The Classics of Secular Western Civilization has produced a rich history of secular humanist literature. Many of these books are classics, while Albert Ellis others have been forgotten or lost. We invited a number of , The Basic Writings of leading humanist intellectuals to provide a list of those books Bertrand Russell (New York: Simon and that influenced them most, with a special emphasis on the Schuster, 1961). Lays some of the important classics of secular humanism. We are pleased to present their philosophic groundwork for twentieth- selections — Ed. century secular humanist thought. Corliss Lamont, The of Humanism, fifth edition (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1965). A simple but Brand Blanshard is professor emeritus at Brand Blanshard profound summary of some of the main Yale University. He is former president of tenets of secular humanism. the American Philosophical Assn. and the David Friedrich Strauss, Leben Jesu (1835, Humanist Manifestos I and II (Buffalo: American Society. Among his Eng. trans. by George Eliot). The most Prometheus Books, 1978). Pioneer state- books are and Goodness and thorough and decisive work of higher ment of secular humanism, nicely updated. Reason and Analysis. criticism yet written. George H. Smith, : The Case W.E.H. Lecky, History of the Rise and Against (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, Joseph Fletcher was professor of pastoral Influence of the of in 1979). Scholarly presentation of some theology and Christian , Episcopal Europe (1865). A masterly account of the aspects of secular humanism that are often Theological School, Cambridge, and taught rise of freedom of thought in modern times. neglected. medical ethics at the University of Virginia Andrew D. White, History of the Warfare Albert Ellis, Humanistic Psychotherapy: Medical School. He is author of Situation of with Theology (1896). A The Rational-Emotive Approach (New Ethics, and other books. temperate and accurate account of the York: Crown Publishers and McGraw-Hill clashes between science and super- Paperbacks, 1973). My own attempt to Albert Ellis, a clinical psychologist, is ex- . combine some of the best elements of the ecutive director of the Institute for J.M.E. McTaggart, Some of existential-humanistic psychology of the Rational-Emotive Therapy. He is the (1906). A remarkably lucid discus- human potential movement with the hard- author of numerous books, including The sion of some central concepts of religion by headed, realistic views of modern secular American Sexual Tragedy and A Guide to a mind of the first competence in humanism, and to apply both of these Rational Living. philosophy. to the field of psychotherapy. , The Life of Reason Robert Rimmer is the author of The (1905-06), in five volumes. (See especially Harrad Experiment and many other novels. Reason in Religion). A work of power and Robert Rimmer grace, written by a Catholic who became a Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888) Garrett Hardin is the chief executive officer naturalist. and Equality (1897). The two novels taken of The Environmental Fund (Washington, together propose a humanist oriented world, D.C.). He is professor emeritus of human Joseph Fletcher especially the sequal Equality, which is not ecology at the University of California, well known. Santa Barbara. Among his books are The , On Liberty (1859), Homer W. Smith, Kamongo (New York: Tragedy of the Commons and Promethean because it is the first essay to make adequate Viking Press, 1932). A short novel com- Ethics. sense of a precious principle too easily paring Man's adaptability to the African uttered. Lungfish. Isaac Asimov is the famous author of Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth, James Cooke Brown, The Troika Incident science and science fiction. He has publish- edited by Bernard De Voto (New York: (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, ed over 200 books. Harper & Row, 1962), because we tend to 1970). This is the only novel written by forget that we need humor to protect us Brown. He invented a complete language Richard Kostelanetz, noted critic and from believing in things we cannot know. and still teaches it (so far as I know), in San author, has published dozens of books, in- George Santayana, Life of Reason (1905- Diego. Jim Brown also invented the game cluding The End of Intelligent Writing and 06, in five volumes), anywhere in the five Careers. The Troika Incident is a story of a Esthetics Contemporary. volumes, because of its brilliance and future world with meanings for our world. humility. King C. Gillette, The Human Drift For biographical sketches of Sidney Nook Garrett Hardin, Nature and Man's Fate (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholar's Facsimiles and and , see pages 7 and 27. (New York: Rhinehart, 1959), because it Reprints, 1976). The inventor of the safety gives us a biological setting for our attempts razor was a humanist, closely involved with Joseph Blau is professor emeritus of to understand our life and thought.. Upton Sinclair. The Human Drift is a great religion at Columbia University. His books Bertrand Russell, Human Society in American classic — together with Gillette's include Men and Movements in American Ethics and Politics (New York: Simon and The People's Corporation (New York: Boni Philosophy and Cornerstones of Religious Schuster, 1954), because of its wisdom and and Liveright, 1924), and World Corpora- Freedom in America. social sensitivity. tion (Boston: The New England News Com-

