In the recent article “Does Humanism need to be new?” Doug Muder wrestles with the question of how humanism can be made relevant and how a militant new atheism fits into the picture. To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, “practical people who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct philosopher.” Some of my very best friends are religious humanists, and I care for them deeply. They are very moral and kind people and have very good intentions. However, I have to say that they are the unwitting slaves of some very defunct philosophers.
With all due respect to them and to good humanists everywhere, humanism is fighting a rearguard action and simply will not succeed. Its quest for widespread acceptance of an Enlightenment worldview is doomed to ultimate failure. While the reasons for this inevitable failure are intensely complex and wrapped in long history, the culmination of the line of the thought that spelt their demise is found in the thinking David Hume. While this grossly oversimplifies the matter, it is the best leverage point I know of to make this point. Hume’s body of work conclusively demonstrates that one cannot arrive at a moral system from observable phenomena alone. That singular observation, the rationale behind it and its necessary corollaries spelled out more fully in Hume’s broader work sound the death knell to an optimistic humanist value structure. This fundamental breakdown of the ability to of representational reason alone to cope with moral and aesthetic truth, as acknowledged by Hume, accounts for the Humanism’s increasingly marginalized voice
If humanism had its birth in the early renaissance, it met its demise over 300 years ago in the late Enlightenment. The rise of empirical skepticism was a deathblow from which it cannot recover. The German and English Idealists attempted to revive a moral center, but in the end were unsuccessful. To date we have not been able to find a widely acceptable answer to the question of the relationship between reason and morals. Post-Kantians everywhere (and most of those educated in universities after the 1960s are the unwitting slaves of Kant and his intellectual progeny) understand this problem at a visceral level. Such people recognize the fundamental inability of Humanism to put forward a compelling moral position.
This fundamental failure of humanists to grasp post-modernist thought means that they will be forever marginalized. The world has clearly moved on into postmodernism and many are now exploring integral models of understanding the world. Humanism simply does not have the intellectual horsepower to address humanity’s deepest questions. Continuing to dream of a rationalist renaissance is a fine fantasy, but rather quixotic in a post-modern world.
With all due respect to them and to good humanists everywhere, humanism is fighting a rearguard action and simply will not succeed. Its quest for widespread acceptance of an Enlightenment worldview is doomed to ultimate failure. While the reasons for this inevitable failure are intensely complex and wrapped in long history, the culmination of the line of the thought that spelt their demise is found in the thinking David Hume. While this grossly oversimplifies the matter, it is the best leverage point I know of to make this point. Hume’s body of work conclusively demonstrates that one cannot arrive at a moral system from observable phenomena alone. That singular observation, the rationale behind it and its necessary corollaries spelled out more fully in Hume’s broader work sound the death knell to an optimistic humanist value structure. This fundamental breakdown of the ability to of representational reason alone to cope with moral and aesthetic truth, as acknowledged by Hume, accounts for the Humanism’s increasingly marginalized voice
If humanism had its birth in the early renaissance, it met its demise over 300 years ago in the late Enlightenment. The rise of empirical skepticism was a deathblow from which it cannot recover. The German and English Idealists attempted to revive a moral center, but in the end were unsuccessful. To date we have not been able to find a widely acceptable answer to the question of the relationship between reason and morals. Post-Kantians everywhere (and most of those educated in universities after the 1960s are the unwitting slaves of Kant and his intellectual progeny) understand this problem at a visceral level. Such people recognize the fundamental inability of Humanism to put forward a compelling moral position.
This fundamental failure of humanists to grasp post-modernist thought means that they will be forever marginalized. The world has clearly moved on into postmodernism and many are now exploring integral models of understanding the world. Humanism simply does not have the intellectual horsepower to address humanity’s deepest questions. Continuing to dream of a rationalist renaissance is a fine fantasy, but rather quixotic in a post-modern world.
© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.
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