Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

After three-starring (perhaps high?) Bakewell's "Existentialist Cafe" book, I thought I would give her another shot. This is an extended review of what's on Goodreads.

This also is a three two-star, and it also has some of the same issues as that, the biggest being falling between the stools of something in a more formal style and depth versus something more casual. With that comes the issue of not writing something long enough for a more formal book, and a circumscribed scope as well.

The second is once again privileging Sartre over Camus, and, related to that, somewhat whitewashing Sartre by omission on his biggest sin.

We'll get more to whitewashing in a minute, because, he's whitewashed less than somebody else.

A small, but not THAT small issue? It’s limited to the “west” only. Yes, Rumi is a half century older than Petrarch, but you certainly could work him in. You could definitely add much more from non-Western thinkers of newer times.

Big problem? Minimizing. Like Le Bon David’s racism. Maybe she learned that from Julian Baggini?

I had seen a few nagging things throughout earlier chapters, but stuff that probably wouldn’t add up to more than a half-star. Then, I saw the Hume minimizing at the end of the “perpetual miracles” chapter and oops! Hume was not alone, of course; plenty of Enlightenment leading lights, whether humanists or not, were racists. Look at Locke, even if not generally called a "humanist." (Perhaps Bakewell figured he was too much to whitewash.) Look at the Reformation. Luther’s early adversary Eck, considered a religious humanist, was even more an anti-Semite than Luther. I then thought of Rumi.

She does address it in the next chapter. But, only in brief and lumped with others. The real question is whether these people should be considered humanist in the first place, and no, that’s not “presentism,” not since Hume was called out at the time — and she mentions it! She also doesn’t wrestle with the issue of the Enlightenment developing modern ideas of “race” in general, and at least some of them — Hume included — articulating the idea of polygenesis. She also doesn't discuss Hume's ethnic, or ethnonationalist, stereotyping of Italians and others. I cover ALL of this in detail.

One Chinese and one Cambodian get mention in passing in the post WWII era. Manabendra Roy does get a half a page. That’s it. The non-West is presented as only a backdoor. Within the West, Sartre of post-WWII is presented as countering Heidegger. No Camus at all. (She very much privileged Sartre over Camus in Existentialist Café as well.) Nor any mention of Sartre’s ongoing toadying for Stalin. The Sartre error is compounded here re humanism, not existentialism, because she explicitly calls Communism anti-humanist.

Frankly, I think, based on the two books together, her view of Sartre is outrightly hagiographic.

Here in the US? Though Zora Neale Huston is on the cover, she gets a throwaway mention and that’s that. On Frederick Douglass, there's no mention of him being not so humanistic about American Indians, as well as stereotyping Germans and Irish. (This says nothing of Hume's ethnic stereotypes on top of his racism.)

Also missing, as far as this not being in-depth? Until mention of the Humanist Manifesto, there's really not a lot of "meta"-level discussion of what humanism was considered as being, at times, other than an antiquarian belle lettres for the early Renaissance humanists. Nor

And gets on my newly created "meh" shelf. And, I recommend against reading her further. I'm not going out to hunt her Montaigne bio. I've read enough of his individual essays, I know the basics of his life, and I fear she probably has mucked things up if a more in-depth bio. And, I just don't get what critics see in her. 

Vita brevis, ars longior. You had two bites at my reading apple; I don't have time for a third.

View all my reviews