Redeemable Humanity
Daniel Woolf reviews Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell
These days, any time spent on social media or tuning into the news can quickly induce fear, horror, anger, revulsion and any number of negative emotions. Human beings can be, in a word, awful. While we’ve only recently had the ability to mass-exterminate each other, violence and hatred appear to be features of the human species and have a long history dating back to Creation stories (we’re looking at you, Cain) and even the age of our primate ancestors (cue Richard Strauss and the bone-smashing sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey). The continued popularity of military history on bookstore shelves testifies to our instinct for carnage.
Every so often we need reminders of the positive things that have made humans not only human but humane. We need reminders of those rare individuals who, in the pursuit of truth, progress, liberty or other estimable values, challenged contemporary norms and beliefs—often at great personal risk, and sometimes misguidedly. The history of ideas, along with fields such as the history of the arts and those of the sciences are more likely to “accentuate the positive.” British author Sarah Bakewell’s new book, Humanly Possible, is the latest effort to cheer us up intellectually—maybe for all the bloodshed and the ruin of the planet, we aren’t entirely irredeemable.
Bakewell, the cover blurb tells us, has a background in philosophy and years of experience as a curator of early printed books. She has several prior works to her name, including At the Existentialist Cafe (2016) and How to Live (2011), the latter which is not a Jordan Peterson-style self-help book but a biography of one of the more attractive figures of the sixteenth century, the French essayist (literally, since he invented the term “essaie”) Michel de Montaigne. Like Bakewell’s earlier works, which appear from high quality trade publishers such as Knopf, Vintage, Penguin, and Chatto and Windus, her latest book is aimed at the curious, intelligent, and educated general reader rather than the academic market. If one is expecting the kind of deep analysis or original scholarship one might in a monograph on Bertrand Russell’s logic or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, this book is not for you.
That’s actually fine. There’s a lot to be said for bringing intellectual history or philosophy (they aren’t quite the same thing) to a wider audience than readers of the Journal of the History of Ideas, Mind, or Nous. Humanly Possible has some philosophical ambition in its discussion of some of the ideas presented, but it falls more squarely on the intellectual historian’s side of the fence, more explication than exploration, even if Bakewell is not shy about engaging with her authors critically. The book is essentially a rapid cruise through seven centuries of the human mind (the ancient and medieval background is dispatched rapidly in the early pages), with shore-stops along the way, and (shamelessly changing metaphors!) focused on the square peg thinkers rather than the status-quo round holes against which they scraped. Dozens of names ensue, some spotlit (Petrarch, Matthew Arnold, Russell, Montaigne again), others given mere walk-on parts. They fall into chapters more or less in chronological order and, to the author’s credit, are not deracinated from their biographical and social context. Bakewell writes in a chatty and good-humoured register, consistently respectful of her subjects. She’s an easy and pleasurable stylist, albeit sometimes veering close to the retro-colloquial, as for instance in her description of Petrarch’s prolific quill: “And, boy, did he write.”
If Humanly Possible is a little like intellectual comfort food, there’s a place for it, not least if it instils a degree of optimism and curiosity in its readers--including younger ones discovering some of these past minds for the first time. Ultimately, Bakewell’s book is best viewed in the light of Montaigne’s Essays, as a series of disconnected, charming episodes rather than a coherent whole. Of that famed work by her late sixteenth-century hero Bakewell writes (accurately) that “The words flow, take unexpected changes of direction, and contradict each other; they tumble into digressions, some of which become many pages long,” which in places could describe Humanly Possible, though the shifts and changes are often entertaining and informative. Bakewell feels that the human spirit can still rise above its environment, and choose freedom and love over fanaticism and hate. For all our sakes, let’s hope she’s right.
