Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

by Sarah Bakewell

Of course, being free, we can choose to ignore these affinities in ourselves. But if only we followed the promptings of our natural humanity, we would do far better.

War is a blunder: a failure to be human.

Later commentators observed, with sadness, that Erasmus seemed to underestimate the real depth of human attraction to violence, unreason, and fanaticism—probably because of his own cordial personality. Immune to the thrill of battle and the intoxication of radical ideas himself, he simply could not understand why others found them so powerful. He was no Machiavelli in his reading of the psychological (or political, or economic) machinery that can lead to war. Other humanists have had a similar blind spot, in other times, and many are thus left helplessly wondering again and again why everyone around them seems to have gone mad. But then, they are not always wrong: sometimes the Erasmian spirit does return, at least for a while, and when it does, it is often a reaction against the episodes of suffering caused by its opposite.

As with other humanists in our story, his real memorial and afterlife are found in the legacy of his ideas: on education (where Erasmian advice and principles remained hugely influential), on religion (his theological tracts as well as translations remained standard for a long time), and on the movement for peace and international cooperation.

As he said, it was “putting a very high price on one’s conjectures to have a man roasted alive because of them.”

I love life and cultivate it just as God has been pleased to grant it to us. . . . I accept with all my heart and with gratitude what nature has done for me, and I am pleased with myself and proud of myself that I do. We wrong that great and all-powerful Giver by refusing his gift, nullifying it, and disfiguring it.

There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being.

Instead, he likes books when they enhance life and when they expand his understanding of the many people who have lived in the past. Biographies and histories are good, because they show the human being “more alive and entire than in any other place—the diversity and truth of his inner qualities in the mass and in detail, the variety of the ways he is put together, and the accidents that threaten him.” Terence’s plays also represent “to the life the movements of the soul and the state of our characters; at every moment our actions throw me back to him.” Montaigne was not the only humanist to look for such personal connections in books, but he is exceptional in his insistence that the books in themselves have no appeal to him. (He just happens to read an enormous number of them, build shelves for them, and have hundreds of quotes at his fingertips as well as literally hanging over his head.)

Thus, he writes as a moralist, but a moralist who acknowledges fallibility and slips out from underneath every consistent moral rule. He is political, but expresses his views through evasiveness, insistence on privacy, and refusal to conform. He has an educational theory, but it is one that has no time for schools or rhetorical exercises or compulsion of any kind. When it comes to etiquette, style, virtue, or almost anything else, he constantly adds remarks along the lines of “But I don’t know” or “Then again” before switching to some unexpected new angle.

Those angles often derive from his respect for diversity and variety. “I believe in and conceive a thousand contrary ways of life,” he writes. This belief makes him an advocate of travel as the best means of encountering some of those varied ways.

Montaigne writes that each of us is a bearer of the human condition in its “entire form.” This is why we can recognize ourselves in the experiences and characters of others, however much we diverge from them in cultural attitudes or background. This forms part of his justification for writing so much about himself: he is an ordinary example of a human being, and one he happens to know intimately. “You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff.”

is this writing-out of his essential humanity that makes his book such an advance in humanistic writing. It is a human book, both in the traditional sense of a work of gentlemanly scholarship and in a revolutionary new way, at once philosophical and personal. Its humanness brings another benefit. Writing a book of this sort, Montaigne knows he need not have compunctions about ignoring theological questions.

Montaigne founded no formal school of thought; he strove for no philosophical rigor, and promoted no dogma. Yet his impact on literature was enormous. The century after his own, the seventeenth, saw an explosion of personal essays written on his model: reflective, skeptical, witty, self-indulgent, sometimes mercilessly critical, and generally dedicated to the spirit of freethinking in the widest sense. The modern world is still filled with such writing.

particular, it found its way into a very successful form: the novel. You can see Montaigne himself as a kind of novelist, albeit one who features just one central character—himself—along with walk-on roles for others encountered in his life or reading. He pioneered the stream-of-consciousness narration that would be a feature of modern novels long before consciously modernist experiments in that line came along in the twentieth century. The great psychological and social novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are positive waterfalls of streaming consciousness. They allow us to hitch a ride inside each of several characters in turn, occupying their perspectives as they reflect on events or interact with each other, and as they change through experience.

