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Liberal Humanism’s Philosophical Roots

Liberal-humanist philosophical thought contributes to modern beliefs in a reality that can be known directly through the senses and through the employment of rational thought. Humanism’s flourishing during the Renaissance was partly a reaction to the feudalism and church control of the Middle Ages. While in the Middle Ages people were told they must accept their place in the order of things, with humanism came a belief in the freedom of human beings to control their own destinies. Abbagnano (1967) tells us of humanism’s history:

The term “humanism”...derives from humanitas, which at the time of Cicero and Varro meant the education of man as such, and what the Greeks called paidea: the education favored by those who considered the liberal arts to be instruments, that is, disciplines proper to man which differentiate him from the other animals.... The humanists held that through classical letters the “rebirth” of a spirit that man had possessed in the classical age and had lost in the Middle Ages could be realized, a spirit of freedom that provided justification for man’s claim of rational autonomy, allowing him to see himself involved in nature and history and capable of making them his realm. (p. 70)

Liberal humanism inspired a scientific, rational world view that placed the knowing individual at the center of history, and viewed that history as the progress of Western thought. It served as the catalyst for the modern world’s reliance on individualism and belief in a common human nature, scientific rationality, and the search for truth as universal knowledge and certainty in the world (Abbagnano, 1967, p. 72). The liberal-humanist view also made possible notions of general education and general (public) literacy because knowledge came to be considered as having “objective” bases that could be acquired by anyone with training.

Of the many schools of thought inspired by liberal humanism, two directly inform modern reading practices: empiricism and rationalism. Though Western empiricism finds its earliest inspiration in Aristotle, it took its modern form following the great 17th- and early 18th-century British thinkers Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Empiricism posits that all factual knowledge is based on our sensual experience and inner reflection -- that is, there is a reality independent of the mind that can be experienced by the senses. And while different schools of empiricist thought interpret key terms such as experience, fact, and world differently, they generally hold that the mind comes to acquire knowledge about the world by systematic means including induction and the scientific method (Tarnas, 1991, p. 334).

Rationalism, a school of thought with its early Western roots in the dialogues of Plato, claims as its modern proponents the 17th- and 18th-century philosophers Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Rationalism is characterized by the belief that knowledge of the world can be attained through reason, that this knowledge is universal and deductive in character, and that everything is fundamentally explainable by this universal system. This view of the world, while at odds with certain fundamental tenets of empiricism, finds its greatest expression in the fields of logic and mathematics (Tarnas, 1991, p. 334).

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