Is Humanism Enough?

The lecture Olaf Stapledon brought back to the South Place Ethical Society, at Conway Hall, in November 1946 — so the red inscription on the first sheet of his notes; the exact date in the month is not recorded — re-set as an essay. It is the sequel, twelve years on and to the same society, of Humanism and Superhumanism (1934). The argument, structure, and emphases follow his manuscript notes sheet by sheet; the prose is editorial — connective sentences, examples, and asides in his manner that the notes do not contain. For exactly what is his, word for word, see the source-bounded reading edition; for his notes beside the reconstructed prose, the side-by-side reconstruction.

My subject is, "Is Humanism Enough?" I approach it with some diffidence, because I have friends in both camps — Christians and Humanists — and all, I should say, are people of good will. Their hearts are sound; whether their heads are is another question; and their difference is symbolic of one that runs through the whole world — which needs a common platform of good will. Both parties are moved by interest in man and by a moral will. The Humanist adds intellectual integrity, which leads to scepticism; the Christian adds what I shall clumsily call emotional integrity — fidelity to his deepest intuitions, reached through religious emotion. My claim will be that Humanists ignore certain data — facts of experience their theory cannot cope with, a Procrustean bed; and that Christians claim too much for religious experience, treating it as evidence about the hidden structure of the universe. We have, I suggest, a dialectical movement of Western civilisation: the thesis, doctrinal Christianity; the antithesis, Humanism, allied with scientific materialism — the moral movement of the nineteenth century; the synthesis, something for which we are still groping.

Theism, and what really undermined it

By "theism" I mean, broadly, the doctrine of a universal being, personal or super-personal, immanent in all things: eternal; benevolent, his very nature Love; almighty, though self-limited by the creation of free spirits (why that should be necessary is never quite explained). Whitehead traced Christianity's loss of authority to bad tactics in the battle with science — the needless defence of the Biblical creation story — and to the Churches' failure, as Churches, to give a moral lead in social conflict.

Yet the real reason for distrusting theism is internal incoherence, not any scientific discovery. Personality involves time and conscious process; yet God is "eternal". Personality involves purpose, and therefore finitude; yet God is infinite, and so purposeless. Retreat to a "super-personal" God and you mean something quite inconceivable to us — and therefore insignificant. And an emotional inadequacy: God is good only if he wills good ends, so "God" presupposes good; and the mass of undeserved suffering — infant mortality, disease, the massacre of the innocents — is difficult to reconcile with a God of Love. Theology can add devices; they involve "epicycles".

The verdict on the old war of clerics and scientists: science did not disprove theism. It made it look less plausible, justifying not atheism but agnosticism; and it produced a new loyalty — intellectual integrity. Theism may be true in some Pickwickian sense; but we cannot know it, and today it is wishful and unwholesome. Agnosticism is now the way of true piety; insistence upon theism is impious. The old questions — God or no God? survival or no survival? — are probably false questions; and atheism is as doctrinaire as theism. And agnosticism must be an agnostic piety; otherwise it remains emotionally lopsided.

The religion of the scientist

Three factors have gone to the growth of the scientific attitude: interest in objectivity — respect for Whitehead's "irreducible and stubborn facts"; trust in analysis, with its conviction that wholes are "nothing but" their elements in a pattern; and iconoclasm — laudable, but liable to become an automatic, obsessive defence mechanism. Its religious aspect: self-reliance, independence, intellectual integrity, reverence for inhuman "fate" and chance — but also the egotism of humanity, and self-pity for man.

Humanism may be called the religion of the scientist: the doctrine that the whole proper concern of man is man — not the individual but the species. It lies between two extremes which are not Humanism: individualistic hedonism, for which my own pleasure alone concerns me; and theism, for which we exist for something above man. All Humanism asserts an obligation to transcend individualism for the sake of the species, and rejects every claim beyond it. Its two forms are simple and evolutionary.

Simple humanism

Simple Humanism is at heart hedonistic — utilitarianism; its standard of value is the pleasure and pain of individuals. Three difficulties: it fails to explain the leap from individual to social hedonism — why ought I to bother about the pleasure of others?; there is the hedonic calculus; and are some pleasures qualitatively better — is pushpin as good as poetry? The upshot: either the theory is non-ethical and logically sound — by nature we do care for mankind, but with no obligation to; or ethical and logically unsound — we ought to care because pleasure is good no matter whose, though the premise was that my pleasure alone can move me. And emotionally it is inadequate. A Brave New World is not good enough. We feel it in our bones that we are for something more than pleasure.

