Perez Zagorin
on humanism
past & present
Is there, or can there be, any place for
humanism in the world of the twenty-
½rst century? After the appalling events
of the past century, is there any ground
left to believe that mankind may yet
come to regard the life and happiness
of human beings as a supreme value to
be cherished and promoted in every pos-
sible way?
These are some of the questions com-
prised in the broad general question of
whether humanism both as a concept
and a substantive ideal may still possess
the power to help shape the course of
human affairs.
In the West, humanism ½rst came to
birth in Greece during the fourth and
½fth centuries b.c.e., in the age of Plato
and Aristotle. It was the Sophists who,
as teachers in the ½fth century, originat-
ed humanism as a cultural-educational
Perez Zagorin is Joseph C. Wilson Professor of
History Emeritus at the University of Rochester
and a Fellow of the Shannon Center for Advanced
Studies at the University of Virginia. He has been
a Fellow of the American Academy since 1976.
© 2003 by the American Academy of Arts
& Sciences
program or paideia aimed at the many-
sided development of man’s faculties
and the creation of the highest excel-
lence of which he was capable. “The un-
examined life,” Plato’s Apology recorded
Socrates as saying, “is not worth living.”
Indeed, although the Greek language
had no word for humanism, a concern
with man and his dignity became the
focus of Greek thought at this period in
drama, philosophy, and history. And so
Sophocles wrote, “Wonders are many,
and none is more wonderful than man.”
Greek humanism persisted among the
successors of Plato and Aristotle, but, al-
though it included lasting values, it was
not an offering to all mankind. It was a
cultural program designed predominant-
ly for an elite of free men of aristocratic
background and independent means
who had the leisure for the pursuit of ex-
cellence. It was predicated on the idea of
an inherent superiority of the Greek over
the barbarian. It arose and developed in
an era of internecine war between the
Greek cities, and extended down to the
time of the conquests of Alexander the
Great. It took for granted the existence
of war and the institution of human slav-
ery as permanent features of human so-
ciety.
The humanism that developed in re-
publican Rome rested on similar values.
The Romans of the republic were one of
the most predatory peoples in world his-
tory, as well as among the greatest mili-
tary leaders, statesmen, empire builders,
rulers, legislators, and administrators. In
the ½rst century b.c.e., during the ½nal
years of the republic, before Julius Cae-
sar’s heir Augustus acquired sole power,
Cicero, a Roman consul and member of
the republican ruling class, de½ned hu-
manism in a manner that was to remain
influential for centuries. For him, hu-
manism was an educational and cultural
program and an ideal expressed in the
concept of humanitas.
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Note by
Perez
Zagorin
This Latin term designated a number
of studies–philosophy, history, litera-
ture, rhetoric, and training in oratory–
that were considered to be the ingredi-
ents of a liberal education, and it also
referred to the moral attributes of hu-
maneness, philanthropy or benevolence,
gentleness, and kindness. Something of
the essence of Ciceronian humanism
might be summed up in the words with
which the seventeenth-century English
poet John Milton, who was a Christian
humanist, de½ned the nature of edu-
cation. In 1644, Milton wrote that “a
complete and generous education”–by
which he meant the education of a gen-
tleman–was one that “½ts a man to per-
form justly, skillfully, and magnani-
mously all the of½ces, both private and
public, of peace and war.”
There was also a medieval humanism,
whose character has most recently been
traced out in the last works of the great
English medievalist R. W. Southern.
This humanism appeared as part of the
renewal of civilization that followed the
end of the Roman empire and pagan cul-
ture in the West and the gradual emer-
gence of a new Christian and feudalized
society in the earlier Middle Ages. The
cathedral schools and the new universi-
ties of Paris and some of the Italian cities
then became the centers for the three
disciplines that constituted the bases of
order and civilization in medieval Eu-
rope: liberal arts, Roman and canon law,
and theology. Along with these disci-
plines, the medieval study of the works
of Aristotle in Latin translations was
perhaps the single most important intel-
lectual foundation of scholastic human-
ism. Another foundation was the belief
in the dignity of human nature, which
scholastic thinkers equated with the
power of the human mind to perceive
the grandeur of the universe, the princi-
ples of nature, and the divine purpose of
the creation. But Scholastic humanism
was not a general social program based
on an ideal of human excellence; it was a
select type of higher education designed
for the minority of clergy who went to
university in order to be trained as the-
ologians and teachers or to take their
place as of½cials in papal and ecclesiasti-
cal government or in the expert service
of secular rulers.
