Humanitas (from theLatinhūmānus, "human") is aLatin noun meaninghuman nature,civilization, and kindness. It has uses inthe Enlightenment, which are discussed below.
The Latin wordhumanitas corresponded to the Greek concepts ofphilanthrôpía (loving what makes us human) andpaideia (education) which were amalgamated with aseries of qualities that made up the traditional unwritten Roman code of conduct (mos maiorum).[1]Cicero (106–43 BCE) usedhumanitas in describing the formation of an ideal speaker (orator) who he believed should beeducated to possess a collection of virtues of character suitable both for an active life of public service and a decent and fulfilling private life; these would include a fund of learning acquired from the study ofbonae litterae ("good letters", i.e., classical literature, especially poetry), which would also be a source of continuing cultivation and pleasure in leisure and retirement, youth and old age, and good and bad fortune.[2]
Insofar ashumanitas corresponded tophilanthrôpía andpaideia, it was particularly applicable to guiding the proper exercise of power over others. Hence Cicero's advice to his brother that "if fate had given you authority over Africans orSpaniards or Gauls, wild and barbarous nations, you would still owe it to yourhumanitas to be concerned about their comforts, their needs, and their safety."[3] Echoing Cicero over a century later,Pliny the Younger (61–112 CE) definedhumanitas as the capacity to win the affections of lesser folk without impinging on greater.[4]
The concept was of great importance during the re-discovery ofclassical antiquity during theRenaissance by the Italianumanisti, beginning with the illustrious Italian poetPetrarch, who revived Cicero's injunction to cultivate thehumanities, which were understood during the Renaissance as grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy.[5]
In 1333, inLiège,Belgium, Petrarch found and copied out in his own hand a manuscript of Cicero's speech,Pro Archia, which contained a famous passage in defense of poetry andlitterae (letters):
Haec studia adolescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant, secundas res ornant, adversis perfugium ac solacium praebent, delectant domi, non impediunt foris, pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur.
These studies nourish youth, entertain old age, enhance prosperity, offer refuge and solace too in adversity, delight us at home, not hindering us out of doors, spend the night with us, go abroad, and live in the countryside.
Petrarch liked this quotation and referred to it often, and where Cicero used the phrase "litterarum lumen", "the light of literature", Petrarch in the margin wrotelumen litterarum alongside and drew a sketch of a lamp or candle. The Liège manuscript is lost and so is Petrarch's copy, but Petrarch's copy "can be shown to be behind all but one of the later manuscripts" and preserves Petrarch's marginal annotations.[6] Petrarch, in many respects a medieval man, regretted that Cicero had not been a Christian and believed that he certainly would have been one had he not died before the birth of Jesus. To Petrarch and the Renaissanceumanisti who immediately followed him, Cicero'shumanitas was not seen as in conflict with Christianity or a Christian education. In this they followed the fifth century Church fathers such asJerome andAugustine, who taught that Greek and Roman learning and literature were gifts of God and models of excellence, provided, of course, they were filtered and purified in order to serve Christianity.[7]
According to historianPeter Gay, the eighteenth-century Frenchphilosophes of theEnlightenment found Cicero's eclectic,Stoic-tinged paganism congenial:[8]
The ideal ofhumanitas was first brought to Rome by the philosophic circle around Scipio and further developed byCicero. For Cicero,humanitas was a style of thought, not a formal doctrine. It asserted man's importance as a cultivated being, in control of his moral universe. The man who practicedhumanitas was confident of his worth, courteous to others, decent in his social conduct, and active in his political role. He was a man, moreover, who faced life with courageous skepticism: he knows that the consolations of popular religion are for more credulous beings than himself, that life is uncertain, and that sturdy pessimism is superior to self-deceptive optimism. Man becomes man as he refines himself; he even becomes godlike: “Deus est mortali iuvare mortalem,” wrote Pliny, translating a Greek Stoic, “To help man is man's true God.” Finally, the man who practicedhumanitas cultivated his aesthetic sensibilities as he listened to his reason: "Cum musis,” wrote Cicero, “id est, cum humanitate et doctrina habere commercium".[9] Virtue, Cicero insisted, is nothing but nature perfected and developed to its highest point, and there is therefore a resemblance between man and God: "Est autem virtus nihil aliud quam in se perfecta et ad summum perducta natura; est igitur homini cum deo similitudio"[10]...
Cicero'shumanitas... reappeared in the first century inSeneca's claim – made in the midst of a lament over Roman bestiality – that man is a sacred thing to man: “homo res sacra homini”;[11] and reappeared once more in the eighteenth century inKant's call for human autonomy and inVoltaire's stern injunction: “Remember your dignity as a man.”[12] In the beginning of hisMeditations, the EmperorMarcus Aurelius elaborated a veritable catalog of qualities which, all together, made up the virtues which Cicero had calledhumanitas and which thephilosophes hoped they possessed in good measure: modesty, self-control, manliness, beneficence, practicality, generosity, rationality, tolerance, and obedience to the dictates of nature.
During theAufklärung (the German version of the eighteenth-centuryEnlightenment), the term "Humanität" was used to designate the intellectual, physical, and moral formation of "a betterhuman being" (orHumanism). It was used, for example, by theologianJohann Gottfried Herder in hisBriefe zur Beförderung der Humanität (Letters for the Advancement of Humanity), 1792, and byFriedrich Schiller, among others.
