You're welcome Again to our Series. I Believe you are Going to Have a very Stimulating time.

Just as I
promised the other time, today we are going to look at a particular theory that most times it's
overlooked as a theory in literary study and in the whole context of theorizings in literature. And that
theory, well, some people would tell you that's a non theory, and you find out why because of the
assumptions of that theory. That theory is named liberal humanism. Humanism itself is a production of a
history right back as far as the times of the Enlightenment in Europe, or let's put it broadly, in the west,
and then how it produced itself through the moment of the Renaissance period, the Renaissance ways
of reconceptualizing human existence and progress in society.

Before the Renaissance period in Europe, we'd had a particular time frame in history, well, you may say
pedigoratively, that is, in a way that looks down on me pejoratively, called the Middle Ages or the Dark
Ages. The Dark Ages are seen in European thoughts, Western thoughts, and history as a time of
knowledge occlusion, a time when knowledge was boxed in that man, the human self, was not really
allowed to opine from an independent faculty of reasoning. Okay? He or she was, so to speak, Boxed
into a ThEocentrIc EpistEmology Of WorldView. By theocentric, I mean a kind of worldview that had God
as the primary lens of looking at the world.

So during the time of the Middle Ages, we had a particular doctrine that was invoked, actually
theocentric, the godlike kind of thing that was in operation in society as a form of knowledge production,
was in favor of the Roman Catholic epistemology that was so much, so to speak, intertwined with
governance in Europe. You had, in most cases, the monarchs in Europe, and then you had the Catholic
Church, the Pope, had so much influence in society.

And within that period, just after the classical period, which was very robust in know, you're talking
about the Greek culture, series of cultures, if you like, and forms of enlightenment that were seen as
classical, that produced a number of philosophies and philosophers, philosophies that had to do with
looking at art and humanity in a new way, that allowed the self to rationalize, to conceptualize things, to
imagine things in very secular and also religious fashions that produced man as a kind of fantastic
creator of knowledges. That was the time when you had philosophers like Plato, Socrates, Aristotle. You
had people that were actually positioning the world, the future, so to speak, in a context where the
mind could operate.

But just after the fall of that period, we had a situation in which the Roman Empire, together with the
Pope, had a way in which almost every culture and every form of reasoning within Europe. Fell into the
epistemology called the Great Chain of Being. That great chain of being had a kind of organogram, so to
speak, in which the great being was seen at the top of power, followed by a series of vassal powers like,
you are the king, you are the monarch, you are officials of state. And it trickled down that way. So in the
great chain of being, humanity and human cultures were seen as fused together. Okay? There was a
hierarchy by which almost everything was conceived. From Ethiocentric, Catholic, Christian
perspective. That was the age when you had the moral plays, you had the miracle plays.

And these plays definitely had Manikian thematics. When we talk about something being Manikian, we
are talking about a structure, a system, in which you had a binary opposition of good and bad, of right
and left, of white and black, and so many other things like that. So there was a parallel of opposite
knowledges in which one was definitely superior to the other one, which it negated. So, by that kind of
situation, the kind of literature and the kind of theoretical underpinnings that informed literature were
guided by theocentric terms of morals, of codes, of conduct, of ethics, of relationships, in which the
divine dictated to the unconscious and the subconscious of the human being. So the reason why
philosophers recall Such an Age as an age of darkness.

Was because they felt that the human mind was not allowed to Gestate, to fecundate, that is, to bring
about a kind of fertility, of the Potentials it could give to human progress. But with time, just like all
forms of histories and all forms of things that come with history, tends to change. That time was
superseded by the Renaissance period. Roughly starting from the 14th century. And progressing to
about the 15th or to 16th century. So, within the Renaissance Period, there was a particular fixation, a
particular concentration on the power of the mind of man, the potential that was put within the
Doctrine called humanism.

By humanism, we mean a kind of knowledge production and a kind of practice, in fact, a kind of way of
seeing the world, by which there was much emphasis on the ingrained productivity, the integral
productivity of the human mind. So that was the Age that celebrated the freedom of mind, the freedom
of rationality, the freedom of creativity, away from theocentric expectations of morals. And of the
worship of the Great being and so on and so forth. Definitely, just as this kind of thing, that is,
knowledge production in the Middle Ages affected literature. The turn of humanism within the
Enlightenment period also definitely informed literature and literary activities in Europe. Some of the
main writers of that time included the canonical, very historic figure called William Shakespeare. It was
also the time of people of Sir Philip Sydney. Okay.

And it was a period that saw a kind of possibility of the human mind in so many ways. For example, in
the arts. You had such fantastic figurations of graphic art in Europe. That, up till today, still become
canonized, that is seen as Standard references to art. It was the time that we had a whole lot of
scientific inventions, a whole lot of imaginations that brought humanity away from the shell of what you
can call a theocentric imprisonment. And Then humanity within the European world began to
experiment in so many things. Themes that were seen as Abominable in those days. Themes that looked
at state, that contradicted the excesses of power, that looked at the intricacies of human relationships
and the intrigues of such relationships as it had to do with gender, class, privilege, reasoning, and so
many other things like that.

