Charles Hartshorne
“There are few human beings, who, when they think of themselves in relation to the universe, are without a sense of curiosity, of wonder, and even of awe; and in so far as this leads them into speculation, they become philosophers. . . . And surely the questions that rise to the lips of every child should always be remembered — remembered if only as indications of the profoundest of all human needs. Overlook those needs, forget those questions, and you are likely to become satisfied with art that is petty, reasoning that is pedantic, and knowledge that is not bread but a stone.” —L. H. Myers1
In the best sense, “humanism” is simply the expression of an interest in man; in the worst sense, it is this interest become a monomania, excluding interest in anything else. In so far as it develops such exclusiveness, humanism contradicts its own intent, for interest in man implies interest in those things in which man is interested; and in what is man not interested? Darwin devoted himself to the study of earthworms; the astronomer gives heed to objects inconceivably remote in space-time. To indicate the scope of human interest we must speak with Plato of “all time and all existence.” Hence when Terence made his famous assertion that nothing human was alien to him, he was saying by implication that nothing whatever was wholly alien and indifferent to him. To be a citizen of the entire human world is excellent; but the only way really to do so is to be a citizen of the universe — as the old Stoics, and in some degree even the Epicureans, recognized.
But superficially it appears simpler and safer to concentrate upon man, our “proper study.” It is this specious simplification, of which there are all degrees, that constitutes humanism in the sense intended in this book. Humanist exclusiveness has two aspects: one, a narrowness of interest; the other, a doctrine which rationalizes, more or less unconsciously encourages, this narrowness. In effect, the doctrine is always a theory that the non-human portions of nature, and nature as a whole, need not interest us because they are not intrinsically interesting — however useful they may be as means to our ends. They are interesting as a bank check is, for consequences which human behavior can cause to flow from them. Calverton puts it with almost brutal clearness:
“. . . Man will find a new strength and a higher form of courage in viewing it [nature] as neither friend nor foe, but simply as an outer force or substance that he can convert into malleable forms which can be hammered and chiseled and cemented and harnessed in ways advantageous to his exploitation.”1
Other humanists state the matter less harshly and negatively. Dewey, for instance, advocates a “pious” sense of our dependence upon the forces of nature and of nature as a whole inclusive of us and therefore not wholly alien to us in character. But this position is on the very edge of humanism as I have defined it. In general, humanists hold that, so far as we know, man is the highest type of individual in existence, and that therefore if there is any proper object of religious devotion, any real “God,” it can only be humanity considered in its noblest aspirations and capacities, together with nature so far as expressed in and serviceable to humanity. Humanism is thus not so much atheism as a reinterpretation of God, not so much irreligion as an attempt to separate the sound human kernel of religion from its supernatural husks. It is the faith of humanists that the essential values of religion are independent of these husks. Thus Calverton speaks of “superior substitutes for religion and the gods.”
Humanism, so conceived, amounts to two claims. First, it implies that, except for the animals and for the speculative possibility of inhabitants upon other heavenly bodies, man is evidently alone in the universe, dependent for friendship upon his own kind. Second, it maintains that the recognition of this loneliness will aid rather than hinder the good life here upon earth. In naturalism, as opposed to supernaturalism, the humanist finds not only truth, but the truth that makes us free and strengthens and enlightens us for the tasks of living.
The position which I wish to defend against humanism is not supernaturalism in any usual sense. If by “nature” we mean the average quality of things in our environment, or the mere collection of natural entities, then any God worthy of the name must be supernatural or transcendent. But nature as a whole may be an individual in a deeper sense than a collection can be, and with a very different quality from that of its parts; and this quality may be divine. Supernaturalism and humanism are, I hold, two aspects of the same error, the mistaken notion that nature, in her non-human portions and characters, is wholly subhuman. Not finding the superhuman in nature, the supernaturalist seeks it “beyond” nature; the humanist, in the unrealized potentialities of man. Could both perceive the living divinity which in a certain sense is nature, the one would cease to locate the object of his worship in a vacuum, and the other would cease to deify man and romantically to exaggerate the good and underestimate the evil in man. Theoretically and practically both would, I believe, have reached a superior position. But as long as nature is so conceived that its divinity is concealed, the choice is between two non-natural Gods (for it always turns out that the humanist sees in man something more than is actually there, even potentially), and neither of these Gods is satisfactory. The strength of each doctrine lies chiefly in the weakness of the other. Yet both agree that there is no third possibility. Thus these opposites, like so many others, unwittingly conspire to support each other.
