of mankind, which usually included sections on both the body and the soul. The first book, for instance, of On Man's Dignity and Excellence (1452), by Giannozzo Manetti (1396-1459), is a hymn to the beauty, utility, and divine craftsmanship of the human body. Quoting long passages of Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods and Lactantius's On the Handiwork of God, Manetti lovingly describes each organ and limb, noting how man's erect posture, unique among all living beings, allows him to observe and contemplate the heavens; and how the placement of his eyes, ears and nose ‘in the citadel of the head’ is marvellously adapted to sense perception, while nevertheless keeping these delicate organs far away from the bodily equivalent of drains, which, as in the best-designed houses, are relegated to the rear.

Humanists uncovered a more inspiring parallel between buildings and the human body in the architectural treatise of the Roman author Vitruvius. He compared the symmetry of a temple to that of a well-proportioned man, who, with extended hands and feet, fits exactly into both a circle and a square, the two most perfect geometrical figures. The famous drawing of ‘Vitruvian man’ (Venice, Accademia) by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is a good example of the way in which the humanists' study of ancient texts influenced the Renaissance perception of the human body.

— Jill Kraye

Bibliography

• Kraye, J. (ed.) (1996). The Cambridge companion to Renaissance humanism. Cambridge University Press.
• Nutton, V. (1988). From Democedes to Harvey: studies in the history of medicine. Variorum Reprints, London

humanism, a 19th‐century term for the values and ideals of the European Renaissance, which placed a new emphasis on the expansion of human capacities. Reviving the study of Greek and Roman history, philosophy, and arts, the Renaissance humanists developed an image of ‘Man’ more positive and hopeful than that of medieval ascetic Christianity: rather than being a miserable sinner awaiting redemption from a pit of fleshly corruption, ‘Man’ was a source of infinite possibilities, ideally developing towards a balance of physical, spiritual, moral, and intellectual faculties. Most early humanists like Erasmus and Milton in the 16th and 17th centuries combined elements of Christian and classical cultures in what has become known as Christian humanism, but the 18th‐century Enlightenment began to detach the ideal of human perfection from religious supernaturalism, so that by the 20th century humanism came to denote those moral philosophies that abandon theological dogma in favour of purely human concerns. While being defined against theology on the one side, humanism came also to be contrasted with scientific materialism on the other: from the mid‐19th century onwards, Matthew Arnold and others (including the New Humanists in the United States, led by Paul More and Irving Babbitt in the 1920s) opposed the claims of science with the ideal of balanced human perfection, self‐cultivation, and ethical self‐restraint. This Arnoldian humanism, which has enjoyed wide influence in Anglo‐American literary culture, is one variety of the prevalent liberal humanism, which centres its view of the world upon the notion of the freely self‐determining individual. In modern literary theory, liberal humanism (and sometimes all humanism) has come under challenge from post‐structuralism, which replaces the unitary concept of ‘Man’with that of the ‘subject’, which is gendered, ‘de‐centred’, and nolonger self‐determining. For a fuller account, consult Tony Davies, Humanism (1996).

This term, first coined in the 18th c., is used, broadly speaking, in two different senses which it is important not to confuse. In Renaissance studies it refers to a scholarly movement devoted to the thoroughgoing revival of the writings of classical antiquity and embodied in a pedagogical programme designed to supersede the logic-based scholasticism of the later Middle Ages [see Classical Influences]. The term humanista was coined in the late 15th c. from the classical Latin phrase studia humanitatis to designate students and scholars who chose this kind of study. As the name implies, a central aim of such ‘humanists’ was to promote a more human-based approach to learning, including a cultivation of eloquence for practical purposes and a study of disciplines such as history and moral philosophy. But this did not entail an abandonment of Christian belief: indeed, most humanists—especially in northern Europe—were deeply concerned to demonstrate the compatibility of ancient culture with Christian faith and values. In modern times ‘humanism’ has been used, by contrast, to refer to a philosophical outlook in which man is assigned value in his own right, and hence normally implies an atheistic or at least an agnostic frame of reference: thus, for example, Sartre's claim that ‘l'existentialisme est un humanisme’.

[TC]

Most generally, any philosophy concerned to emphasize human welfare and dignity, and either optimistic about the powers of human reason, or at least insistent that we have no alternative but to use it as best we can. More particularly, the movement distinctive of the Renaissance and allied to the renewed study of Greek and Roman literature: a rediscovery of the unity of human beings and nature, and a renewed celebration of the pleasures of life, all supposed lost in the medieval world. Humanism in this Renaissance sense was quite consistent with religious belief, it being supposed that God had put us here precisely in order to further those things the humanists found important. Later the term tended to become appropriated for anti-religious social and political movements. Finally, in the late 20th century, humanism is sometimes used as a pejorative term by postmodernist and especially feminist writers, applied to philosophies such as that of Sartre, that rely upon the possibility of the autonomous, selfconscious, rational, single self, and that are supposedly insensitive to the inevitable fragmentary, splintered, historically and socially conditioned nature of personality and motivation.