Evolutionary humanism

Evolutionary Humanism tries to do justice to exactly that feeling — instrumentality — and blends an important truth with an error. The truth: development is an objective fact, not merely subjective (compare Julian Huxley); man is more developed than an ape or an amoeba; and development implies its shadow, perversion, objective too — degeneracy and over-specialization, from the tapeworm to the sabre-toothed tiger. The error is fatal: founding ethics on biology — good supposed to be good because it lies in the line of evolution, not because of what good actually is in experience. A Life Force ground is anyhow a kind of theism, and the arguments for it far too weak to bear the weight of ethics. Ground it in natural selection and you try to have your cake and eat it: you feel you ought to work for development; therefore, it says, the feeling had survival value — which justifies nothing, and makes it illusory. Freud's account of moral feeling is true so far as it goes, but misses the vital point, and so merely explains away. There is no "scientific" justification for religion and ethics. Three courses remain: scepticism and cynicism; a rush back to theism; or a re-examination of religious experience, and of the scope of reason.

The scope of reason

All honour to the Rationalists for their work against superstition and wishful thinking. Narrow rationalism shuts its eyes to awkward facts for the sake of a theory; I care for intellectual integrity, and that is exactly why I reject it. Rationality is true inference from the given to the not-given, taking account of everything relevant; rationalism avoids wishful thinking but is snared by the wish for rationality. Within a familiar universe of discourse "singular points" may occur and be overlooked; true rationality may then demand a wider universe of discourse. And "the heart has its reasons which the head knows not" — the whole cognitive, affective and conative person. The heart gives no evidence about the hidden nature of reality, so none for theism; but it gives important evidence about itself — the nature of personality — and if that evidence will not fit a rationalistic theory, so much the worse for the theory.

Awake and less awake

Now for my own sketch of a synthesis — no doubt false, but worth considering. I must examine religious experience — inevitably my own: typical, average, open to all. I distinguish in myself more-awake and less-awake states of knowing, feeling and striving. In a more-awake state I am aware of more, and more clearly — of the world, of myself, of other persons as persons — and I conceive motives inconceivable to the less-aware me. In less-awake states I trust the more-awake: it works, does not let me down; and it affords a deeper satisfaction — the sense of the "true I".

In my most-awake state I see that some things matter supremely — intellectual, emotional and conative integrity. They matter in a relatively absolute way: beings sufficiently awake to grasp them cannot but will them wherever possible, unless their minds have been perverted from the true line of development by irrelevant cravings. It follows from the experienced nature of personality, and holds for any rank of personality, in any period and any world. What it wills are always activities of persons, and relations of person and world — acts of "me-moulded-by-my-world". Personality is the expression of a world in individual consciousness; without a world it is an abstraction. The ideal is the fulfilment of the universe in personal consciousness.

Love, and the child's discovery

For religious experience perhaps the most important matter is personal relationship. There is the animal relation — the self an automatic self-cherisher, plus automatic gregariousness. And there is the distinctively human relation, fully expressed in love: clear awareness of self and other as different; mutual enrichment and cherishing; each espousing the other's needs as his own. There arises the awareness of "we" — yet the individuals remain distinct — no common "I", only a common "we". A factor of hate remains in all love, but true love transmutes it; possessiveness is incompatible with it. From such experience alone arises the generalized will that all persons be treated as persons — a universal "we". Personality involves community, and vice versa; the goal is personality-in-community.

In love we wake to essentially new values. The orthodox psychoanalytical account — an inadequate one — derives the child's love of its mother from pleasure, pain and conditioning; Suttie's criticism is that the child discovers "I", "you" and "we"; my own point is that the child finds new values, not reducible to sensory pleasure and pain — different in kind. (The account is not essential to my view; at some point genuine love emerges.) Art is an obvious case: this work of art is an end in itself; there is a sense of possession; and yet the universe finds expression through me.