The difficulty of the third position, that nature in her highest non-human aspects is God, is that we have insufficient knowledge of these aspects clearly to see their divine character. Humanism can say that the highest human attributes constitute God, its advantage being that these human attributes are at any rate known with some definiteness. Supernaturalism can say that the beyond is God, its advantage being that the beyond is not definitely known to be other than divine — for it is not, in reality, known at all. Nature is neither so indefinite and passive a concept as the “transcendent,” nor so definitely known to be admirable as” humanity.” It follows that only an improved understanding of the higher aspects of nature can enable the doctrine of a natural but superhuman — and even, in a sense, perfect — God to take the place of the other two doctrines. In the meantime, those who require very definite knowledge of the object of worship will be humanists, and those who care more that God shall be really worshipful or divine than that he shall be really knowable will be transcendentalists. Yet man is not really worthy of our final devotion; and the transcendent, in the old sense, is nothing. That these things are so would, I believe, be generally admitted were it not that the failure to find God above man, and yet within nature, forces us to try to believe that we have found him either in the best that we know in ourselves, or in that which, since we do not know what it is, may be better than anything we know. The best clearly known reality, or the most ambiguous and empty unreality, are thus the easiest places to locate the supreme good.
It seems plain that the supernaturalist way is the greater obstacle to intellectual advance. It operates beyond the reach of evidence, whereas humanism pretends to deal with the known or knowable situation of man. In so far humanism is the first step toward a real solution. To progress beyond humanism it is only necessary to see that the human situation is other than as humanism supposes. In particular we may ask whether there is any defensible halfway house between the crass pragmatism of a Calverton — surely inadequate to human needs — and the intellectual, aesthetic, and moral love of nature as the body of God, in all parts having some degree, however slight, of kinship with ourselves, and as a whole immeasurably superior to us, and hence worthy of our highest reverence.
The great phrase of Spinoza, deus sive natura, “God or nature,” expresses this conception of nature as worthy of unstinted admiration and boundless interest. It is also a key to tolerance in the modern world. For all men feel some of this appeal of nature, so that in so far as God is defined as the lovableness of nature, no man, not even Calverton, is an absolute atheist. Only the pure supernaturalist, who claims to distinguish utterly between God and God’s creation, and the pure pragmatic humanist, who alleges that there is no hint of divinity in nature, appear to disagree in all their positive contentions (negatively they agree to a suspicious extent!) . Yet that the creation is his implies that it resembles the Creator in some degree; and that nature can be rationally controlled implies that she has an intelligible order, and this is, for all theologians, part of nature’s godlikeness. So there is really no one who cannot see some meaning in the phrase, “God or nature.”
If we have the will to intellectual cooperation, we shall hesitate long before indulging in dogmatic proclamation of either the absolutely supernatural or the merely pragmatic natural. The difficulties which both naturalists and supernaturalists have felt with “pantheism” may be real but due to errors in our understanding of nature or in the logical or metaphysical categories — such as those of Spinoza — which have been applied to the problem.
