Anthony Hecht

From Philosopedia

Hecht, Anthony (16 January 1923 - 20 October 2004)

Hecht, an American poet who was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, responded in 1989 to a query by Warren Allen Smith about humanism:

I feel much as Lionel Trilling did [in the quote you mailed], ill-at-ease with the term “humanism” though perhaps our reasons for discomfort are not the same. I’d be curious to find out if any of your respondents claim to enlist under the heading of “ancient humanist.” As for me, I’m afraid that as currently used (without your fine distinctions) the term seems to mean little more than that the person to whom it applies is “a nice guy,” and more particularly one who is nice by instinct and not by policy or doctrine. This essentially antinomian meaning is one of the things that makes me as hesitant and suspicious as I am. The word carries about as much weight these days as the word “socialism” in the phrase “National Socialism.” In terms of plain usefulness, I still like to employ it as you did in your third definition, the one of “Classical Humanism,” applied, as you indicate, to the likes of More, Erasmus, Montaigne, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bacon, Colet, Vives, and so on. I wish I could claim to be able to enroll myself under such a heading, but apart from my ignorance, I would also have to be a great deal older than I am.

In 1992, he had further observations:

Your categories intrigue me, not least of all because they are by no means exhaustive. None of them, for example, would embrace what Terence and Cicero meant in saying, “I am a man: nothing human is alien to me.” I think this is clearly distinct from the second category of “collective philosophies” such as you enumerate. It furthermore occurs to me to wonder just how useful a term “humanism” can be if, as I shrewdly suspect, there are hardly any people who would categorically deny an affiliation to one or another of its varieties. If not too impatient to consider the question, even Hitler, I imagine, would declare himself a “humanist” (just as he regarded himself as a Socialist) on the grounds that he was generously concerned with the welfare of at least some fellow humans. I may say that I have no faith whatever in the “self-improvability of human personality” which you offer as a description of “secular humanism.” This does not mean that I don’t believe that individuals can improve themselves in important ways; they obviously do so simply by maturing, and most adults are more thoughtful and considerate of others than small children are. But in the main, I do not for a minute believe that the human race has become more humane or less given to barbarous inhumanity than obtained in any former period however “barbarous” or refined in its brutality. From my point of view, the most useful definition is the one you characterize as “classical humanism.” It describes a particular era, and a latitudinous kind of culture that belonged to a certain period, and that is now past. There is nothing wrong nor especially pedantic about seeing humanism as something in the past. Up until recently the word “modern” was defined as “bearing upon the present,” and concerned with whatever is “current.” But now, it appears, we live in a “post-modern” world, and no one will ever be modern again.

{WAS, 30 January 1989 and 5 June 1992}