The spirit

Now I go too far for the Humanists; the theists applaud and demand more. The child's discovery of "I", "you" and "we" is religious in an embryonic way, and so is all personal love: it carries a sense of instrumentality — "I" am for "we"; I am for love. Mature religious experience is a waking to what I shall call "the spirit" — by which I never mean a divine person. It means experiencing an attitude toward the universe — or to the supremely important thing in it? — as the right attitude, actually appropriate to the actual universe. No particular experience is wholly religious, but all are partly so if they involve an attitude to the whole; particular acts — love, art, intellection, creative action — are its symbols.

Lovers embracing know a sense of universality — the universal subject embraces the universal object; each is a vehicle, an instrument, a vessel. This is what we are for: channels through which objective influences find expression. There is an unmistakable sense of awakening, and of possession: the child by the "we"; in mature religious experience the person by the "spirit" — a vision of an ideal form of behaviour for all personal beings. It resembles the Platonic form of the Good, but inhabits no realm apart — inherent in personality-in-community-in-a-world. The spirit is not a substance. It is a Way of life — the Tao, if one cares for the word — varying from person to person, country to country, world to world; but always the full expression of personality in those circumstances.

Instrumentality and salvation

A religious experience comes as a revelation, and the new given must be related to one's accepted culture. Christianity falsifies it by claiming too much; Humanism by suppressing some of its aspects. In some ways Christianity is nearer the truth; I take two of its phrases seriously. First, "for the glory of God". One may dig in the garden, build Jerusalem, swim, or love a woman, for purely personal fulfilment, or social — or for the "glory of God"; and I should translate that last as for the glory of the spirit: for the universal ideal of the fulfilment of personality-in-community-in-this-universe.

Secondly, salvation. A man cannot save himself (one cannot lift oneself by one's own bootstraps, as it was put at Chelmsford), nor can the race; God must intervene in an act of grace, though the individual must "open his heart". Translated into non-theistic language: the fully awake mind alone can will the spirit fully. The unregenerate self wills its own aggrandisement, the beloved's, society's — but never as occasions of the spirit; it cannot lift itself beyond itself. Less-awake states cannot rise without the incursion of a new vision which takes possession — against violent resistance — "kills" the old self and recreates it upon a new plane. To the somnolent self the spirit seems irrational, and is resisted; yet it is immanent even there, embryonic and felt as "other". The spirit "promises" fulfilment — but only to an unborn, other self, which lives unconditionally for the spirit; fulfilment is incidental. That, it seems to me, is the core of religious experience.

The theist objects that there is a further stage of awakeness, beyond my reach, which gives assurance of God. Perhaps — but they may be deceiving themselves, wishfully. Even so, theism today is too insecure a prop; my religious experience is the plain man's, but clarified. The Humanist objects that the naturalistic account — natural selection, conditioning, psychoanalysis — is adequate. My answer: it falsifies the thing to be explained; the experience and the account of it are superficially alike but fundamentally different, as a living man and a wax model; he is blinded by his theory.

Humanism Plus, Theism Minus

My view avoids the egoism of humanity which spoils Humanism — the self-importance of man. My view is Humanism Plus: Evolutionary Humanism with a clear awareness that it is more than Humanism, and with borrowings from theism — instrumentality, and "salvation". Better, it is personalism, because not limited to man; but objective personalism, because personality is the product of both the objective world and subjectivity; better still, personalistic communism, because personality implies and presupposes community.

From the other side, my view is Theism Minus, but also Plus. Minus a personal deity, and the assertion of individual immortality, about which I remain agnostic. It accepts instrumentality — but to the spirit; and salvation — not for the individual self, but for the individual in his instrumentality to the spirit. And it claims a greater emotional depth than theism, whose promise of individual survival blurs the essential tragedy of the unregenerate self. That tragedy is absolute; but it is transfigured in the waking to the spirit.

The Humanists charge the Christians with woolly and wishful thinking. True. The Christians charge the Humanists with crude and obtuse feeling. Also true. And the conclusion of the whole matter: Humanism is not the antithesis to Theism. It is a compromise — a failure to achieve the needed synthesis. Concerning the ultimate nature of the universe we must remain agnostic; but our agnosticism must be piety, not indifference. That, in outline, is the synthesis for which we are groping.