The Importance of Responsibility in Humanism

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I like the idea that plagues and earthquakes play such a large role in the flourishing of humanism throughout history. But it actually, it makes sense upon reflection because I would take part of humanism to sort of accept the responsibility of trying to make things better. An anti-humanist or non-humanist philosophy can kind of offload that to god to destiny,. A humanist has got to say, well, look there's randomness but we still have to do the best we can in the face of that.

Human beings are small compared to the universe, but we're very important to ourselves. Humanism can be thought of as the idea that human beings are themselves the source of meaningfulness and mattering in our lives, rather than those being granted to us by some higher power. In today's episode, Sarah Bakewell discusses the origin and evolution of this dramatic idea. Humanism turns out to be a complex thing; there are religious humanists and atheistic anti-humanists. Her new book is Humanly Possible: 700 Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope.

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Sarah Bakewell did postgraduate work in philosophy and artificial intelligence before becoming a full-time author. Among her previous books are How to Live: a life of Montaigne, and At the Existentialist Cafe. She has been awarded the National Book Critics Circle award in biography, as well as the Windham-Campbell Prize in non-fiction.

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