Sarah Bakewell. Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry and Hope. Penguin Press, 2023. pp.464 $23 (paperback)
Still, with such range, the book suffers from errors that most readers won’t notice but that twitched this history professor’s eyebrows. The leading Nazi-exiled art historian of mid-century, Erwin Panofsky, did not have a “long career at Princeton,” if by this the university is intended, but rather he had a career in Princeton, the New Jersey town, and that at the Institute for Advanced Study, an entirely separate entity from the university (though in fairness the two are often conflated). The Brethren of the Common Life were a pietist lay confraternity, not “monks,” though they did serve as talent-spotters for the church in the way that 1930s Cambridge dons did for British (and Soviet) intelligence—Erasmus was one of their most famous protégés though he repudiated his upbringing. And Joan Kelly-Gadol did not write her famous essay “Did Women have a Renaissance?” in 1984 (at which time she had been dead for two years) but in 1976. There are also some odd statements, such as an early clanger in the introduction (p. 6), that “neither Plato nor Aristotle are mentioned much in books about humanism” (a statement belied by the author herself later in the book and one that might flutter the heart of any scholar interested in the impact of neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino, who appears briefly). There are, fortunately, relatively few slips of this sort for a book of this range. Yet readers will find the absence of in-text captions for the numerous illustrations a potential irritant, and the lack of footnote numbers another. Bakewell has done her research, as the copious notes at the back show, but one is regularly stopped dead in one’s tracks, mid-paragraph, to hunt these references down as they appear listed only by page number.
The selection of authors is also puzzling, though some are an unexpected delight. For every major (or minor) name included there are other exclusions, including some whom one might have expected to have seen in a book which highlights “freethinking” in its subtitle. Leibniz—here reduced to Voltaire’s Panglossian caricature--and Spinoza, arguably the two most interesting figures, philosophically, of the early Enlightenment, are barely mentioned; ditto Pierre Bayle (the subject along with Isaac Newton of Dmitri Levitin’s recent book, The Kingdom of Darkness). We get John Stuart Mill and his wife Harriet Taylor, but neither John Millar nor Charles Taylor. In terms of subject matter, historiography is not well served--the philosopher-historian David Hume gets serious treatment (“he was just so nice”,) but Gibbon, whose take on the early Christian church so enraged the Anglican establishment of his day, is reduced to three casual mentions.
Bakewell’s gallery of heroes and heroines sticks firmly to the center of the road, since she has little time for fanaticism or extremism. With few exceptions such as Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, the primary figures hover, both politically and intellectually, around the middle of an imaginary Bell curve ranged from radicalism to conservatism: only “standard” deviations from contemporary thought figure. Thus we have Erasmus and Montaigne, rather than, say, Giordano Bruno, whose burning for the heretical belief that there might be other worlds and even other Creations, opened the seventeenth century (a period that gets surprisingly little attention despite the Scientific Revolution) and closed the sixteenth on a downer. (A similar “burn after leading” figure, Florence’s fallen savior, Savonarola, is treated at some length, but more as foe of learning than friend of the poor). The book is also rather genteelly Eurocentric and especially, in the later chapters even Anglocentric. Early mentions of Confucius and Mencius give one hope for a wider global span, but that inclusivity is not sustained; we don’t see much of Asia again till we get to Pol Pot and Mao, who aren’t there to represent the cuddliest aspects of humankind. On the other hand, we do get some lively treatments of figures not typically included in the “Great White Men” hit parade of intellectual history, among which Bakewell’s sparkling portrait of slave-turned-reformer Frederick Douglass is a high point. And less familiar characters such as Ludwik Zamenhof (the inventor of Esperanto) and the American agnostic Robert Ingersoll also find a place at Bakewell’s table.
Obviously one can’t include everyone and one must and should be grateful for the absence of shopping lists of names. But it’s not always clear what principles of selection, apart from the author’s interests and familiarity, were deployed. Sometimes it feels that intellects are presented simply because they are attractive characters. Hume, for all his reputed atheism, seems to be, like Montaigne, “fanatically non-fanatical”), one of those people with whom one would most want to have a chat at the pub, “le bon David” in Bakewell’s phrasing. Mill’s utilitarianism, we are told, is more human than Jeremy Bentham’s. At times I was reminded of 60s TV spy Maxwell Smart’s oft-repeated wish that the latest defeated villain “had only used his powers for niceness, rather than evil.”
