Promethean Love : Paul Kurtz and the Humanistic Perspective on Love [1 ed.] 9781443802642, 9781904303626

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Promethean Love

Promethean Love Paul Kurtz and the Humanistic Perspective on Love

Edited by

Timothy J. Madigan

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PRESS

Promethean Love: Paul Kurtz and the Humanistic Perspective on Love, edited by Timothy J. Madigan This book first published 2006 by Cambridge Scholars Press 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright ©2006 Timothy J. Madigan and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-904303-62-5

CONTENTS Timothy J. Madigan

Preface

ix

Part One PROMETHEUS REVISITED Paul Kurtz

Promethean Love: Unbound

3

Noel Robertson

Prometheus the Foreknowing: Myth and Ritual in Ancient Athens

23

Herbert Schutz

Goethe and Daimonic Love

37

Part Two PRAGMATIC NATURALISM AND HUMANISM John M. Novak

Pragmatic Love

65

Timothy J. Madigan

Promethean Love and Humanism

83

Tad S. Clements

Love in Naturalistic Perspective

101

vi

Contents

Part Three SPIRITUALITY AND CHRISTIANITY Richard A. Berg

Psychic and Humanistic Love

109

Hendrik Hart

Autonomy, Arrogance, Agape

125

Part Four SEXUALITY AND LOVE Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie Bullough

Love, Sex, and Marriage: A Problem Area

143

Morton Hunt

Love in Humanist Perspective, Four Decades Ago and Now

157

Part Five SELF-INTEREST AND ALTRUISM David Goicoechea

The Humanistic Welcome: Kurtz, Singer, Levinas

173

Marvin Kohl

Promethean Altruistic Humanism: A Reply to Paul Johnson

191

Love and Self-Interest

205

Jan Narveson

Promethean Love vii

Richard Taylor

Aristotle’s Analysis of Love and Friendship: Philia vs. Agape

221

Part Six EUPRAXSOPHY James Lawler

Love, God, Morality, and Money: Eupraxsophy in Kant and Hegel

239

Part Seven Paul Kurtz

From Philosophy to Eupraxsophy: A Response to Critics and Commentators

263

Preface Paul Kurtz is arguably today’s most important secular humanist philosopher. He has also been perhaps the most action-oriented philosopher of that period, for he combines interests that are both theoretical and practical. Not only has he written on a wide range of philosophical issues in methodology, epistemology, the philosophy of science, ethical and social philosophy, and naturalistic metaphysics, he has attempted to build new institutions exemplifying his principles. Thus both the contemporary secular humanist and skeptical movements of the 20th and 21st centuries have been inspired by his indefatigable energy. He has consistently defended reason, science and free inquiry in all areas of human interest. The main focal point of his work is defined by the word eupraxsophy, introduced by Kurtz, which means “the practice of good wisdom” (scientific and philosophical) in the conduct of life. If philosophy is the “love of wisdom,” eupraxsophy is “the application of philosophy to praxis.” The chapters in this book grew out of a conference that I coorganized, with David Goicoechea, at Brock University in Ontario, Canada on February 13-15, 1992. It was part of a ten-year series of conferences on the Philosophy of Love (all held appropriately enough around Valentine’s Day), masterminded by Professor Goicoechea, from 1991 to 2000. This was itself a Promethean, if not to say Herculean, effort. Philosophers whose works were focused

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Madigan: Preface

upon at the other such conferences include such stalwarts as Irving Singer, Martha Nussbaum, Tui Wei-Ming, and Raimundo Panikkar. The authors who appear in this volume for the most part attended the Kurtz Conference and submitted their formal papers after the fact. Given the continuing importance of the topic of the philosophy of love, I thought it would be good to publish these pieces, along with Kurtz’s extensive critique. Because of the time lapse between the conference and publication, I thought it best to preserve the papers “in amber”, as it were, since further revisions would have added to the delay. Also, sadly, some of the contributors have passed away in the interval. I hope that readers will be charitable and understand that all the contributors, had they but world enough and time, would have no doubt added more recent references to the literature on love if they had been so able. This volume does not cover the full score of Kurtz’s entire corpus of writings. It concentrates only on those primarily that deal with normative ethical issues, and especially with the figure of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and bequeathed it (along with the arts and sciences) to humankind. Prometheus is a symbol for all who have challenged the gods on high. Part One deals with the role of the Prometheus myth historically—from ancient Greece to the modern world. Part Two concentrates on Humanism and Naturalism, both of which are central to Kurtz’s work. Kurtz has been instrumental in founding the modern-day scientific skeptical movement with its critiques of paranormal claims; and he also has been a sharp critic of religion,

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especially theistical religions. Thus Part Three concentrates on spirituality and Christianity. Part Four deals with love, sexuality, and marriage. The humanist view of sexuality diverges significantly from the theistical view. Kurtz defends the audacity of Prometheus in his challenges to religious piety and his concern for the good of mankind—expressing a type of moral caring. Thus Part Five contrasts self-interest and altruism, two differing approaches to morality. Part Six deals with the concept of eupraxsophy. The concluding section contains Paul Kurtz’s response to the critics of his work. Beginning with an autobiographical section, Kurtz addresses each of his critics in turn and further delineates his understanding of what a naturalistic view of love is all about. It is my pleasure to finally be able to bring out this important contribution to the topic of the philosophy of love. Paul Kurtz has made a major contribution to my own life, as a teacher, employer and colleague, and I hope that the reader will find the discussion herein both lively and informative. I would like to thank Ranjit Sandhu for his yeoman’s work in typesetting the manuscript, and David Goicoechea for allowing me to participate in his 10 Years of Love celebration. Since it came to an end in 2000 my Februarys have not been nearly so exciting. Most of all I want to thank Paul Kurtz for inspiring me with his boundless energy, endless enthusiasm, and sheer audacity. He is truly a modern Prometheus. This volume is dedicated to the late Bonnie Bullough, Tad S. Clement, and Richard Taylor. They were all humanists in every

xii Madigan: Preface

sense of that word, and in Aristotelian terms they were all my good friends. —Timothy J. Madigan