So within that kind of context, humanism affected philosophy, it affected music. It touched on the
arts. It's touched on architecture. It even touched on religion, because you began to have, for example,
when you talk about people from the Christian religious perspective, began to antagonize some things
they felt that were perhaps too high ended within Roman Catholicism. You had a figure like Martin
Luther. You read the Bible. And from the kind of consciousness of humanism that is, the liberality of the
mind, to suggest, to conceptualize, to propose, and then also to direct that proposition into positive
things, you had, even within religion, a figure like Martin Luther presenting some thesis that were based
on his private reading of the Bible. That questioned the high grounded, unscriptural observations,
according to his own faces, of the Roman Catholic Church.

And that was the birth of the Protestant Church. So even what you call humanism became the Spirit, the
knowledge spirit that was guiding the direction of humanity within Europe. And by extension, within
Western thoughts right from the moment of the Renaissance period. Now back to our lecture on liberal
humanism. Of course, we might even say, to talk about liberal and humanism joined together will be a
kind of tautology that is a kind of repetition of concept, a kind of repetition of idea. Because when you
talk about the liberal, you are, by extension, in the context of the humanism happening in Europe. You
are talking about also the reign of the Human agency to direct the cosmic affair in which the human
being was in direct scientific, philosophical control of so biliberal humanism attached to literature.

There was this conception that the human was very germane in anything that had to do with literature,
and that there was no relevance of literature if it did not, in the first instance, ennoble human character,
the human spirit, and make humanity very self concealed in such a way that it could reproduce itself in
very positive ways, that society could grow and become better. So when you talk about the concept of
liberal humanism, we are talking about certain positions that were made about literature. Number one,
literature was seen as an aesthetic site in which man, that is, man, as man and woman. I'm talking about
man in a generic form, not in a way that several other critics might be accused of as maybe privileging
maleness and ignoring femaleness. I'm not talking about that here.

I'm just using man as a generic term that within the concept of the textual, in the gaze of liberal
humanism, as a theory of literature, humanity was seen as very unique, and all that will enable man or
the human being was seen as the essence of literature. By extension, liberal humanism saw literature
also as a self contained, self defined, self accomplished production artifact work of art that universally
represented the story of viable human experience. By extension, the liberal humanist theory of
literature saw literature as a text that is not conditioned by cultural indices. It's not a product of culture
or history or the intention of an author or the expectations of a particular kind of aesthetics that must
be there. The liberal humanist was saying that literature was self contained.

And anywhere you read the work of art or you came across literature, it produced a kind of effect, a kind
of literary and consumer effect for the audience that could be felt anywhere in the world. That is, if I
was reading William Shakespeare's Macbeth or I was reading Othello or reading the Tempest in Nigeria,
that the same pleasure, the same accomplishment, the same effect of literary enjoyment is what to be
felt anywhere else in the world by anybody, whether the person is African or European or Arab or Asian,
whatever the case may be, the same literary effect, the rhetorical first and enjoyment or gain that I get
in literature is the same thing that will be produced in any human being that encounters that kind of
literature. Number two is that literature is an aesthetic product that transcends time.

It is the same in any historical sphere, any temporal sphere of human experience. That is, as it was in
William Shakespeare's days, so is it in the times of Nigerian days of blacks reading the same tempest. In
other words, if I were a man or you are a woman, I happen to be a boy, you are a girl, I happen to be
white. You are black. I happen to come from a culture from Africa, and you are coming from a culture in
China or in Canada or the United States. We are both going to have the same kind of effect, the same
kind of reading, the same kind of judgment of that literature.

In fact, another thing about liberal humanism in relation to literature was that there was no way in
which you could subject literature to criticism, because literature has nothing to be criticized. The thing
to bring into literature, like bringing some kind of philosophical opinion, coming from what you might
call racial theory or feminism, sexual orientation of a particular critical reading, or you are coming from a
particular discipline like philosophy, or coming from a religious ways and all that. All these things won't
matter when encountering literature that literature itself contained, and anything that can break that
unification of the literary text as a kind of exemplar of universalist audience consumption, will be very
extraneous. That is, will be very irrelevant to literature.
One other thing you will find about liberal humanism is that it synthesizes, it fuses form and content in
such a way that it doesn't allow a kind of judgment of its form, and what thematics is bringing out. All
those things are extraneous in liberal humanism as it has to do with literary theory. Another thing about
this is that it sees literature as not an innovative practice. It sees it as a kind of embodiment of
metaphysical textuality. That is, it is self evident. Anywhere it goes, it is self evident. In fact, some
theorists have tried to itemize some tenets of liberal humanism as being within certain yardstick of Ten
Commandments. And all these things, I've said, are contained within the ten tinnets assumed to be of
liberal humanism. Liberal humanism, therefore becomes the kind of theory that proposes literature as
universalist, as transpatial.