36 MkWin- ¡Tate pany, 1910). (most have been reread many times). It Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches seems to me that all of them should be con- of Human Nature (New York: Viking Press, sidered "secular classics," because they are 1971). This is a collection of Maslow's es- certainly not religious. I feel more comfor- Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline says. I am proposing "Theory Z" as a new table with a personal list than an "objective" and Fall of the Roman Empire. An il- management technique in a novel which I one which may ultimately be a reflection of luminating account of how barbarism have just completed, The Birdwhistle Op- fad, literary-politicking or other inauthentic without and barbarism within (fanatical tion. "Theory Z" approaches, contrasted by process. Christian ), destroyed Maslow with "Theory X" and "Y," are 's essays, for the clarity and Roman civilization. totally humanistic. courage of his intellectual style, not only in George Santayana, The Life of Reason (And chuckling): My novel, Love Me articulating his perceptions efficiently but (1906). A felicitous expression of a Tomorrow (New York: Signet, 1978), which also in resisting deception (1959). naturalistic which I wrote under the title Looking Backward Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd recognized that all things natural have an I!, and which no humanist publication has (New York: Random House, 1960); for ideal fulfillment and that all ideals worthy of ever reviewed. showing me at the age of twenty how the fulfillment have a natural basis. anarchist critique of the world around me John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (1874). was invariably more true than the Marxist, Mill has been called the saint of secular Garrett Hardin and for implicitly persuading me to avoid, at humanism, and like all saints has personal Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, all costs, the perils of a steady job (1960). and intellectual failings. Whatever the and (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1956). Hannah Arendt, The Origins of limitations of his , at its heart Percy W. Bridgman, The Intelligent In- Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, lies a vibrant sympathy for the sufferings of dividual and Society (New York: Mac- Brace, 1951); for its incomparable un- mankind, and a rational will to modify millan, 1938). derstanding of a distinctly modern malaise social institutions that needlessly intensify Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the (1961). or pepetuate them. Modern World (New York: Macmillan, Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War Morris R. Cohen, The of a Liberal 1925). (second edition, Princeton: Princeton (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1946). Joseph Townsend, A Dissertation on The University Press, 1960); for realizing one Illustrations of the play of a profound Poor Laws: By a Well-Wisher to Mankind definition of a "brilliant" book, persuasively critical intelligence on some current (Berkeley: University of California Press, transcending, not only in evidence but in problems of our times. Liberalism is broadly 1971). concepts, previous critiques of its subject conceived as commitment to the use of in- Thomas R. Malthus, An Essay on the (1963). telligence in furthering the cause of human Principle of Population. Buckminster Fuller, Nine Chains to the freedom. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species Moon (1963) and Education Automation , Experience and Nature (1859); and his Autobiography (1892). (1962) — both published in Carbondale by (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, R.A. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Southern Illinois University Press — for 1925). A profound exploration of the rela- Natural Selection (New York: Dover, suggesting a profoundly radical, up-to-date tion between nature and human nature in an 1958). social thought based on neither "left" nor attempt to show how, without relying on any George Orwell, Animal Farm (New "right" but on the possibilities intrinsic in myths about the transcendent, creative in- York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, technological development and social telligence can function effectively and 1954). change (1966). humanely in building a better society. Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of L. Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion Social Behavior (New York: Harcourt, (Chicago: P. Theobald, 1947); for explaining Antony Flew Brace, and World, 1969). recent art to me, two decades after the book was actually written, and for identifying the Hume has to figure prominently on my list principal precursors of contemporary ex- since he was the first major thinker in the Isaac Asimov perimental literature (1966). modern period to be through and through I'm not sure that I have read any secular Barbara Rose, ed., Art as Art: The secular, this-worldly, and man-centred. That humanist books.... The books I enjoyed Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt (New "juvenile work," A Treatise of Human most, without reference to their intrinsic York: Viking Press, 1975); for showing that Nature, even though it is too long and value, judged by the number of times I have a genuinely radical aesthetic position in- probably too much for the philosophical read and reread them, are: evitably incorporates a radical position layperson, and even though Hume did feel Homer, The Iliad within the politics of one's art (1966). that he had to castrate it, removing its Shakespeare's plays Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro "nobler parts" before publication, is a must. Dickens, Pickwick Papers Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967); for For us here and now the greatest thing there Cervantes, Don Quixote suggesting that intellectual thought and an is Hume's naturalistic account of every kind P.G. Wodehouse, various "Jeeves" novels intellectual's career could be analyzed as of value: values cannot be neutral, and ob- closely and skeptically as literature or socie- jective facts about the universe around us ty. but must instead be some sort — although it Richard Kostelanetz Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scien- is inordinately hard to specify precisely what In a recent volume of my Autobiographies tific Revolutions (Chicago: University of sort — of projection of our individual and (New York: Future, 1981), I listed the books Chicago Press, 1962); for implying that the collective desires and commitments; and to that have meant the most to me along with a consequential revolutions of art were as en- say that values spring from and are rooted in date that indicates when I first read them compassing as those of science (1967). nothing else but human desires is to say that

Spring, 1981 37

they are as important as anything could Realms of Being (1942), in which the "realm ly tempted to suggest the Kantian corpus, possibly be. An Inquiry Concerning Human of matter" is regarded as the source of the especially Religion in the Light of Pure Understanding has to go in, above all for its other realms of which he speaks, thus deny- Reason Alone, but this is so much a work inclusion of those "nobler parts." These two ing to those others anything other than a for the professional philosopher that I prefer Sections X-XI contain in outline knock- derivative "being" — being, then, in a pun- for general reading 's Natural down decisive refutations of the traditional ning sense. But Santayana vigorously . Hume's background two-stage rational apologetic: first, es- asserted that his was a materialist position, was much more limited than that of later tablishing the existence and certain unlike the Humanism about which he philosophical and historical students of minimum characteristics of the Mosaic God taunted his humanistic contemporaries. Can religion, but this brief work, the most by the proofs of Natural Theology, above all one legitimately ascribe to a philosopher as neglected of his major works, is in many the Argument to Design; and, second, the precise in his language as Santayana a posi- ways the finest expression of a secular authentication of a particular Revelation tion that he specifically denied holding? humanism before the twentieth century. claim by deploying historical evidence to And, of course, any sociologist might For the Nineteenth Century, we must verify the occurrence of endorsing . claim a right to be on the list, for, as declare Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) Equally certainly Hume's posthumous someone or other wrote some time ago, no and Descent of Man (1870) ineligible, masterpiece the Dialogues Concerning sociologist can be called `religious,' because they are not philosophical works; it Natural Religion must go in: although there "because he goes to church to count is clear, however, that if these two works had is scholarly dispute as to which of the genuflections, not to pray." Many never been written the question addressed in characters most nearly speaks for Hume biologists, too, might be listed, people such the making of these lists would probably himself, there seems little possibility of as Rene' Dubos who