Part One PROMETHEUS REVISITED

Promethean Love: Unbound Paul Kurtz

I The Promethean myth is Hellenistic in origin. It has inspired countless generations of protesters, secularists, and humanists—who herald Prometheus’s heroic virtues. Pitted against this myth are the Mosaic, Christian, and Mohammedan revelatory myths, Hebraic in origin and inspiration. One difference is that the Greeks, at least by the time of the pre-Socratic philosophers, knew that the Homeric legends were only mythological, though they served a poetic and moral function; though, as Plato pointed out in the Euthyphro, they had a confused ethical message. Judæo-Christian theologians and many philosophers, still today, have not accepted the fact that their Gospels are likewise only confused mythical fictions spun out of the human imagination. Prometheus serves as a symbol for those who reject the reigning theistic orthodoxies and who criticize the temptation of mortal men and women, to deify and worship the dark unknown in an effort to assuage their fears of death. Our knowledge of the Promethean myth is due primarily to Aeschylus, who authored three poems, Prometheus the Firegiver, Prometheus Bound, and Prometheus Unbound. The only one that has survived intact from the long period of theistic domination is Prometheus Bound. The poem opens with Hephaestos, along with Strength and Force, escorting Prometheus in chains, where he is bound to a rock on Mount Caucasos. The Prometheus tale is rich in imagery. Prometheus, a demigod, was, according to Aeschylus, the son of Themis (the Earth) and Gaea, though according to Hesiod, son of the Titan Iapetos and Clymene. In a war between the Olympian gods and the Titans, Prometheus sided with the Olympians. The

4

Kurtz: Promethean Love: Unbound

Titans were defeated and their dynasty was overthrown. What is unique for Prometheus is that he grieved at the sorry state of humankind. Humans, we are told by Aeschylus, lived wretched lives, like ants, huddled in caves (reminiscent of the Stone Age). Out of love for men, Prometheus became their benefactor, stealing fire from Hephaestos (the god of fire and metalwork and son of Zeus), and bestowed it on man. Ancient man worshipped fire and the sun; to receive the gift of fire was the beginning of man’s emancipation from bondage. Fire was difficult to ignite, but it kept us warm, was used to cook our food, and was basic to technology. Prometheus taught man the arts and sciences, the beginnings of civilization. He taught men how to build houses made of brick, and carpentry. He taught them the significance of the seasons, astronomy, mathematics, the alphabet, language, the domestication of animals, the building of chariots and ships, the art of medicine and healing, the skills of intuition and prophecy. We read in Prometheus Bound—and this is central for humanism—that “Men were aroused to reason and taught to think” by Prometheus, who made it possible for men “to cease from contemplating death.” “Blind hopes I gave,” said Prometheus, “to live and dwell with them.” Prometheus is thus challenging the Olympian gods and especially Zeus, who was the symbol of savage power and autocracy. The state of men was such that “through fear of death” they lived “all of their lifetime subject to bondage” and they were susceptible to the slavish awe of Zeus. With the stimulation of reason, the birth of the technological arts, and sciences, Prometheus gave men new interests in life. Humans, formerly impotent before the unknown forces of nature, discovered that they had new powers, and they were responsible, at least in part, for their own destinies. For teaching man these skills, Zeus in anger had Prometheus chained to a rock, and, as further punishment, had a vulture (or eagle) pick out his liver incessantly, renewed by night, and devoured by day. In Prometheus Bound, Prometheus declares his defiance:

Promethean Love 5 “To be the bond slave of the rock, is better than to be Zeus’s trusting herald.” “All the gods I hate.” “I will not become womanized in mind, or entreat him [Zeus], whom I greatly loathe, with upturned hand.” “Let [Zeus] do what he wills, I will not give in . . . . ”

Zeus eventually frees Prometheus, because Prometheus has the gift of prophecy (for the skeptic a questionable ability) and he had foreknowledge of Zeus’s doom: If he has a son by Thetis, Prometheus states, Thetis will “bear a son greater than the father,” and the child will overthrow him, as Zeus did his father. Zeus is gratified for this knowledge. He has Prometheus released from his chains, the vulture is killed by Heracles, and Prometheus is restored to dignity. Indeed, Zeus, according to legend, establishes a festival in his honor, and so Prometheus emerges victorious, not as a tragic figure in the final tale. The Promethean figure has inspired poets and prophets ever since. The central theme is the struggle between Zeus—who represents violent power and demands obedient servility—and Prometheus—who represents reason and the arts and wishes humanity to prosper. It is a clash between authority and rebellion, tyranny and freedom, obedience and autonomy. Prometheus did not deny that the gods exist, as did later Prometheans, only that humanity has a right to flourish and share in power in spite of them. The Enlightenment expressed the high point of modernity’s confidence in the potentialities of human beings to use reason, technology, and science in order to create a better future. Goethe, poet of the Enlightenment, reveals his distaste for religious superstition and the tyranny of Zeus in his poem, “Prometheus”: I know of nothing poorer Under the sun that you gods. Wretchedly

6

Kurtz: Promethean Love: Unbound You feed your majesty On imposed sacrifices And the Breath of prayers. You would waste away If children and beggars Were not hopeful fools.

