October 2023 Event: Talk with Sarah Bakewell

“Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope”

Sarah Bakewell

Is the author, most recently, of ‘Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope’, published in March 2023. A New York Times bestseller and a BBC Book of the Week, it explores the lives of humanists from Petrarch in the 1300s to the present day.

On Monday the 16^th of October, the HAI members had the pleasure to share an evening with Sarah Bakewell – author of “Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope” and other books such as “The Existentialist Café” and “How to Live a Life of Montaigne”

Sarah clearly had lots to talk about and we started by asking her how she was able to contain all in what many see as an extremely capacious book into 1 volume versus 7 volumes and what was the core genesis of its being and how did she wrestle with such an audacious manuscript.

Humanism as a whole

She described how she was inspired to look at humanism as a whole and how it is defined, what it means, how to explain it and how to approach it from across the ages. And this was mapped out looking at various humanists ranging from David Knobs, Petrarch, Voltaire, EM Foster, Humboldt, Mill and Matthew Arnold where on the one hand from the middle ages to the renaissance period – humanism sought to move away from the ideas of the supernatural, religious ideas and morality to look at a more philosophical and scientific approach to life.

3 classical realms

From here, Sarah looked at 3 classical realms in more depth; questioning the senses of the divine realms, the physical realms and the human realms of ethics and sociology. Moving into the 19^th century, Sarah believed that humanism began to center more around education, science and bringing more happiness to more people with better schooling structures and more stable political systems although how this was a challenge with the rapid emergence of industrialization. She toyed then towards the conclusion of her book the more optimistic view of humanism and how we often have to tussle with the abdication of hope and responsibility and how James Baldwin spoke to this in his quote where – “One is responsible for life and it is that small beacon from where we come from and where we will return and how one must negotiate this passing as safe as possible for those who come after.”

Sarah certainly had our members and audience really enthused with her book and her comments and we saw lots of wonderful questions in particular from our HAI President David Mc Connell.

A big thank you

A wonderful evening was had by all and a huge thank you to Sarah for her time and we hope to see her soon in person for more conversation. If interested in purchasing Sarah’s books – you can find out more here – https://sarahbakewell.com/ and https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/552033/humanly-possible-by-sarah-bakewell/

You can watch the discussion now on Youtube by clicking here