Today, when both conceptions of nature and theories of logic are changing as rapidly as at any time since the ancient Greeks, it is a revelation of intellectual incompetence to regard the question of the relations of the religious object to nature as having been settled by the older discussions. Theologians themselves have in the past few years been abandoning the old supernaturalism in greater numbers than ever before (in spite of the neosupernaturalism of German theology), and scientists have grown incomparably more critical of the traditional forms of naturalism. The only reasonable working hypothesis for our time is that the old questions are too badly formulated for any of the old answers to possess validity. For instance, I may be asked if I deny the transcendence of God. I should have to answer that I deny that any traditional definition of transcendence — or, for that matter, of immanence — is unambiguous. According to current metaphysics every individual is immanent in and transcends all others, and the transcendence and immanence of God is the supreme case of this double relation. I should reply also that I am very confident that God transcends “nature” as nature is conceived by supernaturalists. In short, only those capable of confronting the problem of God or of nature with fresh wonder, without arrogant confidence in their scientific or theological sophistication, only those who with the age can be intellectually born again, are likely to contribute to the discussion of this problem.
A few Barthians — and even they are chary of the term “supernaturalism,” but are, I fear, nevertheless caught in the old categories — and a few atheist Marxians — and even they might remember that Marx himself was, by his own account, “not a Marxian” —may be useful as stimuli; but sanity and profitable discussion depend upon neither group’s becoming too numerous. We should remember Spinoza and his view of the study of nature as “the intellectual love of God.” Or the Stoics, from whom in part Spinoza learned this natural piety. Or — perhaps even my less pious readers will permit me to add — we should remember Jesus, whose love for man was compatible with his seeing the reflection of superhuman values in flowers, animals, sun, and rain, and whose preferred cathedrals were the mountains and the desert.
The heart of Christendom has been with Jesus — deus est caritas — but its intellect has been with Spinoza — deus sive natura. The medieval attempt to unite heart and intellect in supernaturalism did not succeed; and Spinozistic pantheism was too one-sided to satisfy men even as much as medievalism had done. Our good fortune is that we no longer have to choose between Spinoza and Jesus, for it can be proved that the reasons which prevented Spinoza from regarding nature not only as God but as the God of love are erroneous in the light of the new science and the new logic. Spinoza today would not be a Spinozist but a Whiteheadian. And I dare say that Jesus today would not be very tender toward a theology which has left mankind so confused and comfortless and unable to profit spiritually by the unselfish labors of the men of science If the man of today leaves humanism, it should be to go beyond and forward, not back to those things which the humanist has so acutely criticized and found wanting. If we can see nothing providential in the last three hundred years of earnest but increasingly destructive inquiry into the logic of traditional theology, can we reasonably assert a belief in Providence at all? And on the other hand, if we really love humanity can we be indifferent to the new possibility that the sympathetic, social nature of man, with its ideal of perfect love, can be made to interpret also the intellectual relation of man to nature upon which all his practical power depends? The man who will not try to give fairminded attention to this possibility makes us wonder how it can be either man or God in whom he has faith.
In any case, I believe, there are enough open-minded scientists and theologians to insure that the discussion will go forward, perhaps to lay a foundation for future civilization as enduring as that effected by the church Fathers, who worked out the best available compromise between the only philosophy they had and their religious inspiration. But we work with far more freedom than they — provided political tyranny does not overtake us. Fortunately the outlines of the new view are almost finished. Religious metaphysics has just gone through one of the greatest transformations in its history, just as has natural science. The reconstruction is mostly accomplished; what is lacking is effective exposition, application, criticism, diffusion, defense. These require perhaps lesser talents, but in far greater number and variety. Sooner or later the new vision will receive the widespread attention which it deserves. Not much longer, we may hope, will the masses of men be required to choose between alternatives both of which, by modern criteria, are almost equally wrong.
Concerning revelation and popular fundamentalism, I would in some measure agree with the humanists. The more the rational elements of culture, that is, science and critical metaphysics, advance, the less need or excuse there will be, it seems to me, for authoritative revelation as a rival or supplement to knowledge. We need inspiration as well as proof; but infallible inspiration seems a meaningless idea. Even if God dictated the Bible, it would be of no help until he taught us how to translate it into modern language and thought and life, and if we were taught to do this infallibly, we should acquire a degree of insight clearly incompatible with human limitations.
