What Is Humanism For? (Bristol University Press) by Richard Norman
Humanism once evoked the image of a Renaissance scholar hunched over a bookwheel, scribbling in the margins of some ancient manuscript. Though devout believers, these scholars were pioneers in loosening Christianity’s grip on European thought, reviving ancient ideas alien to the medieval mind and, paradoxically, nurturing a more modern sense of “humanism”. Richard Norman’s elegant new book is less about cataloguing definitions than asking what humanism is for: what role it plays in people’s lives and in the societies they inhabit.
Nevertheless, definitions still matter. Norman is a philosopher – an emeritus professor at the University of Kent – and his approach is revealing. Humanism, Norman insists, is “not a set of doctrines … a creed … a prescribed body of practices or a code of moral rules,” but a “frame of orientation and devotion”, in Erich Fromm’s phrase, enabling individuals and communities to make sense of existence without appeal to the supernatural. As a “frame”, humanism offers “an overall perspective, a way of seeing our world and our place in it”, one that is “broad and general” yet neither “vague nor empty”.
This formulation highlights both the promise and the difficulty of defining humanism. Too often, it risks being defined negatively, by what it rejects – religion, God, metaphysics, the supernatural – rather than by its positive content. Norman acknowledges this tension, and much of his work is to show humanism’s positive content in terms of how it functions in the modern world. He does so in two ways: one conceptual, and one historical.
The ground of his conceptual analysis is naturalism. Naturalism, for him, is the conviction that “this world is the only world there is. And by ‘this world’ is meant, equally simply, the world in which we live and with which we interact through sensory experience and physical action.” Such a claim may appear stark, but Norman argues that it provides the foundation for building a worldview from the inside out. We need not import meaning from an external realm; it can be created within human life itself.
The historical approach is necessarily concise in this short 116-page book, with nods to the naturalism of the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, as well as contemporaneous critiques of the Scottish philosopher David Hume and the great polemicist of the French Enlightenment, Voltaire. The account also brings in Indian schools of atheistic and materialist thought.
The aim is not to provide a comprehensive history but to demonstrate that humanism is neither a novelty nor a purely western invention, but rather a recurring current in human thought, re-emerging in different forms as human beings wrestle with questions of meaning and morality without appealing to the divine. The latter point is especially important if humanism is to spread significantly beyond the already secular west.
One of Norman’s strengths is his refusal to caricature religion. He insists on taking it at its most intellectually and morally serious, rather than dismissing it as mere superstition. He is less indulgent towards contemporary forms of scientific reductionism, eg the attempt to say that the human being is simply a series of neurons or chemical reactions in the brain, or the idea that our existence can be explained entirely in the language of mathematical physics. This, he suggests, is a real threat: the risk of reducing human life to what religious critics have long feared, a barren desert of mechanism and emptiness.
Norman resists this tendency, insisting that the richness of human experience – emotion, imagination, culture, art – cannot be collapsed into physics or biology without remainder. Humanism, as he presents it, is not a reductive scientism but a broad framework that values science without allowing it to swallow all other forms of understanding.
The question of community is more difficult. Religions have historically thrived by meeting human needs for belonging, ritual and solidarity. Humanism, by comparison, is young and often appears to be playing catch-up. Norman acknowledges that ethical societies, humanist groups and secular ceremonies struggle to replicate the accumulated emotional weight of centuries that gives religious communities their strength.
Where humanism may appear to have the upper hand is in its political implications. Norman traces a line from figures such as Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill, who linked their secular philosophy with political struggles for liberty, democracy and equality, all the way through to contemporary humanist commitments to human rights, free expression, sexual equality and environmental responsibility.
I found the book most interesting when Norman confronts not only the “old gods” of religion but the “new idols” of transhumanism and posthumanism, with their vision of using science and technology to move beyond our current mental and physical limits. Against such ideas of immortality, digital transcendence or engineered perfection, he argues that finitude is essential to meaning. The emphasis on finitude is the most compelling aspect of the book because it is an answer both to traditional religion and to posthumanism. Responding to the familiar charge that rejecting religion makes life meaningless, Norman argues the opposite: mortality is what lends life its urgency and preciousness. Human life is valuable not because it is potentially infinite but because it is necessarily finite.
If naturalism is the theoretical basis of humanism, finitude is its ethical ground. Finitude is the condition of the meaningful possibilities we encounter in our lives, individual fragility and the ground of collective solidarity, creativity and joy. The emphasis on the goodness of finitude constitutes the positive core of humanism, and Norman goes on to identify several sources of meaning available within a humanist framework, including:
- Authenticity (the determination to live one’s own life rather than one dictated by tradition or dogma)
- Creativity (the impulse to shape the world through art)
- Work
- Imagination
- Continuity with past and future generations, which situates each life in a larger story
- Connection with the natural world
- And lastly, the power of narrative (the ability to tell stories that give shape and coherence to a finite existence)
Through this framework, he shows how humanism today can offer something of the ceremony and symbolic depth of traditional religion. Humanist funerals are one example, with their attention to individual life stories and their rejection of supernatural consolations.
Norman’s What Is Humanism For? is a winningly undogmatic book. It is lucid and accessible, avoiding jargon without oversimplifying, and identifies the central problem of showing how and why humanism is more than the absence of religion. It provides modest and practical arguments about how humanism allows us to live finite lives with clarity and compassion, to face global challenges without illusions, and to find significance in the one world we share.
Finally, what the book is able to achieve is to put forward a persuasive case that humanism is not simply about rejecting religion, but about how we might live.
This article is from New Humanist's Winter 2025 edition. Subscribe now.