It is transhistoric. It has no bias about discussivity. That is angle it is bringing its presentation or
information from, maybe in a kind of political way. No, it just sees literature as a kind of consumption
that anybody can assume. And then what makes it liberal or humanist in that context is that it is human
being centered, and it is supposed to enable the best of the potential of man. It projects literature as a
kind of literary proposition that does not have to be looked at as being predetermined by the
author. The author in liberal humanism, just like you'll find out in some other subsequent theories, the
author is not a matter to really consider interpreting literature. The author might just be a kind of, well,
tool that produces the literature. Liberal humanism focuses on the text.

In other words, the author is not the issue. Different ways by which different audiences see the
literature as different information doesn't come up here. The text is seen as self subliming, self
contained, self accomplished, and therefore universally approachable and consumed by different
audiences wherever they come from, of different timescapes. So literature becomes a kind of silent and
very unassuming artifact. Rather than a programmatic propagandist production. It is a very unassuming,
so to speak, but very strong and self revealing production that cannot be contained or that cannot be
faced by other forms of looking at it, maybe from gendered or racial or colonial or post colonial or
whatever you might be looking at that might be seen as political agenda of looking at literature. A
number of things go in here for the text. In liberal humanism, the text is sovereign.

And the information, the communication, the text is given is very unheeding. It is naked. It is not
maxed. By extension, there are no private meanings as to how to interpret a text that is literary. It is, so
to speak, already written, already read the moment you encounter literature. Now I want to talk about a
particular theory. So many factors brought in this view of literature, in literary conception of history. But
then we know that by talking about liberal humanism, although there have been people that had been
bringing this kind of things and ages that had been projecting this kind of vision of literature right from
ancient times.

For instance, if we remember what we said about the production of literature during the classical Greek
times, especially the preplatonic moments, you will find out that to a very great extent, even though
they didn't theorize it that way, literature had a way of being seen as literature because it produced a
kind of aesthetics that was knowable and which everybody enjoyed as literature. We were talking about
Homer the other time, the last lecture that he proposed that if you are going to be a poet, to be very, so
to speak, attuned to the highest level of linguistic experimentations and production. The assumption
that Homer was having there was that in its own right, any form of what was seen as good literature
transcended time, transcended private biases of people. From a political perspective, it just presented
itself as literature.

It's like saying that you will always know an elephant when you see one. You can mistake it as ant, for
example. You'll always know a lion when it comes to you. Hopefully, it won't get to you. You just see it at
the zoo. But then you'll always know them. By extension, you'll always know literature as it is. The
Arrowhead originator of this theory, in a conservative academic landscape of reading the history of
liberal humanism as it has come to Ross in contemporary times, was a man called F. D. Morris. Frederick
Denison Morris was born in 18 five and died in 1872. Morris was a product of several realities that made
him a scholar that often disappointed conventions. He came from a Christian family where his father
was a clergy. He belonged to a Unitarian faith. Observation of Christianity.

When you talk about the Unitaranian, you are saying that the Godhead was seen as one. The idea of the
Trinity didn't exist. In other words, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit weren't seen as co partners with the
Father that we know about it in Christianity. Rather, the Father seemed to be in the Uniternian
conception of Christianity as the main reference in the Godhead. And Jesus just happens to be a kind of
subordinate to him, something like that. FD Morris'father happened to be a scholar in his own right. He
was a fantastic thinker, and because of his depth of knowledge, he felt that this kind of thing must be
reproduced in his son, in what he saw as proper education. So Morris, actually that is the FD Maurice we
are talking about, was well schooled.

He went to school, he went to the seminary, and at the end of the day he graduated as a lawyer from a
very ivory tower university in the United Kingdom. But unknown to the Father, his Christian upbringing
and his association began to make him to look at a number of things within his secular society as not
acceptable. Number one, he was somebody that had so much sympathy to the masses, and by extension
he was somebody that felt that there was a need to upgrade the lifestyle, the life realities of the
masses. And by extension, he was in absolute interrogation against the elite class, the aristocracy, which
in his time were seen in his own kind of radical scholarship as global elites. In other words, they were cut
off away from the reality of the environment.

So Morris felt that literature had something to play to raise the humanity of everybody within
society. And he subscribed to the middle class as a bridge between the excesses of the elite and the
downtroddenness of the masses. And he elected for a middle class education as an identity of
Englishness. And he also felt that the middle class represented the ideal of what it means to be English
in society. And along that line, he extended his belief system within literature into a number of social
work that had to do with bringing in the poor people into Bible study, into getting to know things. And
he philosophized a number of things that were calculated to improve the humanity of the masses. Along
that line, literature, for Morris was something that was supposed to be ennobling, something to make
humanity a better thing.

Morris happens to be a very interesting character to follow up as we talk about the influence he had on
liberal humanism. We're going to exhaust that in the next lecture. Just remember to subscribe. Like
Share this video, but let's wait for the very next lecture, which will be exhausting. Morris and the
intricacies of liberal humanism, its strengths, its weaknesses, and its dynamics in so many ways.