Popular fundamentalism is either a negative evil, a callowness of culture which should be kindly assisted to cure itself; or a positive evil, an unloving and therefore unchristian dogmatism which is to be greeted, like every other form of arrogant power, with indignation and ridicule. An infallible dogma or book or church is a boast or a bludgeon, not a call to comradeship in human strength or human modesty and repentance. It may well be that in all of nature and history the Christian record is the chief single source of inspiration, the chief expression of Providence so far as man is concerned. But to say more than this for it is to contradict the spirit of the record itself, whatever justification from the letter there may be.
Christianity is not a code or a scientific metaphysics; it is, at its best, the sublimest inspirational source of true ideas and good acts that we have. To belittle this sublimity with literal-minded claims to finality is an old but tragic mistake. Call if you will, the Christian story the center or turning point in history, as Tillich does, but do not make Providence a pedant!
Nor are the utterances of reason in science or metaphysics to be regarded as iron-rigid against the pressure of inspiration. It will not do, for instance, to scoff at or overconfidently explain away men’s feeling that they are genuine initiators of new causal series, even though the science, or the philosophy of science, of the moment has decided against this idea. Inspiration, intuition, on so fundamental a matter is not to be brushed aside so lightly. It now turns out that the spokesmen for science were in this matter not nearly so sure of their ground as they long seemed to be. But inspiration was flouted even longer by religious metaphysicians who claimed, by virtue of their Aristotle or Plotinus, to have discovered that God does not, except in a Pickwickian sense, have purposes, or sympathize with men in their joys and sorrows — because then he could not be immutable, or “pure actuality.” Human beings do not slip into omniscience so easily that they can afford altogether to neglect any type of clue which may serve to check the method they may be primarily relying upon. We must revere nothing if reverence means rigidity, paralysis of inquiry. We must revere everything that sincere men revere, if reverence means respect made mobile by curiosity and flexible by modesty.
Another problem to be briefly mentioned here is the relation of theistic belief to ecclesiastical institutions. The question of God’s existence seems too clearly distinct from the question whether or not we wish to have churches for any decision concerning the latter to play the crucial role in deciding the former. The question of group worship and its leaders, professional or otherwise, is a practical question at a considerable remove from the theoretical one of the basic nature of this great universe. The practical problem is a topic more for sociology than for philosophy. Although the chapters which follow discuss human needs, including social ones, it is a main conclusion of these discussions that man needs at times to forget himself and survey the whole of which he is a member, using his humanity as an observation platform, not as the scene to be observed.
Of course, too, there are those who will say that every effort to find a way of reconciling science and religion is treachery to science, since religion has always been the foe of science. And there are those who regard every encouragement to religion as an aid to social and political oppression. But here again the question for our day is not the traditional one. In actual fact, as even Russell concedes, the great foe of science in the present world is political tyranny; and this tyranny is also the greatest threat to religious liberty, and therefore to genuine religion. Against the menace of dictatorial nationalism science, and the Protestant religions at least, belong on the same side. In Germany it is not science that seems to have offered the greatest resistance! But it is also true that religion has too often hampered both intellectual and political freedom and development; and this is one reason why I have no desire to give aid to any merely traditional form of religious thought. Theological revival without reform, and just such reform as is required to render theology genuinely and unambiguously favorable to science and social justice, would be a misfortune. But there is no way to prove in advance that such reform is not possible, and consequently the new theism must be examined on its merits. To try to prove from the forms and uses of theistic religion in the past that such religion must be antiscientific and antisocial is like trying to prove from the early association of medicine with magic and priestly power that medicine is necessarily superstitious and socially invidious. The question is not what has been, but what can be. And neither scientists nor socialists ought to be the persons to refuse to recognize the distinction.
Notes
1. L. H. Myers, The Root and the Flower (Harcourt, Brace & Co., Inc., 1934),p. 10.
2. V. F. Calverton, The Passing of the Gods (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), preface.
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, Beyond Humanism: Essays in the Philosophy of Nature, pp. 1-11.