[De]

A philosophy or ethical system that centres on the concept of the dignity, freedom, and value of human beings. The belief that there is an essential human condition that emerges regardless of historical circumstance and that this can be used as the basis for developing an understanding of the past.

How does humanism connect with humanity? The dictionary doesn't help, both words have a cluster of meanings. The Renaissance humanists (for example, Petrarch and Erasmus) were so called because they felt that Christianity should be as much concerned with human affairs here on earth as with the afterlife in heaven and hell, and also because they were learned in the newly discovered literature of classical Greece and Rome, which was rated as 'the humanities' because it was the secular work of man whereas the Bible and the patristic commentaries were treated as the divinely inspired works of God.

Contemporary humanism is a morally concerned style of intellectual atheism openly avowed by only a small minority of individuals (for example, those who are members of the British Humanist Association) but tacitly accepted by a wide spectrum of educated people in all parts of the Western world. The essence of this modern humanism is summed up in the following quotation from Vico (Giovanni Battista Vico, 1668–1744, professor of rhetoric at Naples), who was an 18th-century Italian, though he wrote in the manner of the Renaissance humanists: '[it is] a truth beyond all question that the world of civil society has certainly been made by man and that its principles are therefore to be rediscovered within the modifications of our own human mind.'

Vico considered himself a Christian, but 20th-century humanists had no use for God either as an external force which interferes in the processes of nature and the affairs of men or as an arbiter of moral judgements. Many things that happen are the consequence of pure chance, but there is no point in deifying chance and treating it as a disembodied mind which might respond intentionally to prayer. The only intentional force in the world is our own human mind.

But although modern humanists reject supernaturalism, they are not behaviourists in any simple sense. They do not claim that all human action can be explained in terms of triggered responses to external stimuli. Humanists believe that we are capable of making choices, changing our minds, and telling lies. Men are therefore responsible for what they do. But this formula is less straightforward than it seems. Where is this 'I' located that can assume responsibility for what I do?

Let us go back to Vico, who was a thinker of great subtlety. Vico contrasted certainty (certum), which is what we learn from empirical observation, and truth (verum), which he thought of as a kind of structural model in the mind which we use to interpret the 'certainties' of our sensory experience. Hence history, that which we know as certain, is constantly transformed by the developing modifications of the mind through which alone we come to know what is true. Putting the same argument in a different way, Vico insisted that an external observer can never understand a product of human craft in the way that the craftsman himself understands it. Comparably we can understand human history not only because men made it but because our understanding comes from the truths which we hold in our mind rather than from the certainties which we obtain as external observers.

The relevance of all this to humanism is that it bears on what we might mean by the concept humanity. In what sense is this creature 'man', who makes his own history as a carpenter makes a chair, 'other than' just an animal caught up in the accidents of fate? How is man different? What makes him a human being?

The religious answer to this question is that man has a soul; the atheist–humanist answer is that man has a mind. But what do we mean by that? Significantly, both in German (Geist) and in French (esprit) soul and mind are covered by the same word.

Let us try to be more specific. Humanity is that which differentiates man from other animals. Where does that get us to? What can we do that they cannot do?

All animals have a limited capacity to discriminate and categorize other animals. They can recognize members of their own species and discriminate as to sex; they can distinguish food from not-food; they can recognize potential predators; some highly social species (for example, various insects, birds, rodents, baboons) can learn to discriminate neighbours from strangers. In man this last capability has been greatly elaborated. In the human case the development of a self-conscious 'I' which is contrasted with 'other' is closely linked with the formation of verbal concepts. The structure of speech, which is linear and segmented, encourages us to perceive our environment as consisting of separable 'things' and 'events' and 'categories' each of which can be described by a name. The discriminations which are indicated by such contrasts as 'I'/'other', 'we'/'they' are a part of this very general process.

But our thinking is not limited to this linear form in which we distinguish polarities, one thing after another. We also think by analogy (metaphor), one thing superimposed upon another. Thus, while polarity may lead us to distinguish 'I'/'other', 'we'/'they', 'man'/'animal', 'tame'/'wild', 'cultivated'/'natural', analogy may lead us to feel that these pairs somehow resemble one another, so that 'we' are to 'they' is as 'man' is to 'animal', as 'tame' is to 'wild', and as 'culture' is to 'nature'.

The way we make discriminations and the way we make metaphoric associations seems to be largely arbitrary so that, overall, there are many degrees of freedom built into the way we perceive the environment in which we live. A great deal of this 'freedom' (arbitrariness) derives from our use of language in category formation; hence we may infer that other animals, which do not possess language, have a much more constricted perception of the world. To put it differently, because we have language we are able to convert sensory inputs into 'concepts in the mind' and we can play with these concepts in the imagination without reference to operations in the external world. We have persuaded ourselves that this is a human characteristic which is not shared by other animals.

