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The Humanistic Note in Iqbal PDF Print E-mail

M. Abdul-Huk

What Is Humanism? Like any other “ism,” humanism is a term of vague and varied usage, perhaps finally identifiable, but one from which certain aspects may be picked out. Humanism, as a term for a certain attitude of mind, has a somewhat curious historical genesis. I say curious, because the attitude itself is much older than the period by which it was given this label – is, perhaps, as old as human nature itself. However, as a term of historical genesis, humanism came to be applied to the view of life that began to oppose and be contradistinguished from the older medieval view of life (since called “divinism”) from the time of the European Renaissance. Here, I can do no better than quote almost in extenso Professor Ramsay Muir’s description of the essential difference between the divinism of the Middle Ages and the humanism of the periods both before and after the “divinistic” interregnum.

The best men of the Middle Ages thought of the world as a place of struggle and discipline in preparation for another world; the Greeks thought of it as a place of wonder and beauty which ought to be explored and enjoyed, and they thought little and vaguely about the idea of another world. … for the best minds of the Middle Ages the highest duty of Man was to conquer his passions and to subordinate his arrogant will to the will of God by obeying the rules of life set forth by God’s Church. For the Greeks, Man’s highest duty was to make the most of himself and to develop all his powers of mind and body in the most harmonious way, so that he might enjoy the beauty of the world and be able to seek the truth.

To put the contrast in a single phrase, “self-repression was the highest ideal of the medieval world, self-expression of the ancient world.” What Professor Muir has said about the attitude of the ancient world toward life, as opposed to the corresponding attitude of the medieval world, applies with no very great difference essentially to the contrast between the medieval and the modern attitudes to life. Humanism is, therefore, roughly the ancient and the modern attitude, while divinism, against which modern humanism was a protest and a reaction, was the medieval attitude.

So much for a description of humanism. I shall now quote two wellknown passages that may be regarded as specimens or products of modern humanism. One is that very famous apostrophe which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Hamlet and which runs:

… this goodly frame, the earth, … this most excellent canopy, the air,
took you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted
with golden fire, … What a piece of work is Man! How noble in reason!
How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable!
in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!
the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!

This passage expresses both the essential notes of humanism – a sense of the wonder and beauty of the world and the universe, in other words, of the human situation; and a sense of the dignity and worth of Man himself.

The other is an utterance in Latin which runs: homo sum: humoni nihil a me alienun puto and, roughly translated, means: “I am a Man: nothing pertaining to humanity do I consider alien to myself.” This saying strikes a note of sympathy with and interest in all that pertains to Man, thereby giving words and importance to everything that Man does or happens to him – another deepening note of humanism.

From an interest in all things human and a sense of Man’s worth and dignity, it is a natural and logical step to exalt Man, to apotheosize or raise him to a god – to exalt his place, his nature, and his potentialities. It is in this vein that Marlowe makes his Doctor Faustus say:

O, what a world of profit and delight,
Of power, of honour, of omnipotence
Is promised to the studious artisan!
Here, Faustus, tire thy brains to gain a deity!

Shelly sings of the perfectibility of Man, of Man as a being of infinite capacities and destinies. In a sense, this is the acme and the culmination of humanism and, broadly speaking, it is at this pitch that the humanistic note enters into the poetry of Iqbal.