are so admiring of never have been raised. Thomas Henry Hux- denying that any residual religious in humanity and its possibilities that they con- ley, a second possibility, unwittingly Hume was almost indiscernible from no sistently refuse to acknowledge its complete- eliminated himself by arguing, in such belief at all. ly animal origin and ancestry. Darwin and Ethics (1893), for the exclusion of ethics Next I want to fly a flag for Thomas himself, whose studies and theories had so from the list of matters affected by the Hobbes and his Leviathan. Certainly it is ex- much to do with the current form of evolutionary hypothesis, which otherwise he tremely long and on some matters of great evolutionary naturalism (the boon compan- accepted. Of the big three of British for- practical importance very wrong-headed. ion of secular humanisim) studied for the mulation of secular humanist ideas, that Nowadays it is read mainly for the would-be ministry in youth and never abandoned the leaves Herbert Spencer, who applied anatomical science of the state in Chapters Church of England. evolutionary theory to and to 13-30. But Part III, "Of a Christian What, then, can one advise an inquiring ethics, the latter especially in his Principles Common-Wealth," is a landmark in the person, young or old, to read to find out of Ethics which unites morals with those history of biblical criticism, while Parts I, what is best in the literature of secular areas of human concern that relate to and still more, IV, deliver the most humanism? Let me propose a list that is human survival. Spencer, of course, no devastating hammer blows in defense of a limited to the last four centuries — roughly longer seems to us the outstanding figure secular world-outlook. from the seventeenth through the twentieth that he seemed to our predecessors, but he Finally, no doubt in step with many century — and to works of a philosophic looms large in his own time. others, I nominate Charles Darwin's The cast (though not necessarily written by Finally, it should be noted that secular Origin of Species. For, although I should philosophers or theologians). humanist philosophers in the twentieth cen- claim that Hume provided all the materials Seventeenth Century tury are quite numerous, and many are very needed to destroy every version of the Argu- Galileo: Dialogues on the Two Chief able thinkers. There are two, however, who ment to Design, very few people could ever Systems of the World; supplemented by his seem to me to stand out: Bertrand Russell in in fact have been persuaded to accept the Dialogues Concerning Two New . England and John Dewey in the United Stratonician atheism had not Darwin show- Eighteenth Century States. Each wrote widely and influenced a ed how fantastic complexity and integration David Hume: Natural History of broad spectrum of followers. Russell's might come about without conscious design. Religion. secular humanism, as expressed in his fre- Nineteenth Century quently reprinted essay, "A Free Man's Joseph Blau Herbert Spencer: Principles of Ethics ," as well as in the other essays (1895). belatedly collected in the volume entitled You set a problem that is almost impossible Twentieth Century Unpopular Essays (New York: Simon and to solve. Not that the candidates are so few Bertrand Russell: Unpopular Essays Schuster, 1951) offers an important correc- or their claims so weak, but that there are so (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950), tive to the excessively optimistic visions of many fine works clamoring to find a place especially "A Free Man's Worship': the post-Darwinian "social evolutionists." on the list of "Best" Secular Humanist John Dewey: A Common Faith (New John Dewey, in his Terry Lectures, publish- Literature, and so many fields of inquiry in Haven: Yale University Press, 1934). ed under the title A Common Faith (New which the chosen few are to be found. How, York: Yale University Press, 1934), avoided for these selections for instance, can the rankest amateur ranker both Russell's pessimistic strain and any fail to list Edward Gibbon's History of the Galileo' Dialogues set the major problem degree of over-optimism by his emphasis Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? But of the scientific account of the universe in upon a democratic and cooperative striving Gibbon did not write from a consciously contradistinction to the biblical versions of for a better world to be brought about by secular humanistic position, even though we the story. This conflict is the controversy mutual formulation of intermediate goals may find that philosophy in our reading of within which the secular humanist tradition and the common effort to unite toward the the text. has developed. achievement of these "next steps," or, in Again, consider George Santayana's For the Eighteenth Century, one is strong- Dewey's language, "ends-in-view."

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