Assignment #3: Humanism

What the hell is humanist theory? Who are its big names, and what have they said that was so darned influential?

This seems a natural, if brief, launching point out of antiquity...

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A mini-response

As usual, a concept is better illuminated when held in contrast to its opposite. I mean, I feel like humanism is a concept I could have articulated in high school; I was fascinated by the Renaissance back in the day. But by reading William Wordsworth's 1802 introduction, "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads," I feel I can quite nicely grasp how the paradigm shifted, so to speak.

Based on my futzing around, the theories of literature put forth by Plato and Aristotle were pretty much uncontested during the Middle Ages (during which Aristotle's Poetics was barely read, anyway). Sir Phillip Sydney's "Defense of Poetry" is on my list, as being often cited as an example of burgeoning literary theory in the 16th century... SPS evidently defended poetry on the grounds that it could teach us something useful and morally upstanding, which is of course at odds with that jerk, Plato. The point seems, for me, to be the perpetuation of classical discourses as the absolute authority on art.

Artifice and elevation: the triumphs of Greek (and Roman?) civilization. Like a cold marble statue, it's technically perfect stuff - and I'm not trying to knock Homer, but I believe that Wordsworth blows my mind precisesly because he, too, would be the guy in the museum next to me, saying "Yeah, it's beautiful... but damn, it's so... cold." Where's the humanity?

So, humanism allowed us, as human beings, some agency in the creation of art (rather than chalking it all up to God's grace or whatnot). That was a good thing. But the values and blind reverance for the past still strikes me as terribly iffy. Concurrent with such fetishism was a rather elite ideal, that art furthermore could only be produced - and appropriately enjoyed - by those with the education to enjoy it. Ergo, very few actual people; only the assholes who had the money for Greek tutors (not that I'm bitter).

To read Wordsworth's Romantic manifesto is a refreshingly real kind of revolution. People, real people, and emotion - powerful, inspirational, raw - these are the heart of poetry. W-dawg famously describes the poet as "a man speaking to men;" this kind of statement takes on a whole level of incredible-ness once you really consider the traditions which preceded, and surrounded the poet. I love that W is a bit snotty, digging in to the pretentious poets of his day - their contrivances, their artifice, and their weak regurgitation of what the Greek and Romans were actually good at.

For me, W's poems are sadly, something of a let-down. I mean, sure, "Tintern Abbey" has its moments, but the passion, the meditation, the superhuman poet transcending and translating the raw of life into tiny little, rhytmmic words -- well... it just never works for me, as a whole. I guess a 21st century American woman and a 19th century Englishman might just be turned on by different things (I personally distrust the countryside, being full of Republicans, shotguns, and strange, large insects).

It's nice to see that W knew his classics, however. The little scamp almost openly defies Aristotle, by declaring that the expression and production of feeling, above all, is a poem's purpose - not its plot, its characters, its action, its diction. Pretty much everything the great Greek philosopher insisted on, and which consequently shaped Western culture for the next 1K years. So, who finally told Aristotle to f*ck himself? Why, William Wordsworth does!

Humans were placed nicely back in the center by Romantic humanists such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. Even if their adoration of nature/pastoral feels a bit trite today, it's fascinating to think of how their world was changing - industrialization and the spread of daily newspapers, for one. Who wouldn't react with anxiety against such a rapidly changing world? And it must be said that despite his praise for the everyman, W hung on to a distate for the mob and its unpalatable, untrained "thirst" for "sensationalism." Discrimination, training, taste, education - it all laid a nice ground for Matthew Arnold, some 50 years later.

But that's a whole other story, and I have dinner to make.