For a year or two in grad school at Chicago, I was a member of a Bertrand Russell book club. I didn’t like Russell’s politics, but I did like his down-to-earth clarity, his sense of humor, and his optimistic defense of secular humanism.
(p. 10) “I am human, and consider nothing human alien to me”: The famous line from the Roman playwright Terence, written more than two millenniums ago, is easy to assert but hard to live by, at least with any consistency. The attitude it suggests is adamantly open-minded and resolutely pluralist: Even the most annoying, the most confounding, the most atrocious example of anyone’s behavior is necessarily part of the human experience. There are points of connection between all of us weirdos, no matter how different we are. Michel de Montaigne liked the line so much that he had the Latin original — Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto — inscribed on a ceiling joist in his library.
. . .
Humanism, . . ., has always had to negotiate between noble ideals of humanity and the peculiarities of actual humans. Paradox and ambiguity aren’t to be rejected but embraced. “Dispute and contradiction, not veneration and obedience, are the essence of intellectual life,” Bakewell writes.
. . .
. . ., Bakewell practices what she preaches — or, since preaching would be anathema to a humanist, she does what she suggests. She puts her entire self into this book, linking philosophical reflections with vibrant anecdotes. She delights in the paradoxical and the particular, reminding us that every human being contains multitudes.
This can lead her to some wonderful asides. . . . When Bertrand Russell was in a seaplane accident in Norway and a journalist called him afterward to ask whether his brush with death had led him to think about such high-flown concepts as mysticism and logic, he said no, it had not. “I thought the water was cold.”
For the full review see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 29, 2023 [sic], and has the title “The Tricky Thing With Humanism, This Book Implies, Is Humans.” In the original, the Latin phrase in the first quoted paragraph is in italics.)
The book under review is:
Bakewell, Sarah. Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope. New York: Penguin Press, 2023.