so i heard of the philosophy of “humanism” before but i dont entirely know what it means. I tried googling it and i’ll admit it was a bit too complex for me to wrap my head around.
in simple terms, what is the belief of humanism?
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Renaissance Humanism was a theory of what it is to be an ideal human being. A person ought to be educated in history and philosophy, in the fine arts, like painting, music and poetry and be practiced in rhetoric.
In studying history and rhetoric, they came to practice a form of rhetoric common to ancient Rome called the panegyric.
The panegyric is a piece of writing or speech in praise of someone or something, but usually the emperor or Rome. So humanists would write these long poetic speeches praising their country or their ruler or patron. The panegyric cannot be critical, only full of praise which meant that they were often full of shit.
Once you are prepared to make stuff up in a panegyric, you inevitably start to get philosophical about it. You want to say that your nation is the best nation possible and the truth doesn’t matter. So really what you say becomes a theory about what the best possible nation would look like.
General themes start to appear, like freedom from war, and poverty; fair laws that protect us but also give us opportunity and things like that.
So then some of the humanists, start to ask why don’t we have all these things and what would it take for things to be like this. Now at that time the prevailing theory about why the world is as it is was the one that boils down to God likes it that way. But being learned in philosophy, these humanists were aware of alternative theories on such things and some of them rejected that view saying instead that it is entirely possible for humanity to create the best possible kind of world.
That last idea, that humans can, through their choices, create an ideal society or world without needing God or aliens or anyone else became the core belief of modern Humanism.
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