Herder'sHumanität is a broad concept he defines variously as the gradual fulfillment of best human potential, the achievement of reason and fairness in all classes and in all affairs of men, and the joint product of the creative actions of legislators, poets, artists, philosophers, inventors, and educators through the ages.[13]
Although Herder is considered the originator of ethnic nationalism, he was no chauvinist. He maintained that each person loves his own nation, family, language, and customs not because they are better than other peoples' but because they are his. Love for one's own individuality ought to lead to respect for that of others. For Herder, the image of God was imprinted in each human being, along with an internal impulse for self-improvement and growth. Historian William McNeil writes that Herder boldly proclaimed that:
each age and every people embody ideals and capacities peculiar to themselves, thus allowing a fuller and more complete expression of the multiform potentialities of humankind than could otherwise occur. Herder expressly denied that one people or civilization was better than another. They were just different, in the same way that the German language was different from the French.[14]
In Roman humanism, benevolence (benevolentia) was considered a feature ofhumanitas. This is particularly emphasized in the works of Cicero and Seneca.[15] In this context, benevolence drives the idea of humaneness and is understood as a feeling either of love or tenderness that makes "someone willing to participate, at the level of feeling, in whatever is human."[15] Such participation entails a willingness to engage both in human suffering and joy. This was echoed in the Kantian position on love, which cited a so-called rational benevolence driven by natural sympathetic joy and pity.[16]
Others have also discussed benevolence in modern humanism. Max Scheler, for example, used it in his discourse on sympathy. In one of his works, he linked benevolence and the concept of "fellow-feeling," which allows self-love, self-centred choice, solipsism, and egoism"[clarification needed] to finally be wholly overcome.[17]: 98 Scheler equated benevolence with humanitarianism, explaining that these concepts — along with fellow-feeling — embrace all men, "simply because they are men."[17]: 99
Humanitas asbenevolence is also a cornerstone of the credo ofFreemasonry and constituted one of the bases for its position that nationality and religion do not matter, only universal humanity.[18] Some orders of Freemasonry are called "Humanitas".[citation needed]
...l’essenza dellahumanitas romana sta propriamente nell’essere l’altra faccia di un insieme ordinato di valori molto precisi e severi, che facevano parte del codice di comportamento del cittadino romano fin dalle origini, e sono pressoché intraducibili in greco: lapietas (che è qualcosa di diverso dallaeusébeia),mores (che non coincidono esattamente con l’ethos), e poi ladignitas, lagravitas, l’integritas, e così via. L’idea dihumanitas riassumeva in sé tuttiquesti valori... ma nello stesso tempo li sfumava, li rendeva meno rigidi e più universali.
SeeSchadewaldt, Wolfgang (1973). "Humanitas Romana". In Temporini, Hildegard; Haase, Wolfgang (eds.).Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt. Vol. I.4. p. 47. For further discussion of Schadewaldt's essay, see alsoBauman, Richard A.Human Rights in Ancient Rome. London: Routledge. pp. 21–27....the essence of Romanhumanitas is that it constitutes one of the aspects of an orderly complex of very distinct and severe values that had been part of the code of conduct of a Roman citizen from the outset and are virtually untranslatable in Greek:pietas (which is different fromeusébeia),mores (which do not coincide exactly withethos), anddignitas,gravitas,integritas, and so on. The idea ofhumanitas subsumed all these values... simultaneously blurring their outlines, rendering them less rigid and more universal.
Early Italian humanism, which in many respects continued the grammatical and rhetorical traditions of theMiddle Ages, not merely provided the oldTrivium with a new and more ambitious name (Studia humanitatis), but also increased its actual scope, content, and significance in the curriculum of the schools and universities and in its own extensive literary production. Thestudia humanitatis excluded logic, but they added to the traditional grammar and rhetoric not only history, Greek, and moral philosophy, but also made poetry, once a sequel of grammar and rhetoric, the most important member of the whole group.
If it is true that Italian humanists had no expression closer to ‘classical scholarship’ thanstudia humanitatis, thePro Archia provided classical scholarship in the Renaissance with its charter of foundation. In Petrarch's attention toPro Archia eight elements can be distinguished:
- He discovered the speech.
- He liked it because it extolled poetry
- He used it in works of his own
- He marked details in it, sometimes because related things had struck him elsewhere in his reading of ancient literature
- He adjusted its text
- He spoke of his discovery in correspondence that he put in wider circulation
- He put the speech itself into wide circulation
- Such was his prestige both as a writer and as a collector that after his deathPro Archia became one of many texts in his library sought out for copying.
SeeReeve, Michael D. (1996). "Classical Scholarship". In Kraye, Jill (ed.).The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism. Cambridge. pp. 21–22.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
Call Archimedes from his buried tomb
Upon the plain of vanished Syracuse,
And feelingly the Sage shall make report
How insecure, how baseless in itself,
Is the Philosophy, whose sway depends
On mere material instruments;—how weak
Those arts, and high inventions, if unpropped
By virtue.—He, sighing with pensive grief,
Amid his calm abstractions, would admit
That not the slender privilege is theirs
To save themselves from blank forgetfulness!
— "The Parsonage", in William Wordsworth,The Excursion (Book Eighth, lines 220–230)
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