Goethe expressed the joyful, exuberant temper in his own life. He heralds Prometheus as a master of the earth and the inspiration for human independence and power. Prometheus is not only the benefactor, but the creator of Man: Here I sit, shaping Man After my image, A race that is like me To suffer, to weep, To rejoice and be glad, And like myself To have no regard for you!

For Lord Byron, Prometheus called humanity to resistance against its “funereal destiny.” The human spirit, he hoped, would be “triumphant” and where it dared, defy the Gods. In his “Prometheus” poem, we read his defense of rationalism: Thy Godlike crime was to be kind, To render with thy precepts less The sum of human wretchedness And the strength of man with his own mind.

Karl Marx was no doubt the most influential Promethean of the nineteenth century. In his doctoral dissertation, The Difference Between the Material Philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus, Marx extols Prometheus as “the noblest of saints and martyrs in the calendar of philosophy.” He applauds Prometheus’s rebellion against the Gods and his desire to liberate man from oppression. Although Marx was a humanist, he did not consider humanism to be simply atheistic; this was a negative and abstract form of humanism. He

Promethean Love 7

thought humanism was best realized by communism, which was supposed to emancipate humankind from all kinds of servility, not simply from religion, but from unjust economic and social systems. Marx said, “Follow your own course and let people talk!” We all know what has happened to Marxism in recent years. Marx had been apotheosized by some of his disciples. He now lies chained in the Caucasus, his liver devoured by vultures. Unlike Prometheus, he has been proclaimed dead. Whether he will rebound in some form is hard to predict. Nietzsche is likewise a symbol of Promethean defiance. Proclaiming the death of God, he wished to replace the Christian slave morality with that of the Overman. “Whither is God? . . . I shall tell you. We have killed him . . . you and I. All of us are his murderers.” The issue for secular humanists today is not simply atheism versus theism, or Prometheus versus Christ, but the Human Prospect itself. With the collapse of the monstrous tyrannies of the twentieth century—Stalinist communism and fascism—the challenge of Prometheus is especially pressing. For there has likewise been a collapse of self-confidence and of the ability of humans to cope with the complex problems of the contemporary world. Humans do not live by bread alone; they need circuses to entertain them and myths to sustain. Does the Promethean myth have any meaning for “the postmodern age”? Is technology so dehumanizing and reason so bankrupt that we must abandon Prometheus and return to belief in the ancient myth of an omnipotent creator of the universe, and/or retreat into a new failure of nerve, and lapse into nihilistic subjectivity and despair? Paul Johnson, a conservative British religious critic, rails against the Promethean spirit, which he finds dominant in the modern world among intellectuals, and which he describes as follows: But there . . . a Promethean spirit in man, proud of man’s progress and seemingly limitless capacities, unwilling to submit

8

Kurtz: Promethean Love: Unbound to the total subordination which the notion of God demands, driven first to resistance, then to the denial that God exists at all. This Promethean spirit has been growing with dramatic speed over the last 250 years. It is presented as the spirit of modernity, the creed of rationalism, the march of science. It preaches the absurdity of belief in God, the fatuity of religious doctrine and the positive evil of much of the teachings and practices of the organized faiths. In the Western world today, perhaps a majority of the people who classify themselves as educated—that is, they have attended university, they read books regularly and regard themselves as people who think seriously about the problems of the day and the nature of life—perhaps a majority, would range themselves in the Promethean camp, with varying degrees of consciousness and enthusiasm. Skepticism or denial of God is the hallmark of the modern Homo sapiens—Thinking Man.1

Johnson attacks Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, and other atheistic and secular humanists. He indicts free sexual love, abortion, euthanasia, the movement for homosexual freedom, and twentieth-century totalitarian movements, all of which he attributes to the Promethean Spirit. He concludes that “There is no substitute for God: this our own dreadful century has abundantly proved.”2 II I submit that Prometheus is still relevant today. How and why? First, because Prometheus symbolizes human independence and confidence in our ability to persist and to succeed. In defying the Gods, whether Zeus or Yahweh, or the all-knowing Secular Utopian State, we advance the cause of human freedom. Authoritarian myths were invented by some human beings to keep other human beings in a state of servility. They mask a deep-seated self-hatred and feelings of human impotence. Prometheus on the contrary exemplifies the 1. Paul Johnson, “Idols of Destruction: Is There a Substitute for God?,” Crisis, June 1991, p. 24. 2. Ibid., p. 30.