George Eliot believed that reading imaginative fiction brought real moral benefits, because of the way it enlarged the circle of our sympathy, or what we would now call “empathy.” In an essay, she wrote, “The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. . . . A picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.”

In recent times, some research has supported this argument, suggesting that reading fiction does lead us to be more empathetic and make more morally generous choices. Other commentators disagree, and some even wonder whether heightening empathy is a good thing, since reason may at times be a better guide to action. The whole question, for the moment, remains in a Montaignesque state of complexity and undecidability.

Merely understanding and sympathizing with the sufferings of others gets us only so far. Much better would be to prevent such sufferings from happening at all.

A real optimist would hope for things to get better and might even look for ways in which we could make them better ourselves. We cannot stop earthquakes from happening, but we can study them and build safer buildings that don’t collapse so easily. Later generations would extend such achievements: seismologists have now learned to predict the patterns of earthquakes and tsunamis with ever greater accuracy. Experts in other fields can also break up kidney stones with lithotripsy, and design antibiotics to prevent infections, and put sonar on ships, and track weather patterns to see storms coming and get ships into harbor before they strike.

This, in a word, was the philosophy of Voltaire and his intellectual circle—and that word could be “progress,” “improvement,” “reason,” or “enlightenment,” depending on where you prefer the emphasis. The principle of “light,” embedded in the last of these, became the source of names later used to designate such thinkers and their views in several European languages: les lumières in French, Aufklärung in German, illuminismo in Italian, the Enlightenment in English. Few of the thinkers used these labels of themselves, but they did tend to use a language of light and darkness—a language reminiscent of that favored by earlier humanists, the ones who delved into monastery storerooms to find books. Those humanists had thought of themselves as rescuers who brought literature into the brightly lit world of printing and free reading; the new Enlighteners saw themselves as helping to bring people into the light. They hoped, by means of better reasoning, more effective science and technology, and more beneficial political systems, to help their fellow humans to emerge into the sun and air and

live more bravely and happily.

This attitude and an inclination to value the human measure more highly than mystical submission to fate are two features that unite the Enlightenment spirit to the humanist one. Not all Enlighteners are humanists, and vice versa: differences of emphasis exist between the two sets of ideas, and in any case individuals in both categories vary greatly among themselves. Still, generally, Enlightenment and humanist thinkers share a tendency to look to this world more than to the next, and to humanity more than to divinity. Both consider the use of our reason and scientific understanding, as well as improvement of our technology and politics, to be our best path toward an improved life.

Yet he shared the overall humanistic hope: that humans could take more control of their own destiny and arrange their lives more rationally and tolerantly, in ways more conducive to well-being. In short, people could be happier. And in some cases, they could be more alive, having not been killed by diseases, bad engineering, earthquakes, or the violence of fanatics.

Deism, widespread among European intellectuals from the late seventeenth century on, began with the belief that the universe is sufficiently huge and complex that it must have had some equally huge and capable Creator. But that does not mean that the Supreme Being takes any further interest in the day-to-day details of planetary management or human affairs. Some deists also return that favor by taking no great interest in the Supreme Being.

He had described God as so universally infused into everything around us that we can almost regard him as identical to Nature. It takes a very fine scalpel indeed to distinguish between that and the assertion that Nature is all that exists. Spinoza had already been excommunicated from his own Jewish community in Amsterdam before he had even published anything—a devastating punishment, as his friends and family were forbidden to talk to him or help him in any way. His works were later also banned by both the Protestant and the Catholic authorities.

If we want to live in a well-regulated, peaceful society, then we must create one and maintain it. Instead of referring moral questions to divine commandments, we must also work out our own system of good, generous, mutually beneficial ethics. We can try to generate our own rules—such as “do as you would be done by,” or “treat all human beings as an end in themselves, not a means to something else,” or “choose the action that brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number.” These are handy tools for moral thinking, but they are not the same as a set of orders literally set in stone tablets by God. Our moral lives remain complex and personal—and human.

