Ten Tenets of Classical Humanism

Sarah Klopfer

1. Reason: Reality Knowable through Mind 

People complicate this one, but it’s really simple. Reason means using thought and logic to decide what’s true.

2. Freedom: Government Limited by Rule of Law

Some people would quibble, and say you can have freedom without limiting the role of government by law. But an important aspect of the Western idea of freedom involves freedom from the government, from interference that seems arbitrary. The government will say: “You can’t drive on the wrong side of the road.” But that’s different than, for instance, the dictator of San Marcos saying, in Woody’ Allen’s Bananas: “All citizens must change their underwear every half hour, and they will wear their underwear on the outside, so we can check.” Beginning in Ancient Greece, freedom meant limiting government’s power to capriciously command its citizens.

3. Humanism: Mankind the Proper Study of Man

Broadly speaking we can call humanism the notion that the proper study of people is people. Like the idea of freedom, the ideals of humanism also came from the Greeks, who had a fascination with humanity, a fascination with people. People are interested in other people, and the Greeks were the first people to make a thing out of people. They even worshipped people. Where other ancients worshipped animals, or the sun, the Greeks worshipped gods in human form, with arms and legs and other body parts, which they liked to put to use.

4. Forethought: Planning for the Future 

The European idea of human agency involves both having goals and figuring out how to meet those goals. As Aeschylus says in Prometheus Bound, “Forethought founded all the arts of man.” We will see that especially in Homer’s Odyssey, where Odysseus plans a lot for the future, and proves himself quite crafty in adapting his means to the ends he wants to achieve. Likewise his rival, the Cyclops, receives Homer’s censure because he does not plan for the future and so does not employ any of the arts of man.

5. Individualism: The Personal Is Not the Political

We hear today a lot of people say, “The personal is the political.” They insist that the brand of soda you drink, or what television programs you stream, or who you sleep with, has a political dimension. Everything has to do with social justice, or should remain part of some larger political schema. 

Politics comes from the Greek word polity, which means community. It’s a way of thinking about people as they live together. But many great works of European literature position the individual versus the community. The heroine has to choose between obeying the laws of her community, and honoring her own convictions. 

So there’s more to life than politics or community. Lots of important stuff doesn’t happen out in the public square. It happens within your family, or in your personal life. It involves your personal judgments, your individual conscience, what you write in your journal. That personal sphere remains personal, and private, protected from the political. The celebration of that private sphere, and the defense of its autonomy, we may call individualism.

6. Natural Law: Human Nature the Source of Rights 

The Greeks and the Romans said: The fundamental thing that makes you a person is – man is the rational animal. So we’re the thinking animal. So because we all think, we’re all human. And because we’re all human, we all have human rights. But it’s our thinking which makes us all have these rights. We all have the ability to know what’s true and false, right and wrong.

That’s the spark of divinity within us, the little piece of God that’s within all of us, according to the Romans especially, but they get a lot of it from the Greeks.

7. Personal Responsibility: We Cause Our Own Actions

Our environment can make it easier or harder. God or Fate can weight the dice, but in the end, and as a rule, as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus says: Character is destiny.

8. Integrity: Word Should Match Deed 

There’s a long Western animus toward hypocrisy, just like there’s a long Western practice of hypocrisy. Living your beliefs, or what you claim to believe, becomes an important idea with Jesus and Christianity. Moral integrity then becomes a concern with purity.

9. Self-Criticism: Moral Audits and Crises of Conscience 

This is very important. You take a moral account of yourself, and you heed the commands of your conscience. You don’t let yourself off the hook. You think to yourself: What did I do right or wrong here? We see with a lot of heroes and people of moral consequence, they evaluate their own actions. When a European calls Europe the mother of monsters, urging her to account for herself before the world, he does something his ancestors have valorized for twenty-eight centuries. 

10. Xenosophia: Learning From Other Cultures

 Sometimes we look down on other cultures in a chauvinistic way, and that’s not good. But one of the great things about Western culture is that we also learn a lot from other cultures. I’ve coined a word for that: xenosophia. Xenos in Greek means “stranger” – if you’re xenophobic, you fear strangers. Sophia is greek for “wisdom.” Xenosophia means the wisdom of strangers, or literally “strange wisdom,” a nice phrase. Through Xenosophia, the Greeks learned from the Egyptians, and the Romans learned from the Greeks, and the Christians learned from the Romans and the Jews. Likewise, Catholic Scholastics recovered classical learning from the Muslims, and the Beatles took American music from American rockabilly people. So it goes throughout  history.