Promethean Love 9

virtues of courage and autonomy. He dramatizes the need to take destiny into our own hands as far as we can without fear or timidity. Though we may fail, there are no viable alternatives to expanding our own powers in order to control nature and resolve human problems. Implicit in this, Prometheus has come to symbolize the virtue of rationality. In religion, this means atheism, i.e., skepticism toward beliefs in a divine power, but also humanism, i.e., the resolve to cultivate our own skills and values, to use instrumental intelligence, and to develop the arts and sciences. Civilization marks the advance of humanity beyond the fear of death and the torment of the unknown. By using reason and taking responsibility for our own destiny, and in recognizing that “No deity will save us,” and that “we must save ourselves” (Humanist Manifesto II), we advance the Human Prospect. As applied to the individual, Promethean men and women have audacity, the stubbornness and determination to create and realize their own ideals. They are self-generating libertarian free spirits, thinkers and doers. Prometheus thus emphasizes the heroic virtues. He is typified by creative geniuses, rebels, innovators, discoverers, explorers, entrepreneurs, anyone who breaks new ground by challenging the official doctrines of social institutions, whether of church or state or economy and the customary mores. Who are the Promethean men and women? Those on the frontiers of great adventures and moved by the achievement motive: Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar, Queen Elizabeth, Catherine the Great, and Napoléon as political leaders; and Lucretius, Shakespeare, Goethe, and George Sand as poets; Hypatia, Hume, Marx, Nietzsche, Russell, Sartre, Dewey, and Hook as philosophers; Einstein, Freud, Madame Curie, and Darwin as scientists; Thomas Edison and Gustave Eiffel as inventors; Beethoven and Béla Bartok as composers; Susan B. Anthony, Margaret Sanger, and Albert Schweitzer as humanitarians. All are innovators; all attempt to develop new forms of creative expression. Moses, Christ, and Mohammed as the founders of great

10 Kurtz: Promethean Love: Unbound

religions, were also Prometheans. It may be a surprise to hear them described as Promethean figures, but they were. Believing that they talked to God, and were his prophets or messengers, are symptoms of an inflated ego or a form of madness—and they had a touch of both. Moses, Christ, and Mohammed insisted that their disciples obey them. They proclaimed commandments for others, not themselves. They were the masters, not the slaves for whom they preached an obedience-morality. Those who followed their dictates, on the contrary, are anti-Prometheans to the core. Is the Promethean by definition a superperson? Is the Prometheus option available only for a limited number of leaders (or Overmen), appropriate only to an elite class? No, says the Promethean democrat. All human beings have the capacity for some creative selfaffirmation; each person has the responsibility and the power to create and mold his own life. But many fear to do so; they lack the courage; they all too readily are resigned to defeat. Are there not demonic dangers intrinsic to the Promethean spirit? How distinguish beneficent from malevolent geniuses? Cesare Borgia, Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin were rebels and innovators, but they soaked the earth with blood. Were they Prometheans? If audacious defiance is a characteristic of the Promethean attitude, it surely is not sufficient; for intrinsic to Prometheans are the centrality of intellect and reason, necessary to moderate the will and to harmonize the world. There is also the essential role of love. For without love the full test of Promethehood is never attained. What is Promethean love? In a primary sense, Prometheus was moved to undertake his heroic deeds because, as Aeschylus said, “he loved man too much.” There is here an altruistic motive. As the benefactor of humankind, Prometheus was interested in ameliorating the conditions of human life, liberating men and women from darkness and fear, and persuading them to develop the arts of intelligence. Thus the demonic destroyer is a non-Promethean; for he is not concerned with the common good nor does he love humankind.

Promethean Love 11

III What is the pertinence of Prometheus’s message to the present world? How would he respond to the postmodern nay-sayers, who have lost confidence in the Human? Implicit in Prometheanism is a cosmic metaphysic; for the human species is a source of power in the universe, which it shares with the blind forces of nature. The term that I have introduced in my book Eupraxsophy (1990) to describe a naturalistic and humanistic philosophy of life is eupraxsophy (eu = good, praxis = practice or conduct, sophia = wisdom), which means literally “good practice and wisdom,” as distinct from philosophy, meaning “the love of wisdom.” Praxis is a key central concept, as it was for Prometheus, who seized destiny and undertook action, and for Marx, Dewey, and the pragmatists. It is not enough to understand or contemplate the world but to enter into it and change or modify it. Human action tends to re-create the conditions under which it exists. Men and women thus are builders of civilization. The decision to leave the caves of primitive existence, the ability to create techné and arété, the technological arts and sciences, and to discover the means for leading a better life, is that which distinguishes humankind as a sociocultural shaper of events from other species. The emergence of culture is what differentiates the human species; for culture is the repository of the collective memory and wisdom of the race, and it provides the tools and instruments for a civilized life. Sophia is also important, particularly for the philosophy of humanism. In overthrowing the theistic domination of the universe, the world became a scene of natural causes and events. The belief in supernatural causes transcends the categories of human understanding and the forms of human experience, and this may be seen as mere postulation. A secular humanist does not deny the existence of a transcendental realm, but almost by definition we can say nothing about it; hence why glorify or worship it?