Humanists and Enlighteners were thus drawn to an old idea: that the best foundation for this human, moral world lies in our spontaneous tendency to respond to one another with fellow feeling: “sympathy,” or empathy, or the sense of interrelatedness expressed by ren or ubuntu. It is what Condorcet called “a delicate and generous sensibility which nature has implanted in the hearts of all and whose flowering waits only upon the favourable influence of enlightenment and freedom.”

For Shaftesbury, all things are interconnected, including humans, and this underlies our ability to respond sympathetically to one another. That response, in turn, is the seed from which we can cultivate a fully developed moral life. Crucially, this moral cultivation does not require any particular belief system, since it emerges from our nature. We need only improve our ethical good taste, much as we can develop good taste in the arts. The process relies on pleasure more than anything else: when we do something nice for others, they like and approve of us—and that is a pleasurable feeling, so we do more nice things. Eventually one may become what the French were calling an honnête homme, literally an “honest man”: cultivated, humane, well balanced, at ease in the world—a person with humanitas.

These precautions were necessary because presenting an argument for a human source of moral feeling was risky in the Catholic, politically authoritarian France of the day. Human-based morality implied that we needed no external authority to guide our ethical choices. This worried the political establishment, as well as the religious one, because it suggested a state of moral anarchy in which people could follow their own ideas. That would not do: for a coherent state, there must be unity, not pluralism; conformity, not independence; hierarchy, not individuality. Besides, the very word atheist was still considered synonymous with “a person devoid of morals.”

The one good thing you could say about suppression—to set against the misery and loss it caused—is that it fostered ingenuity.

Instead, Paine’s preferred principles were humanist ones: be grateful for life, do not make a cult of suffering, be tolerant toward others, and try to deal with problems as rationally as possible. He summed up his Enlightenment humanist credo: I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

He tells us that we cannot be sure that any cause will lead to any effect, or that the sun will rise tomorrow, or that we have any consistent personal identity. We feel that there are real, coherent causes and identities, but those are just feelings, born of habit and association of ideas. The twentieth-century philosopher and broadcaster Bryan Magee summed him up well by saying, “What Hume characteristically tells you when you go to him with a problem is: ‘It’s worse than you think.’

He suggests applying a basic principle: that “no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish.” (The later science communicator Carl Sagan put it more neatly: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”)

Like Montaigne, he began with the human measure: observing himself and others, and taking such experiences and behavior as material for questioning.

Hume resembled Montaigne in other respects, too, notably in his striking combination of the toughest intellectual skepticism with tolerant good humor. One can hear Montaigne’s voice, for example, when Hume tells us, at the end of the devastating first book of the Treatise, that its contents have taken him to such a strange place that he now feels like a monster (“Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me?”)—only to then conclude that there is no cause for concern. Reason may not be able to help him, but Nature promptly cures him of his “melancholy and delirium” by distracting him with the everyday enjoyments of life. “I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends.”

Like Montaigne and Shaftesbury—and like his friend Adam Smith, who also wrote on this subject—Hume locates the basis of morality in “sympathy,” or fellow feeling. When someone feels an emotion, it may show in that person’s face or voice. Seeing or hearing this, I feel a kind of replay of the emotion myself, based on my own, similar experiences of feeling that way in the past. Our minds work as “mirrors to one another,” he says: a very Montaignesque way of putting it.

Something else Hume shared with Montaigne (and with Erasmus) was a tendency to be audacious in his thought yet cautious in his behavior.

Almost all the humanists in this book so far had a severe limitation: they applied their ideas of humanity or humanitas almost exclusively to white, able-bodied, gender-conforming males—that is, to people who looked more or less like Leonardo’s Vitruvian figure. Only this subset of the species could aspire to be “universal man.” Any other type was treated as a deficiency and a falling-off, perhaps falling below the level of the human altogether.

In general terms, he strongly condemned colonialism, racism, and sexism, and had a vision of all humanity sharing an enlightened future. Yet he did not think of all humans as starting at an equal level on that progressive ladder, and he wondered if some cultures might not make it to the top, after all; they might simply fade away, without their loss affecting the overall picture of progress.