The concepts which have been listed above all represent categories that derive from our experience of the external world, but language allows us to form other concepts which are wholly products of the imagination and which have no objective counterpart in the world out there. We can then use polarity to distinguish things in the world from products of the imagination, thus: 'man'/'God', 'mortal'/'immortal', 'imperfection'/'perfection', 'impotence'/'omnipotence' — and then, by the use of analogy, we may come to polarize 'impotent–imperfect–mortal–man' against 'omnipotent–perfect–immortal–God'. But this is precisely the dichotomy that modern humanists reject as superstition!

In some ways this is paradoxical since it is one of the peculiarities of our humanity that we should be capable of inventing such religious concepts at all. The point is, however, that whereas religion insists that God created man in his own image, humanist scepticism maintains that man created God in his own (mirror) image and that it is only self-deception that leads us to credit this mirror image with a potency which we ourselves lack. Humanists hold that religious faith is undesirable first because it encourages belief in what is false, namely that the human individual survives after death, and secondly because, by attributing omnipotence to God, it undervalues both the limited potency of man and the final responsibility that goes with it.

But God is more than a magnified non-natural man; he is also the source of moral judgement and here the humanists run into difficulty.

During the 19th century atheistical moralists believed that they could dispense with God the Moral Arbiter and substitute an equally metaphysical concept, Human Reason. At this stage in its development rationalist humanism was simply a variation of 18th-century deism and was itself a form of religion which even developed a church hierarchy. Modern humanism has largely abandoned ideas of this sort, though the central humanist thesis that human beings are what they are because of their education rather than because they were created to be that way by God has persisted right through. But 'education' must here be understood in the broad sense of socialization. The individual is created by the whole social milieu into which he was born; my consciousness of myself is coloured by my class consciousness, by my community consciousness, and by my national consciousness of what 'we' are as against the 'others'.

When it comes to morality, humanists now recognize that each individual's conceptions of what is right and wrong will depend upon the circumstances of his upbringing. And since humanists reject the idea that there can be any absolute criteria for making such distinctions they are led to put an unusually high valuation on the virtue of tolerance.

Many religions preach tolerance, but they do not practise it. The divine commandment 'Love thy neighbour as thyself' has never inhibited Christians from inflicting every imaginable barbarity upon their neighbours in the name of true religion. But it was a 16th-century humanist, Montaigne (1533–92), who first complained that the contemporary treatment of heretics was far more horrible than anything that had been reliably reported of South American cannibals.

In this context the unique feature of humanism is that not only does it proclaim the virtue of tolerance but at the same time it denounces all forms of religious zeal, including zeal for humanism itself. In short, humanism is an intellectual attitude rather than the creed of a religious sect or political party; it provides us with a sceptical base from which to criticize the prejudiced certainties with which other people are prepared to proclaim the Will of God and the Destiny of Mankind, but it is not in itself a guidebook to any new kind of Utopia.

(Published 1987)

— Sir Edmund Leach

Bibliography
• Blackburn, S. (2003). Being Good.
• Hinde, R. (1997). Religion and Darwinism.
• Holloway, R. (1999). Godless Morality.

---

Quotes:

"Humanism, it seems, is almost impossible in America where material progress is part of the national romance whereas in Europe such progress is relished because it feels nice." - Paul West

"Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace." - Simone Weil

"When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists." - Walter Lippmann

Dansk (Danish)
n. - humanisme

Nederlands (Dutch)
humanisme

Français (French)
n. - humanisme

Deutsch (German)
n. - Humanismus

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ανθρωπισμός, ουμανισμός

Italiano (Italian)
umanesimo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - humanismo (m)

Русский (Russian)
гуманизм

Español (Spanish)
n. - humanismo

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - humanitet, humanism

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
人性, 人道, 人文主义

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 人性, 人道, 人文主義

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 인본주의, 인문주의, 인도주의

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 人間主義, 人本主義, 人文主義, 古典研究, 人道主義

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) الحركه الانسانيه احياء الآداب الكلاسيكسه والروح الفرديه والنقديه والتأكيد على, الهموم الدنيويه كما تجلى ذلك في عصر النهضه الاوروبيه, الخيريه محبه الخير العام, الفلسفه الانسانيه فلسفه تؤكد على قيمه الانسان وقدرته على تحقيق الذات من طريق العقل, وكثيرا ما ترفض الايمان بأيه قوة خارقه للطبيعه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮אנושיות, הומניות, השקפת-עולם המתרכזת באדם במקום באלוהים או בעניינים על-טבעיים, אמונה המדגישה את הצרכים האנושיים הרגילים ומתייחסת לבני-אדם כאל יצורים שכלתניים, תרבות ספרותית, בייחוד זו של ההומניסטים של הרנסנס‬

If you are unable to view some languages clearly, click here.

To select your translation preferences click here.