12 Kurtz: Promethean Love: Unbound

Skepticism is essential for wisdom. It need not be negative or nihilistic, nor does it deny the possibility of reliable knowledge. It merely affirms the methodological rule that any claims to truth must be tested by objective standards of evidence and reason. It does not deal in absolute certainties, but is willing to live with probabilities and uncertainties. The universe we encounter is in constant flux, processes of both evolution and devolution are present, species appear and disappear. The categories by which we understand nature presuppose some regularities and some degree of order, but nature also manifests contingency, chance, and chaos. Are we entitled to read into this rich pluralistic universe a divine creator? I must confess that I do not know the ultimate origin of the universe. What preceded the Big Bang (a 15-billion-year-old universe), or the plasmic theory of cosmology (a 100-billion-year-old universe), or any other theory of origins, are questions not presently cognitively meaningful, for they cannot be expressed in nonfalsifiable concepts and they have no identifiable experimental content. That is why I am a skeptic or agnostic about any attempt to transcend any possible experience or to postulate a personal deity. All of this reduces to an anthropomorphic leap of faith. Belief in God is fed by the transcendental temptation, and this is nourished by the fear of facing one’s own finitude and the tendency to deny death. Sophia, as I interpret it, is based on a summation of the best scientific theories of nature and man, at any one time in history. It cannot be simply a philosophical summation, but must draw upon the empirical sciences, which are constantly changing. What kind of eupraxia do I think best fits human needs? And in particular, what role does love play in ethics? I have in my book Exuberance (1978) developed a philosophy of the good life appropriate to an individual who is bursting at the seams and has resolved to live with intensity. In Forbidden Fruit: The Ethics of Humanism (1988) I have taken ethical inquiry beyond the individual, to the community, and have focused on the common moral decencies, human rights, and our obligations and responsibilities to

Promethean Love 13

others. My ethical theory is not a meta theory but a normative rendering of the Promethean form of the good life. No doubt this involves some persuasive definitions. There are four E words to describe this humanist eupraxia, though in the time allotted I can only provide a brief sketch of it. I begin with (1) the ego-centered individual. Happiness is always that of a sentient person. I have only one life to live, therefore I should strive to live it with gusto and excitement. (2) The ultimate good for the individual is exuberance. This is not a passive state of eudæmonia or well-being, but an active expression of our talents, interests, and endeavors. Creative joy involves both pleasure and self-fulfillment, a union of hedonism and self-realization. (3) this theory does not reduce to utter subjectivity, for there are normative standards of excellence, criteria of valuation on a comparative scale. Among the highest values for the Promethean are self-love, selfcontrol, self-restraint, temperance and moderation, creativity, courage, the affirmative and positive outlook, and the meaningful life. (4) However, no individual can live fully unless he or she is capable of empathy and has a compassionate concern for the needs of others, their well-being and happiness. I have designated my theory as “objective relativism.” This means that ethical choices are always related to concrete situations, individuals, and societies, so there is a degree of relativism. But there are objective, rational standards of criticism that we can bring to bear in evaluating our values and principles, and they are tested by their consequences. Therefore, we need not degenerate into ethical subjectivity or nihilism. I also describe this normative eupraxia with four A words: It focuses on (1) autonomy, i.e., maximizing freedom of choice so that the individual can lead an authentic self-governing existence. (2) This involves the actualization of one’s talents and the achievement of one’s ends and goals. 3) There is also an element of creative audacity, where we do not simply realize our needs, but seek to exceed our capacities by outreach and invention, and this involves impudence and creativity. If we encounter an abyss, the Promethean

14 Kurtz: Promethean Love: Unbound

task is to leap over it by daring choices, not to cower in fear or fall in. (4) Essential to the full life, I reiterate, is the capacity to express altruistic feelings and to engage in constructive supportive behavior; that is, to manifest a genuine interest in loving and helping other human beings. Love, including altruistic love, is thus a necessary component of the exuberant life, and it is fundamental to what I have called the “common moral decencies.” By these I mean the general moral principles and ethical rules which are necessary if we are to live and interact harmoniously. These involve everything from truth telling, promise keeping, dependability, sincerity, and honesty, to nonmalfeasance, beneficence, justice, negotiation, compromise, and tolerance. Can we define love? It refers to an attitude of attachment and affection that we feel toward a person or object. There are many forms that it assumes. We have already talked about self-love, involving some respect for one’s own self. But I wish to focus on the love we have for other persons. Obviously, there is a profound biological basis for love rooted in sexuality. Individuals thus seek to satisfy their sexual desires, to achieve orgasmic pleasure and hedonic gratification. Romantic love is intermingled with sexual desire. I am convinced that unless an individual is able to satisfy his or her sexual libido without excessive repression, the materials of tragedy will fester. Sexual love is thus essential to human happiness. In this postFreudian age, we are now aware that the many varieties of sexual expression should not be cavalierly condemned as deviant, sinful, or evil. Sexual desires are expressed in diverse ways. John Money has used the term love maps to describe the wide range of human tastes and fantasies that are found in human behavior. Perhaps the term pansexual best describes the capacities of humans to respond to a variety of sexual stimuli, which in one sense are all “good”; so long, that is, as they are nondestructive and do not injure other sentient beings. We now see that the sexual orientation of a person has a

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genetic and pre-natal basis, though how it is expressed depends upon psycho-sexual development and environmental conditions. There are stages of love over and beyond orgasmic release. These can best develop where there are stable, nonpromiscuous relationships between persons—as between a man and woman in marriage, or between two lovers. These relationships may be deeply gratifying and rewarding. They involve sincerity and trust and the sharing of the values of commitment and companionship. There are other enriching forms of nonsexual love; and in a wider sense these shared values become central in meaningful human relationships. I am here referring to the devotion of parents to their children, of children toward their parents, the affectionate bonds between sisters and brothers, and other kinship relationships. These afford among the highest sources of human love. Still at another stage is the love of friends, colleagues, or companions, for each other. Here love is not autistic, selfish, or egocentric, but truly other-regarding. A true friend is one who wishes his friend to flourish, and he exults when his friend succeeds. This is not infantile or possessive love, yet it offers a deeply ennobling form of satisfaction. In cherishing the other person as a person and wanting that person to prosper and to realize his or her own forms of actualization, both persons can grow and can discover new sources of beauty and value. The most extended sense of love as altruistic love goes beyond our immediate circle of wives or husbands, lovers, relatives, or friends, to the community of humankind. The moral point of view is in full array when we have an altruistic commitment not only to aliens and strangers within our midst, as the Old Testament admonishes us to do, but to those without. Here there is an ethical decision to have some regard for all human beings, those who suffer and need our help, without our admonition or approval. Egocentric, self-centered love is never complete. The person never fully flowers as a human being unless he can give love. It is not enough to receive it and to be loved, but one needs to develop the capacity to bestow