On the whole, these Enlightenment authors were just carrying on an older tradition of mixing brilliance about some matters with daftness about others. In ancient Greece, for example, Plato approved of female education, yet also thought that women were the reincarnations of men who had been cowardly or immoral in a previous life. (It could have been worse: more serious failures were reborn as shellfish.) Aristotle wrote Europe’s greatest foundational works of ethics and politics, but only in the context of free Greek males: everyone else was of a lesser nature.

Actually, on the humanity question, some Christian institutions had a better record than secular philosophers.

It seems surprising that Enlightenment-era humanists did not break out of such reasonings more often than they did. After all, they prided themselves on critical questioning of received ideas, and many also valued “sympathy” and fellow feeling as a basis for morality. In most situations, they were with Terence: “I am human, and consider nothing human alien to me.” Yet they often seemed willing to append exceptions to the end of that sentence.

Several key humanist voices spoke up for the idea of everyone sharing an essential humanity, and for reasons to do with life in this world, not prospects of salvation in the next. It was thanks to humanistic beliefs in reason and meliorism that Voltaire argued for tolerance of different religions, Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges argued for including women and non-European races in the French Revolutionary idea of human liberation, and their fellow Enlightenment thinker Jeremy Bentham argued for what would now be called LGBTQ+ rights.

These pioneers, and others after them, advanced arguments based on four big humanistic ideas in particular. The first of these is the one just mentioned: that we are all united in our humanity, so that “nothing human is alien.” A second idea, conversely, stresses not universality but diversity. Yes, we are all human, but we also experience life differently depending on culture, political situation, and other factors—and such differences should be respected and celebrated. The third principle is the valuing of critical thinking and inquiry. For a humanist of any kind, nothing about human life should ever be taken as self-evident or accepted on grounds of authority and tradition. What IS may NOT be right, and should be questioned. Fourth is the general belief that our moral lives, which are central to our humanity, are best served by looking for ways of connecting and communicating between ourselves.

Meanwhile, the influence has also run the other way: as humanists advanced such ideas and explored a new and more open way of thinking about humanity, that new way of thinking helped reshape what it meant to be a humanist. Humanists became less elitist, and more hospitable to cultural differences. Some tried to question their own assumptions more. They continued applying the old skills of critical investigation and eloquence, but to new fields of inquiry.

It was provocative, because homo was invariably translated as “man” (even though in Latin it does mean “human”; a male adult is vir). Yet here was a woman applying it to herself! Her point, of course, was that she had as much right as men to use it and to access the full range of possibilities in life that came with it.

Confinement to a limited sphere is what happens every time people are assigned to a particular range of activities from birth, especially for any reason to do with social class, caste, ethnic group, or other factors. If, like Plato, you believe in reincarnation and the transmigration of souls, well, at least you can console yourself with the hope of getting better status in the next life. But if, like most humanists, you think that this is the life that matters, then it is unacceptable to lose the “largest and highest” options in that life because of typecasting. To refuse such limitation is implicitly to make a philosophical claim: that universal humanity belongs to each of us. This was what Montaigne had said—we each bear the entire form of the human condition—although his readiness to apply that principle to the situation of women was variable. (Everything in Montaigne is variable.)

After the claim to humanity, another claim follows: that we should all have the full range of human virtues to aspire to, not a set of virtues particular to our group. Such a claim matters greatly to humanists, because they are so absorbed in questions of virtue generally: they want to know what it is to be a good human being.

To be fully humanized in matters of virtue, women must also share in a fully humanizing education.

So the whole sphere, and Montaigne’s whole condition, should be opened to all without being limited by one’s particular characteristics. But then, particularity mattered to humanists, too.

If you live in a society where universal humanity is recognized, you might hope that everything possible would be done to support your capacity to enjoy and “unfold” your humanity in the fullest way possible—at its most basic level, by making sure that if you use a wheelchair, you can easily get into buildings. Underlying this is that mirror recognition of a fellow human’s experience: obviously, like everyone else, you want to be able to go places, do stuff, follow your interests, and engage fully in the world.