Of all the major versions of human-
ism, the Renaissance humanism that
developed in Italy during the fourteenth
and ½fteenth centuries has been the
most influential. The humanism of the
Renaissance was neither anti-Christian
nor irreligious, but it centered increas-
ingly upon human interests and moral
concerns rather than religion. Human
dignity, the value of the active life in the
world, and man’s possession of free will
to do good or evil were among the essen-
tial premises of this humanism. And yet,
like the humanisms that preceded it, it
exempli½ed an elitist ideal; its highest
aim was the formation of Christian
gentlemen–classically educated, mor-
ally sound, accomplished in the arts of
speaking and writing, competent to ad-
vise and serve in the governments of
kings, princes, and cities, and possessed
of the manners to make a creditable ap-
pearance at royal and princely courts.
The conception of culture and edu-
cation that humanism propounded in
the ½fteenth and sixteenth centuries es-
tablished the languages, literature, and
thought of classical antiquity as the ba-
sis of a proper education in the Western
world. Compulsory Greek and Latin in
the schools was only one of its conse-
quences. As time passed, and with the
advent of the European Enlightenment
in the late seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, humanism became ever more
independent of religion and sometimes
af½liated with deism, religious indiffer-
88
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Humanism
past &
present
ence, and unbelief. The principle of the
dignity of man remained, but it was of-
ten absorbed into philosophies that were
opposed to religion, that exalted human
reason and science as the solvent of all
otherworldly beliefs and superstitions,
and that enthroned humanity and its
progress as the supreme meaning of his-
tory.
During the nineteenth century, hu-
manist values had to confront the grow-
ing importance of the physical and bio-
logical sciences, the emergence of social
sciences such as political economy and
sociology, and the rivalry of new and
modern subjects that sought to gain
entry into the educational curriculum.
So by the end of the century, humanistic
disciplines were only one strand in the
complex fabric of a liberal education.
This collapse of humanism was fore-
shadowed in the philosophy of Nietz-
sche, with its invocation of the will to
power and challenge to the belief in
truth, and in the theories of Sigmund
Freud, which stressed the irrational
forces and sexual drives of the uncon-
scious in explaining human personality.
During the twentieth century the con-
cept of man ceased to be dominated by
humanistic assumptions, so man now
not only stood apart from God, but also,
with the ascendancy of the naturalistic
perspective, ceased to be seen as a spe-
cial being. The eclipse of humanism
was largely completed by the enormous
and pointless slaughter of World War I
and the disillusionment that followed.
Thereafter, the Western faith in progress
was largely discarded, and with it the hu-
manistic belief in the dignity and nobili-
ty of man, which no longer seemed ten-
able to most intellectuals.
I have thought it necessary to present a
brief sketch of the history of humanism
in order to convey an idea of the impos-
ing place humanism once occupied in
Western culture, and of its withering
away during the past century.
The most important philosophical
discussion of humanism since the end of
World War II makes clear that a philoso-
phy of antihumanism has become a pre-
dominant trend in Western thought.
This discussion has taken place largely
among French thinkers, although it has
also had a wide impact outside France in
the form of postmodernism. It began
with the proclamation of humanism in
the existentialist philosophy of Jean-
Paul Sartre and continued with Martin
Heidegger’s critical response to Sartre’s
proclamation and its subsequent influ-
ence.
In 1946, in reply to objections from
communist and Christian critics that
his philosophy pictured human life as
ugly and meaningless, Sartre defended
his views in a lecture af½rming that exis-
tentialism was a type of humanism. The
fundamental premises of his argument
were that there is no God to tell us what
we ought to do, that there is no human
essence to de½ne our ends, and that
man, thrown randomly into existence, is
compelled to make his own life by his
personal choices and actions.
