Charles Hartshorne
Humanism seems to be a mode of thought incident to a certain stage in the development of science. It arises after the downfall of primitive animism, which is the mythological form of man’s fellowship with nature. The early Greek philosophers still possessed this fellowship and sought to render it intelligible. But the rise of critical logic (Socrates, and the skeptic, Epicurean, and empiricist schools) , together with the decay of classical civilization, brought disillusionment. Nature became problematic rather than companionable, tragic and even ugly rather than an inspiration and the source of all joys. Man was driven back upon himself, his own hopes and fears, with no means of escaping his solitariness and despair except through the hypostatization of abstractions, through mystical communion with a One beyond all evil and change and uncertainty (Plotinus and Augustine). Mythical animistic communion with nature had been fanciful; but it did give some heed to the concrete phenomena of nature. But in scholastic theology the lingering sparks of animistic natural fellowship found in Plato (the world-soul as the mind whose body is nature) and in Aristotle (the souls of the heavenly bodies) were extinguished and the foundations laid for the modern view of the world as a vast lifeless machine, quite distinct from its mechanic-Creator, and in its general traits essentially alien also to man (except as its law-abiding character made it congenial to his intelligence). The final step was to drop the conceptions of creation and divine governance as superfluous, leaving man and the higher animals as the only creators of values and the only proper objects of imaginative sympathy. This was practically pure humanism, for the animals were seldom taken seriously into account. Man was left with what Robinson Jeffers calls an “ incestuous” love for his own kind, and, for the rest, with a sense of the unintelligibility of existence
It is worth emphasizing the point just made, that the isolation of matter from mind and purpose which has led to humanism is due to medieval religion as much as to modern science. It was religion which divided with a mighty gulf God from the world, this world from the next, eternity from time, the soul from the body, the spiritual from the sensuous and material. Humanism is the final version of this exaggerated dualism or otherworldliness. Abstract spiritualism has its correlate in abstract materialism, abstract teleology in an equally abstract mechanism or determinism. The problem is whether spirit can again be naturalized and made concrete as the only self-moving thing (Plato) and hence the indwelling principle of all activity. For the twentieth century was reserved the precious discovery that primitive animistic fancy, abstract mysticism, and abstract mechanism do not exhaust the possibilities, and that science itself may lead in the end to a corrected, trustworthy version of the ancient fellowship, the original “natural piety.” Science shows that fanciful though he was primitive man vastly underestimated the variety of nature, its stupendous contrasts. But this means, not that the savage’s mistake lay in peopling the world with beings realizable only through imaginative sympathy, but rather that he erred through the too narrow range and the too egoistic and wishful character of his sympathies. On the one hand, he failed to envisage the possibility of sentient creatures whose complexity, compared to that of man, would be almost infinitesimal. Instead, he endowed even relatively low-grade animals with consciousness equal or superior to his own. On the other hand, however wishfully he ascribed immortality and other merits io the gods, he did not do justice to the distinction between all merely superior and the supreme or cosmic individual. Also, in regard to the lesser beings, he did not understand the necessity for patient induction from observed facts; as in regard to the maximal being he did not grasp the need for exact analysis in terms of philosophical categories. He lacked critical science and critical metaphysics. He thought the forefathers knew, rather than that he must and could find out for himself.
When critical science and philosophy came, they destroyed the primitive view much more rapidly than they were able to elaborate a substitute. Some of the chief obstacles to this elaboration are now beginning to yield to scientific advance. Perhaps the most vital contribution of science has been to show that of the hierarchy of natural individuals only a small range is distinctly apparent to the senses, so that beliefs based simply and directly upon experience cannot possibly give much idea of the hierarchy as a whole. That, for example, plants are less unitary, less organic, than the parts (cells) composing them, even Aristotle was not able to guess. Only very indirect, extremely elaborate inferences from careful observations of a quantitative nature, and under maximally varied conditions, can penetrate the veil of pseudo-unities which the senses present (all that, to fulfill their biological functions, they need to do). Indeed, even science tends still to deal with the vast majority of individuals, such as molecules or cells, not as individuals, each with its own internal quality, but as bare terms of relations and as indifferent units of statistical behavior.
