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

"I don’t know any other writer who could pull off something like this. I mentioned already that Sarah managed to write a compelling group biographical study of the existentialists, which was no mean feat. But this was an even more difficult writing task. She’s covering the long history of humanism, not just the kind of humanism we think of as an agnostic or atheistic approach to life—humanist funerals that kind of thing—although that’s there. She includes humanism in the sense of the regeneration of interest in the Classical world that was characteristic of some writers of the Renaissance, and the humanistic traditions that can also be found within a religious context. What she’s managed to do is uncover common threads. All these thinkers, though diverse, are passionate in their interest in human beings, rather than in the physical world or the idea of the divine. She tells an interesting story and manages to do it in a very accessible way with humour and colour. It’s memorable, enjoyable to read, and full of insight all along the way. It’s quite brilliant. A book to dip into and return to rather than to read once, I think. One point of focus for her is that quotation from Terence: “I am human, and so nothing human is alien to me.” She points out that it was originally a kind of joke, the response of a character who is very nosy—‘the reason why I’m so nosy is that I’m human, I can’t help it.’ But it’s become a kind of motto for a certain type of interest in human beings, and the relationships between human beings. Bakewell’s not scared of taking on the darker, more disconcerting side of humans either, the side which is sometimes ignored by what I would call ‘happy clappy’ humanism, the optimistic, everything’s-going-to-turn-out-well view of the human predicament. Her other motto is from E.M. Forster —“only connect”. What she sees her book doing is connecting up lots of different strands of humanism. She’s generous in her inclusivity and the way she traces complex patterns of influence in the various forms of humanism. Yes, I think it’s superb. I’m a huge fan of Bakewell’s writing. She’s very modest and doesn’t show off, but everything is based on deep and serious scholarship. And she’s an absolutely brilliant writer. So this book is a joy."

"When I first heard about ‘humanism’ at school, I remember only that it was connected with a person called Erasmus (1466-1536), who lived in Rotterdam. Later, when I interviewed Andrew Copson, the CEO of Humanists UK, about humanism , I gathered it could also mean a non-bleak/more positive approach to atheism. I’m not the only one confused. As Sarah Bakewell puts it at the beginning of Humanly Possible, “it all seems gently foggy.” The book tries to trace the evolution of humanist thinking over 700 years. The book starts in 1300, though the philosophy of Brhaspati (who inspired “the first text to understand human life non-supernaturally” in the 6th century BCE) and Democritus also make an appearance. It’s a wonderful gallop through the lives and ideas of dozens of interesting thinkers and writers, including Michel de Montaigne , the subject of a previous book by Bakewell and coiner of the word “essay” (from essais —meaning try outs or attempts). By the end, the word ‘humanism’ is still not quite in focus, but I feel more comfortable with the bleariness: it makes sense that we all have our own opinions about why we’re here and what we should do with our brief lives. Another book that clarifies an ‘ism’ is The Invention of Marxism by Professor Christina Morina , a historian at the University of Bielefeld. Translated from German, it’s a “search for the origins of Marxism ,” which looks at the biographies of nine 19th-century individuals, including Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg as well as (to me) lesser-known figures. By doing so, it helps shed light on how Karl Marx —a penniless German philosopher who lived in exile in London—came to be what she calls the “(unintended) godfather of one of the most destructive social experiments in human history.”"