Thomas Rue, M.A.
December 1989, 2004. All rights reserved.

The ancient Greeks were probably the first "humanists." Protagoras wrote that "the human is the measure of all things." Sophocles, that of all the many wonders of the world, there is "none so wonderful as the human" (Phifer, 1973.)

Humanism is an orientation and an approach with applications in virtually all professional disciplines, including but not limited to education, counseling, psychology, and medicine.

Elizabeth Campbell (1984), a past executive director of the Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP) wrote that humanistic psychology holds a hopeful view of people and their ability to be self-determining, self-actualizing, and capable of making choices.

In addition, she listed the following results of humanism:

It promotes human growth and transformation;

Gives priority to human needs;

Is holistic and insists on looking at total systems;

Honors the subjective, the intuitive, in the study of humans;

Supports self-disclosure, trust, and openness as ways of being in the world.

Campbell's description fits closely with assertions made in the Humanist Manifesto in 1933, which declared that the purposes and practice of humanism is to:

Affirm life rather than deny it;

Seek to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from it;

Endeavor to establish the conditions of a satisfactory life for all, not merely the few.

A similar document, the Secular Humanist Declaration, declares that "human beings are responsible for their own destinies." Psychologists refer to this as "perceived internal locus of control" (Rotter & Mulry, 1965) -- a concept with significant implications in counseling and other branches of human services.

While some seem to limit their learning to that which can be demonstrated by the scientific method (Phifer, 1973), others place value in all aspect of human experience -- including the spiritual and intuitive.

In his paper, The Faith of a Humanist, Phifer affirmed: "I have faith in that part of humanism which sees the human being as the highest form of life, an end not a means, the creator of moral values, the maker of history.

R E F E R E N C E S

Campbell, E. (1984), Humanistic psychology: The end of innocence, Journal of Humanist Psychology, spring, 6-29.

Phifer, K. (1973), The faith of a humanist (pamphlet), Boston: Beacon Press.

---

By Tom Rue. From a handout distributed in a Humanistic Psychology class, Sullivan County Community College, Woodbourne and Sullivan state correctional facilities, © June 7, 1988. Permission to reprint is granted, provided credit to the author is given.

 

The Humanist Manifesto harms religion