The real point of the scientific rejection of final causes lies in the fact just mentioned, that knowledge of the inner and individual aspects of microscopic changes is not essential to the formulation of statistical laws. A given electron may be about to “jump” from one orbit to another; and if we could participate in its inner life, we might know this because an anticipation of the jump might be involved in its momentary feeling. But what does it matter when the effects we wish to control are independent of the actions of any one electron? Not merely final causes of individual action but any and all causes of individual action are, in large measure, irrelevant to science. Only in biology and psychology, where definite individuals are isolated and their behavior followed perhaps from genesis to destruction, do individuality and purposiveness of action become themes for science. In psychology even quality must be considered; for somehow the qualities of our sensory and emotional experience belong to the nervous system, “physical” though that be. Moreover, science may in the future extend individual and qualitative treatment downward as well as statistical treatment upward, and meanwhile the only justifiable ideal of knowledge is the co-extensiveness of the two aspects. The human meaning of this ideal is the transience of humanism as the denial of sympathetic participation with the lowest and the highest levels of reality. Nature is dead machinery only to spectators who perceive as such neither her simplest individual parts nor herself as the most complex of individual wholes, but are aware of the subhuman and the superhuman only with such distortion or abstractness as practical egoism, limited imaginative generosity, and inadequate instruments of observation make inevitable. The ultimate ideal of knowledge and of action remains this: to deal with the world as the body of a God of love, whose generosity of interest is equal to all contrasts, however gigantic, between mind and mind, and to whom all individuals are numbered, each with its own life history and each with its own qualitative — enjoying and suffering, more or less elaborately remembering and anticipating, sensing and spontaneously reacting — natures.
Nevertheless, the day of humanism is not necessarily over. Science has perhaps a long road to travel before the outlines of a companionable nature can be made definite enough to convince men generally. There may always be souls too cautious to look beyond the obvious relationships of man to his fellows for the essential values of life. And the “incestuous ‘love of man for his fellows alone must be expected so long as our blindness or inaction in the face of major economic maladjustments and cruelties makes all other questions than these practical human ones seem trivial. Those who cherish the love of nature cannot hope to win to this love the men and women who are denied secure approach to the simplest necessities of natural existence. The dispossessed of this world cannot be blamed if they seek for the lovable, the truly good, either in a world that is yet to be, the human society of the future, or in a world “outside” the world, a wholly supernatural heaven. Nor will the dispossessors, busy defending their position, have much regard for what is beyond the human scene. For the time being, perhaps always, it is by its fruits of practical charity and justice that the inspiring vision of God as the mind of nature will be chiefly judged. But this vision at least encourages us to seek our spiritual solace through the realistic eyes of science and our part in the imitation of the cosmic sympathy through participation with those individuals whom we can really know, who are, in the first instance, our human fellows. And here we know it is not primarily any technical or intellectual difficulty that makes us fall so far short as we do of our ideal — that, for instance, makes us limit our cooperative understanding along class lines — but rather the ethical difficulty of overcoming primitive passions and the will to power, or of renouncing the comfort of not knowing the cost to others of our own privileges.
That men should have thought themselves entitled to this willful ignorance is partly due to the separation of virtue from knowledge, which in turn is connected with the failure to see that both virtue and knowledge are aspects of love, in such fashion that all knowledge involves at least a dim consciousness of sympathy for its object, while all virtue that is not at least the will to understanding is really vice. There is but one good, with many aspects — deus est caritas — and there is some spark, however dim, of that good in all things, and in all relationships of all things. A civilization which will take that as its working hypothesis will do what Europe for twenty centuries professed but never, even in its theoretical activities, practiced. Does it not deserve a trial? The new philosophy is the theoretical program for the trial.
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, Beyond Humanism: Essays in the Philosophy of Nature, pp 312-317.
HyC