16 Kurtz: Promethean Love: Unbound

love on other persons. I am continually surprised by the extreme egocentric libertarian position, which considers human beings to be irremediably selfish in motivation, and which relates all moral concerns to the gratification of one’s own self-interest, whether short-range or long-range. I think this is a distorted view of human personality; for there is considerable evidence that deep within the human species are the potentialities for sharing life’s joys and sorrows, of relating our most intimate secrets to others, and of making sacrifices for them, without any hope of reward or gain. The full test of moral growth is whether an individual is able to realize his capacities for moral behavior. I recognize that altruistic love is sometimes absent in some individuals. Some individuals are deranged psychopaths and sociopaths, as in the tragic case of Jeffrey Dahmer, who had no respect for other human beings as persons. The moral development of some individuals may be thwarted due to severe environmental deprivation or some fixation in the psychosexual growth process or genetic impairment. I submit, however, that with normal genetic endowment, a stable social environment, some form of loving parenting care, and some sexual gratification, that morally altruistic behavior can emerge. In any case, recognizing the key role of altruism as part of the essence of what it means to be human modifies self-interest theories. This is a pluralistic theory of motivation. We are both self-interested and altruistic. Unless altruism is able to express itself, the individual is morally handicapped, deprived of full moral growth. IV Promethean ethics, however, is different from the Judaic, Christian, or Muslim morality, and in the following senses: It is not an ethic of obedience, but of independence and affirmation. It is not willing to sacrifice the autonomous ego on the altar of social custom or to God. Instead of acquiescence and passivity, there is a determination and resolve. There is no exacerbated sense of sin, hedonic-phobia, or erotic-phobia, but a lusty appreciation for life’s pleasures, and also

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the conviction that to live life fully one needs to share its laughter and tears with others. The Promethean ethic is not focused on the escape from death— though obviously we wish to be healthy and to do what we can to prolong life. But there is no illusion that there is salvation beyond the grave. Rather, it emphasizes human powers and to our ability to achieve a good life as best we can, individually and in cooperation with others. There is no meaning to life per se, in abstracto, either for us or for the universe at large. For the universe is blind, impersonal, and indifferent about the preservation or realization of our fondest dreams and hopes. Meanings are what we create. They grow out of our plans and projects. Nature and society present us with options, and we create our own; but the choices of how to proceed are our own, and whether we fail or succeed has no ontological significance, independent of ourselves or of other human beings. There is no denying of death, but there is an affirming of life. The Promethean ethic is not excessively focused on the limitations of human powers; for it seeks constantly to expand them by the discovery and application of knowledge. Primitive man was in awe of and terror-stricken by the savage furies that felled people apparently without rhyme or reason, by premature death or unexpected tragedy. For the Promethean, death is a natural event; there is a season for everything, including a season to die. Accordingly, there is no overriding pessimistic sense of foreboding, failure, or defeat. Life is taken as a challenge. It provides us with opportunities to achieve great things, but if we fail, as we often do, perhaps there is some remorse, but there is no gnashing of teeth, but a kind of Stoic resignation and a resolve to do our best next time in overcoming new challenges. A Promethean will refuse to accept his fate as fixed, nor will he plead for forgiveness to an unknown deity; but he will seek to marshal ingenuity cooperatively with others to create a better world and to live fully within it. A Promethean is concerned not simply with his own self-preservation and prosperity, but with those whom

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he cherishes, and today he has an altruistic concern for all of humanity, beyond ethnicity, beyond race, and beyond nationality, the building of a world community. Prometheus is concerned with the common good, which he thinks can be ameliorated. This is surely the dominant theme of modern Man, especially since the scientific revolution, industrialization, and the Enlightenment. Modernity takes as its project the expansion of technology, reason, and science, for it believes that problems can best be solved by using methods wisely. Today modernity is under attack, and postmodernists have admonished us to abandon any idea that there are standards of objectivity or knowledge; and they have little faith in science and technology. I respond, we cannot escape from the project of living. We are left with a quandary: What viable options do we have, if not marshalling our best talents, human courage, reason, altruism? Is the Promethean model of the good life too difficult for the ordinary man and woman? If only a minority can follow the Socratic injunction to lead the life of reason, can only a minority live consistently the heroic Promethean way, where we need not only reason but courage? It is the courage not simply to be, but to become that is the Promethean injunction. How generalizable is the Promethean ethic? The Promethean democrat shares the gift of reason and fire with all humans, and thus implies some confidence in the capacities of all men and women to utilize their potentialities, however diverse they are. Prometheus stands as a beacon that great things are still possible. But there was only one God, indeed a son of a Titan and a demigod, who dared to challenge the Gods. Perhaps that is why it is so difficult for everyone else. Perhaps some cognitive dissonance and falsehoods may be necessary for sanity. Do human beings need myths of consolation and salvation, in order to survive? The psychiatrist John Schumaker, in his book Wings of Illusion, argues that some degree of insanity is necessary if we are to remain sane. For most people the bitter truth that there is no ultimate purpose to human existence, that our lives

