Summary of Humanly Possible by Sarah Bakewell: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

By Justin Reese

DISCLAIMER

This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of Humanly Possible by Sarah Bakewell: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

 

IN THIS SUMMARIZED BOOK, YOU WILL GET:

• Chapter astute outline of the main contents.
• Fast & simple understanding of the content analysis.
• Exceptionally summarized content that you may skip in the original book

Sarah Bakewell's new book, Humanly Possible, explores seven hundred years of writers, thinkers, scientists, and artists who have sought to understand what it means to be truly human. It explores the personal, individual, and, well, human matter of humanism and takes readers on a grand intellectual adventure. It is an intoxicating, joyful celebration of the human spirit, and at a moment when we are all too conscious of the world's divisions, it serves as a recentering and call to care.

• Language: English
• Publisher: jUSTIN REESE
• Release date: Apr 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215249130

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

David Nobbs's 1983 comic novel Second from Last in the Sack Race explores the question of what is humanism. At the inaugural meeting of the Thurmarsh Grammar School Bisexual Humanist Society, a girl begins by saying that it means the Renaissance's attempt to escape from the Middle Ages, but that's not right. A third member replies that this is to confuse humanism with humanitarianism, and a fourth complains that they are all wasting time. The scathing one then puts forward a different definition altogether, saying that it is a philosophy that rejects supernaturalism, regards man as a natural object, and asserts the essential dignity and worth of man and his capacity to achieve self-realisation through the use of reason and the scientific method. The meeting ends with everyone more confused than they were at the start, but the students need not have worried: each of their descriptions contributes to the fullest, richest picture of what humanism means and what humanists have done, studied, and believed through the centuries.

Modern humanists are people who prefer to live without religious beliefs and to make their moral choices based on empathy, reason, and a sense of responsibility to other living creatures. Humanists focus on the lives and experiences of people on Earth, rather than on institutions or doctrines, or the theology of the Beyond. Scholars of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy and beyond were specialists in the humanities, or the studia humanitatis, meaning human studies. They shared the ethical interests of the other kinds of humanists, believing that learning and teaching the human studies enables a more virtuous and civilized life. They hope to cultivate humanitas, which in Latin means being human, but with added overtones of being refined, knowledgeable, articulate, generous, and well mannered. Humans occupy a field of reality that is neither entirely physical nor entirely spiritual.

This is where we practice culture, thought, morality, ritual, art, and other activities that are distinctive to our species. Humanists of all kinds focus on the human world of art, history, and culture, and make their moral choices based on human well-being. The human-centered approach was conveyed by the Greek philosopher Protagoras, who said that man is the measure of all things. Other proposed definitions have been even more all-embracing.

M.M. Forster is a deeply human writer and a paid-up member of humanist organizations. He believes that humanism should be honoured by reciting a list of the things one has enjoyed or found interesting, of the people who have helped one, and of the people whom one has loved and tried to help. He is a lifelong humanist in the nonreligious sense and has become more and more of a humanist in his philosophy and politics, prizing individual lives more than the big ideas that he used to find exciting. He is lucky in that he has been able to live out his humanism without much interference, but humanism is something for which many people risk their lives.

Hamza bin Walayat, a young humanist in Britain, was living in the UK and applied for permission to remain, on the grounds that his humanist beliefs and his break with Islam had brought threats against his life in his home country. He feared that, if deported, he could be killed. In practice, Pakistani humanists have been killed mostly by vigilante mobs, with the authorities looking away. Hamza was rejected from the British Home Office for being a humanist due to his lack of knowledge of ancient Greek philosophers. Humanists UK and other sympathizers took up his case and argued that humanism is not the kind of belief system that relies on a canon of authorities.

Hamza won the right to remain in May 2019 and an introduction to humanist thought was added to all subsequent Home Office assessors' training. Humanism is personal, and it is a semantic cloud of meanings and implications, none attachable to any particular theorist or practitioner. Until recent times, humanists rarely gathered into formal groups, and many did not use the term humanist of themselves. However, there is such a thing as a coherent, shared humanist tradition, and it makes sense to consider all these people together. E.

M. Forster's epigraph and recurring refrain of his 1910 novel Howards End encourages us to look to the bonds that connect us, rather than to divisions. Through the centuries, humanists have been scholarly exiles or wanderers, living on their wits and words. In the nineteenth century, non-religious humanists were reviled, banned, imprisoned, and deprived of rights. In the twenty-first century, humanists still suffer all these things. Humanism is all about the human factor, but it is a complicated one that concerns each of us intimately. It is not surprising that those who are open about humanist views can be victimized, especially in the modern world.

The most important details in this text are the people who lived during the period when humanism was taking the forms we recognize today, from the 1300s to our own time. These people argued their points with eloquence and reason, and their ideas now permeate many societies, whether recognized as such or not. The book covers seven centuries in particular, and most of the occupants lived within that period. However, the story should always be set in the context of a wider, longer, fuller story of humanist lives and thoughts around the world. The first discussion of materialist views (that we know of) arose in India, as part of the Cārvāka school of thought founded by the thinker Bṛhaspati sometime before the sixth century BCE. The philosopher Ajita Kesakambalī was quoted as saying that this human being is composed of the four great elements, and when one dies the earth part reverts to earth, the water part to water, the fire part to fire, the air part to air, and the faculties pass away into space.

The philosopher Democritus taught that all entities in nature are made up of atoms, which combine together to form our thoughts and sensory experiences. He was known as the laughing philosopher because he was able to chuckle at human foibles rather than weep over them. He passed on his ideas to others, such as Epicurus, who founded a community of students and like-minded friends at his school in Athens, known as the Garden. Protagoras also wrote a book about the gods, which started in this surprising way: as to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist. Given such a beginning, it would be nice to know what he filled the rest of the book with.

The most important details