Humanism Defined

“For the essence of humanism is [the] belief … that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality--no language they have spoken, nor oracle by which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate or expended time and zeal.” — Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, p. 28.

It always strikes me as odd that some human beings ask other human beings to defend the notion of humanism or the study of the humanities, so-called.

Pater here echoes the Roman poet Terrence's declaration that Homo sum--"I am a man" (i.e., a human being)--and what follows from that fact is that "I consider nothing human alien to me" (nihil humanum alienum a me puto).

For human beings to take interest in themselves, their own thoughts and feelings, their own perceptions and experiences, is really a no-brainer. Narcissistic, perhaps, but otherwise non-controversial.

And yet, increasingly in our world, the teaching of the humanities is under attack by human beings who, apparently, have lost interest in humanity.

If anyone should feel the need to defend their position, it should not be those who teach or advocate the teaching of the humanities, but those who oppose them.

But that is not the world we inhabit in the opening decades of the 21st century.