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are fragile and contingent, and that all our plans and projects in the long run will be for naught, may be too difficult to accept. For the stark truth is that in the end we’ll all be overwhelmed by the sands of time, our children’s children’s children, and our very civilization itself. How can a person remain robust and exuberant in the face of these undeniable realities? “Are Prometheans never overcome by depression or despair?,” asks philosopher Marvin Kohl. Do they have a defect of character because they lack a sense of the tragic? Perhaps the Promethean spirit is a gift of the Gods, genetic or glandular in origin. Perhaps some are born with a capacity to enjoy and to live fully and others to bemoan and bewail their melancholy existence, like Miniver Cheevy. But then again, the human adventure on this planet would not have progressed at all if Promethean types were not around encouraging everyone to go on. While so many are frightened and wish to turn back, the Prometheans stand in front, cajoling their comrades to advance, to have a little more confidence, to exert a little more effort. No doubt we need conservative doubters who will seek to restrain at times the inflated sense of arrogance and power of unrestricted Prometheans. Yet, Prometheus is the creative and indomitable will so essential for human achievement. It is the task of Prometheans in our midst to beckon us, not to retreat, not to cower with fear and trembling, not to be overcome by fatigue, or to give up, but to exceed ourselves by resolve, strength, and fortitude. (That sounds like the Buffalo Bills after defeat at the hands of the Washington Redskins.) Nevertheless, the Promethean spirit is vital to the human enterprise, for we need indomitable exemplars of achievement, as new frontiers are chartered and new horizons discovered. Granted that Promethean types may tire everybody out, and that there are those who would much rather recline tranquil in a quiet garden, under a cypress tree, gazing at fragrant lilacs. Heidegger was perched on a mountain top, withdrawn from the world; he deplored the excesses of technology and human pride. No doubt we need both kinds of human beings. Perhaps both

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Schopenhauer-pessimists and exuberant-optimists need to balance our appraisal of the Human Prospect. Still, is it not the nature of what it means to be human to leave the life of quietude and to seek out adventure and exploration? And is it not the Promethean myth that is the symbol of such great undertaking? It is Prometheus unbound, not the martyr bound, that is our inspiration. Alas, it is only a myth, because it involves a belief in one’s own powers to conquer the universe, though in the last analysis the universe is too vast to be vanquished by the puny efforts of man. And we delude ourselves into believing that it can be conquered. But not to believe that we can climb mountains, advance knowledge, build empires, explore outer space, achieve a more peaceful, democratic, and prosperous world, is to slip back into mere biological existence, and to live as other animals, chewing our cuds in lazy fields, fearful of venturing beyond them. Man by definition is a Promethean animal and human history begins when man set out on his own without Zeus to create a better, more interesting, morally meaningful, and exciting life. Bibliography Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound. Blumenberg, Hans. Work on Myth. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985. Byron, Lord. Prometheus (fragment). Conacher, D. J. Aeschylus’ “Prometheus Bound”: A Literary Commentary. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. “Prometheus.” Golden, Leon. In Praise of Prometheus: Humanism and Rationalism in Aeschylean Thought. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962. Havelock, E. A. The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1950. Johnson, Paul. “Idols of Destruction: Is There a Substitute for God?” Crisis, June 1991.

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Marx, Karl. The Difference Between the Material Philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus. McLelland, Joseph C., Prometheus Rebound: The Irony of Atheism. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1988. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Prometheus the Foreknowing Myth and Ritual in Ancient Athens Noel Robertson

Prometheus as a symbol Our theme is love and humanism, and of this the mythical Prometheus has always been the symbol and embodiment. The Greek word “philanthropy” means exactly the feeling of love for men at large, for fellow members of society. In surviving Greek literature, the word first occurs in the opening lines of the tragedy Prometheus Bound. It is used of Prometheus by his torturers as they pinion him to a mountain crag. “Your philanthropic nature” has brought you to this, they say; now you will learn to give up “your philanthropic nature.” Prometheus’s punishment has been imposed by Zeus, the high god; his crime was that he loved mankind, and gave them fire. Afterwards the word “philanthropy” becomes very common, both in theoretical discussion and in the workaday vocabulary of public life. But the ideal, this love for humankind, was first expressed in myth, in the traditional story of Prometheus. The story has never lost its power. Goethe and Shelley made Prometheus the champion of the modern age. He loves and suffers and endures, and at last he triumphs over entrenched authority and power. For Goethe, Prometheus is himself, the young poet and creator, and Zeus is his father, so that youth and imagination are opposed to age and convention. For Shelley, Prometheus is the searching human mind, and Zeus only an illusion, a figment of the mind before it found its way. Goethe and Shelley, we should note, are more forthrightly optimistic than the Greek original. Mary Shelley’s version is less buoyant. “The modern Prometheus” is the name she gives in her title to that creation of modern science which 23