Sartre’s humanism, it seems to me, is
in general a very debilitated kind of hu-
manism based on a number of nonse-
quiturs. Among other failings, it is a hu-
manism totally without content, since it
offers no objective reasons or principles
for our decision to act in one way rather
than another. It calls upon us for a com-
mitment, but not to anything in particu-
lar, and without any principles of justi½-
cation. And when it does ½nally propose
such principles, as for example that it is
wrong to treat people with cruelty, it on-
ly imports them from traditional ethics.
The year after Sartre’s lecture, Heideg-
ger wrote his Letter on Humanism at the
request of Jean Beaufret, a French disci-
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Note by
Perez
Zagorin
ple who regarded him as the greatest liv-
ing philosopher. The main question
Beaufret put to Heidegger was: “How
can we restore meaning to the word
‘humanism’?” Beaufret’s aim in solicit-
ing Heidegger’s views was partly to chal-
lenge Sartre’s current ascendancy over
existentialism. But he also hoped that
bringing the German philosopher into
the French discussion would help reha-
bilitate Heidegger’s reputation, which
had been deeply compromised by his
previous endorsement of Hitler and Na-
zism as the salvation of Germany and
the West.
Heidegger’s well-known attitudes–his
hatred of modernity, his certainty of the
decline of Western thought and culture,
his assumption that he is the one philo-
sopher who preeminently understands
what philosophic thinking is, and his
contempt for democracy, etc.–pervade
his Letter on Humanism. The Letter also
rests on a primordial concept of Being,
the conviction of the abandonment of
Being in Western philosophy, and the
necessity of overcoming metaphysics.
According to Heidegger, every type of
humanism, whether Hellenic, Roman,
Christian, or Marxist, places man at the
center and claims to determine man’s
essence. Yet each type, he claims, fails
to ask about the truth of Being, and each
furthers man’s destructive aim of impos-
ing his mastery upon the world and na-
ture, the planetary domination of tech-
nology, and what Heidegger laments as
man’s homelessness in the world. So in
response to Beaufret’s question about
how to restore meaning to the word
‘humanism,’ he suggests that it would
be better to abandon the word altogeth-
er, because of the damage it has done in
turning philosophy away from Being.
After the appearance in France of Hei-
degger’s Letter, it is no wonder that the
idea of humanism fell into discredit.
From the 1950s and 1960s on, the
most prominent French thinkers shared
a common antihumanism, and, as the
French philosopher Vincent Descombes
has observed, “humanism became a
term of ridicule . . . to be entered among
the collection of discarded ‘isms.’”
Among recent French thinkers, it is Mi-
chel Foucault who is perhaps the best-
known representative of antihumanism.
It was Foucault, writing in The Order of
Things, who declared the “death of man”
–and so became an international celeb-
rity. The excessively abstract and over-
blown style of Foucault’s arguments,
the vacuity of many of his generaliza-
tions, and his many substantial factual
errors that numerous scholars have
pointed out, show that he is far from
being an accurate or trustworthy histo-
rian. Hence, when he erroneously de-
clares in The Order of Things that the con-
ception of man is an invention of recent
date, no earlier than the end of the eigh-
teenth century, and goes on to voice the
hope that man is nearing his end in phi-
losophy and the human sciences, it can
only be a cause for surprise that his theo-
ries have exerted such an influence upon
literary and cultural studies, history, and
sociology in the past three decades.
Part of the explanation, of course, is
the chastening effect of recent history.
After the Holocaust and the more recent
atrocities in Cambodia, Bosnia, and
Rwanda, many among us ½nd it intolera-
ble to hear mention of the dignity or no-
bility of man. Yet the principle of the
dignity of man remains an essential con-
cept in any viable philosophy of human-
ism for our time.
This principle does not, of course, de-
ny man’s animal traits, his kinship with
other living creatures, nor the fact that
he is part of nature and came into exis-
tence as a result of the creative process
of evolution that gave rise in time to life
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Humanism
past &
present
in all its vast and awesome variety. The
af½rmation of the dignity and special
position of man is based on reasons that
seem to me unquestionable. These are
that humans are by a long way the most
intelligent creatures who inhabit the
Earth and possibly also, so far as we
know at present in our search for extra-
terrestrial life, the most intelligent
beings who exist in the universe. They
are also the only one of nature’s crea-
tions on Earth who have fashioned pro-
gressive moral codes ordaining love,
care, compassion, and concern for their
fellow creatures and other living things,
and who by the exercise of their intelli-
gence and through their exclusive and
inestimable prerogative of language
have achieved a great, ever-growing
knowledge of the physical, social, and
cultural worlds and of their own histori-
cal past.