That brings to light a bigger problem, which is the thread along which Bakewell tries to “connect” her gemstones (E.M. Forster’s “Only connect,” the one quotation known by most people from Forster apart from his higher duty to friendship over nation, appears repeatedly; Bakewell is immensely fond of Forster and wins points with me for ranging beyond Passage to India to include his lesser-known novel The Longest Journey). That thread is humanism, and regrettably it simply isn’t a sufficiently sturdy string to support the assemblage. The author’s definition of humanism (an educational and scholarly movement originating in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and usually deemed “over” by 1600 even if some of its values lingered on) is both ambiguous and protean, shifting with the needs of argument. The best effort, late in the book, is a definition by negation: we should look, says Bakewell, “to the gaps left behind whenever a casual disregard of individuals is in the ascendant.” Humanism is “whatever should be there instead.” Bakewell appears at times to confuse humanism with humanity or humaneness, and I think this conflation deliberate and tactical, not accidental--she is far too well-read and intelligent not to realize that there is a difference. But to use humanism as the “through-line” for her book requires the concept to be twisted, extended and expanded beyond any reasonable recognition. Not every humane thinker was a humanist, and by no means every certified humanist met Hume’s, Agent 86’s, or modernity’s standard of niceness. Erasmus seems to have been on the whole a decent sort, but his English pals include some who were not: the sainted Thomas More, despite his immense erudition and his Man-for-all-seasons martyrdom (a fanaticism which the late Hilary Mantel nailed mercilessly in Wolf Hall) could be a proper bastard, Utopia aside, who sent some of his fellow human beings to the stake.
Finally, on the negative side of the ledger, lies Bakewell’s inability to resist simplistic trans-temporal linkages and comparisons, in an effort to strengthen continuities. Sometimes these seem reasonable--Montaigne was close enough chronologically to Erasmus for them to have come out of the same humanist (in the narrower sense) education, even if one doubts the jaunty optimism of Bakewell’s opinion that “they would have liked each other had they been able to meet.” Others are more of a stretch, such as the bookending of science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of post-humanity with Dante's visions of the afterlife.
Writers of books that interpret complex historical subjects for the benefit of a lay rather than academic audience inevitably provide hostages to fortune. There is invariably some set of basic errors, questionable elucidations, or pat generalizations that will make the academic expert cringe. Humanly Possible is no exception; the book’s cheery tone and its reduction of both its topics and its human characters to clever phrasing and sometimes dubious comparisons may turn off some readers. That would be unfortunate.
It’s very much worth reading, given the paucity of professorially-authored studies that can actually present the history of ideas as a story which anyone without a PhD might actually want to read and hope to understand. So, do pick up this well-intentioned, ambitious, and easily digested volume. Apart from the stories she tells, Bakewell builds a case for remembering—even in the shadow of Auschwitz, Rwanda, 9/11, and the Middle Eastern and Eastern European horrors of the last two years—that nobly motivated if imperfect humans have often aspired to a better world, and that these past intellectuals have something to say to us if we will listen.
Daniel Woolf’s research has focused on two areas, early modern British intellectual and cultural history, and the global history and theory of historical writing. He is the author of five books and co-editor of several others, including the two-volume A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing (2 vols 1998). His 2003 monograph, The Social Circulation of the Past, won the John Ben Snow Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies in 2004 for the best book on British history pre-1800. His most recent books include A Concise History of History (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and History from Loss: a Global Introduction to Histories Written from Defeat, Colonization, Exile, and Imprisonment (co-edited with Marnie Hughes-Warrington; Routledge, 2023). He is a contributing editor for Marginalia Review of Books, and his articles have appeared in journals such as Past and Present, The American Historical Review, History and Theory, Renaissance Quarterly, and The Journal of the History of Ideas. He is series editor of Cambridge University Press’s Elements in Historical Theory and Practice.