If a renewed humanism is to be possi-
ble, we cannot doubt that it has to be
genuinely universal–something past
Western humanism never was. But to
accomplish this universality, a new hu-
manism must achieve a modus vivendi
with religion, of which, since the En-
lightenment, Western humanism has
increasingly been an adversary. I think,
nevertheless, that an accord between hu-
manism and religion may be possible in
any society where, as in the contempo-
rary Western world, the state and organ-
ized religion fully accept the principles
and practice of religious, political, and
intellectual tolerance, freedom, and plu-
ralism.
In taking this view, I ½nd support in
the American philosopher John Rawls’s
conception of an “overlapping consen-
sus.” In a liberal society, as he points out,
people may reasonably disagree in some
of their basic beliefs and their concep-
tions of the good. But those who dis-
agree can nonetheless live peaceably
together in their differences as part of
an overlapping consensus because they
share fundamental reasonable values of
pluralism and mutual tolerance. Provid-
ed, therefore, that institutional religion
renounces the support of the state and
recognizes freedom of conscience for
everyone, humanism can not only coex-
ist on amicable terms with religion, but
should also ½nd it possible to enter into
dialogue with it on the basis of common
values that both of them af½rm.
I believe that the conception of human
rights is the best foundation for a new
humanism. In 1948, the United Nations
General Assembly unanimously adopted
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
which asserts equal political, social, and
economic rights for all human beings
regardless of race, color, religion, and
ethnic membership. In relation to a re-
newed humanism, the rights that people
may justi½ably claim beyond those that
are already assured to them in contem-
porary democratic societies, and how far
the principle of human rights can be ex-
panded without losing itself in utopi-
anism or coming into conflict with the
value of political freedom itself are both
questions to be decided by philosophical
and political debate. Such a humanism
can be predicated only on democracy,
because this is the sole system of govern-
ment that recognizes the freedom and
rights of the individual and that pro-
vides for equal citizenship and peaceful
change. Such a humanism would like-
wise uphold the principle of complete
freedom of religion, condemn all reli-
gious violence and hatred, and work to-
ward tolerance and understanding be-
tween different religious communities.
Humanism also needs to be able to
take part in the discussion in contempo-
rary society that weighs the deep and
troubling problems resulting from scien-
ti½c and technological advance against
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Note by
Perez
Zagorin
the hopeful prospects of human better-
ment that science and technology create.
It seems obvious to me that humanism
must lay aside once and for all the hostil-
ity and indifference that its representa-
tives in the past have often shown to-
ward science, in order to establish com-
mon ground with science as one of the
greatest intellectual achievements of
mankind. As part of such an ideal, hu-
manism would most certainly have to
include an environmental ethic as an
essential component of contemporary
human values.
Reflecting on the great history of hu-
manism and its belief in human dignity,
I cannot think that humanism has be-
come an outdated philosophy. On the
contrary, it seems to me that a renewed
humanism, of which the principle of
human rights is the germ, would incor-
porate many of the aspirations of the
world’s people in this era of global inter-
action and communication. With the
French poet Francis Ponge, I am con-
vinced that “l’homme est l’avenir de
l’homme”–man is the future of man. I
also agree with the eminent French his-
torian Fernand Braudel, who, in an essay
some years ago on the history of civiliza-
tion, noted the unity and diversity of the
world and voiced the need for “a modern
Humanism”:
a way of hoping or wishing men to be
brothers with one another, of wishing that
civilizations, each on its own account and
all together, should save themselves and
save us. It means accepting and hoping
that the doors of the future should be wide
open to the present beyond all the failures,
declines, and catastrophes predicted by
strange prophets. The present cannot be
the boundary which all centuries, heavy
with eternal tragedy, see before them as an
obstacle, but which the hope of man, ever
since man has been, has succeeded in
overcoming.
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