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we now call by his creator’s name, Frankenstein. When his love and trust are spurned by everyone, disaster follows. The ending of the story in Greek tragedy was neither so happy nor so forlorn as these extremes. Instead, we might call it realistic. Prometheus and Zeus were finally reconciled, so that the world we live in partakes of both. Furthermore, the nature of both is ambiguous; it was not a simple conflict between right and wrong. The Prometheus trilogy This much we see from the Prometheus Bound. But we cannot be sure how the conflict broke out, or how the reconciliation was managed, because this tragedy is only one of three, a trilogy presenting the connected story. The Athenian audience saw the three plays performed together in a single day. Two of the plays are now lost. The lost ones were probably the first and the third. The title of one was Prometheus the Fire-bringer; it must have shown Prometheus opposing Zeus, so as to elicit the punishment that is depicted in Prometheus Bound. The title of the third play was Prometheus Unbound, the same title Shelley chose. But the ending was not the same. Zeus remained in power, stronger than ever. It seems that we do not even know the author’s name. The play is ascribed to Aeschylus, but differs markedly in language and construction from his undoubted plays. So it is coming to be the majority view that the Prometheus trilogy was composed by someone else and produced at Athens in the fifth century, but some considerable time after the death of Aeschylus. The Prometheus plays are parodied in Athenian comedy of the late fifth century. This is the usual tribute paid by the comic Muse to her elder sister; but hardly any tragedy is parodied so much as these of the Prometheus trilogy. They were appreciated in their time. Prometheus’s gift to man, which is also a theft from the gods, is traditionally fire. But Prometheus Bound offers a more thoughtful and suggestive account of how Prometheus intervened and man’s condition changed. Prometheus says of himself, “I found men foolish

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and muddled and ineffectual, and I made them intelligent and purposeful.” Fire is only a metaphor; what Prometheus has done is to set men on the path of civilization. They are now capable of immense progress and achievement. “All arts that man has are from Prometheus.” Thus does Prometheus sum it up. Prometheus then is not only a kind and generous lover of men, but also a most energetic discoverer and teacher. He personifies these human roles and qualities. All this suggests unbounded optimism; it suggests inevitable victory for Prometheus and mankind. But Prometheus Bound is only one play of three, the play in which Prometheus himself pleads his cause as he is stretched on the rock. The play before it showed Zeus intent upon another course and imposing punishment on Prometheus. The play after it showed Zeus relenting, so that he ordered Prometheus’s release. Though the third play is lost, we know the manner in which Prometheus was released; it is part of the traditional story. The worst of his punishment, as he lay on the rock, was to be attacked by an eagle that tore out his liver. Heracles, the greatest of heroes and warriors, came to the mountain, shot the eagle with his bow, and loosed the bonds that held Prometheus. This rescuer is both a son of Zeus and a mortal man, one of those whom Prometheus loves. Now as everyone knows, Heracles is a model of strength and daring, and yet his story, especially as it was told in Athenian tragedy, by both Sophocles and Euripides, is not a reassuring one. The life of Heracles was full of madness and violence and cruelty, and it ended in crushing failure and an agonizing death. In this third play Prometheus on meeting Heracles predicted to him, as Prometheus was able to do, the future course of his life. Prometheus Unbound had a happy ending for Prometheus on the rock. But at the same time it either stated or implied a less happy view of human nature and achievement.

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The Athenian milieu The poet of the Prometheus trilogy is highly original, but also a product of his times. When he wrote, the group of intellectuals called the sophists were teaching and arguing at Athens. Though Plato and others later gave the sophists a bad name, they are the true pioneers of Western thought, the founders not only of philosophy as the broadest field of inquiry, but of closely focussed research into language and social organization and much else. When Prometheus in Prometheus Bound describes how mankind is advancing, how they are developing arts and sciences, the details are clearly taken from the sophists. Protagoras and Prodicus and others had provided imaginative reconstructions of the origin and progress of human society. Other tragedies too, by Sophocles and Euripides, are indebted to the sophists in various ways. Our nameless poet was at work a little before 430 B.C. Among the repeated allusions in comedy, the earliest that can be dated belongs to January, 429 B.C. At the dramatic festival of this month, the comic poet Cratinus brought on a chorus who approached a Prometheus-like figure with the joyful news that the tyrant Zeus was overthrown. This is somewhat similar to the opening of the last play in the Prometheus trilogy, although there the news was only that Zeus had relented. In the comedy “Zeus” means Pericles, the thundering orator who dominated democratic Athens for many years. In 429 Athens had just gone to war with Sparta, and Pericles, formerly unassailable, was now dismissed from office. So the Prometheus trilogy was composed and produced in a wonderful milieu: Athens before the war, in the heyday of the sophists. Strange to say, Athens was the aggressor in that war, which lasted nearly thirty years. Athens lost, and her walls were pulled down. Sparta and the other victors did not take the further step of razing the whole city and killing or enslaving the inhabitants, as Athens had done with some places that opposed her. But Athens’ preeminence was at an end. The sophists were scattered, and no more tragic trilogies were written.

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The question of origin Let us now turn away from this particular treatment of Prometheus to the story as it was handed down. After all, the story is not a literary fiction, but a myth, the common property of many story-tellers, both poets and others who have left no record. It was already age-old when our tragic poet took it for his subject. He gave the story new significance. He did so partly by adding new details, as a poet, as any story-teller, has a right to do. In Prometheus Bound several other figures come to the mountain to denounce or console Prometheus. They are no part of the traditional story, but provide the means of drawing out Prometheus’s point of view, and of foreshadowing the action of the next play. Yet apart from all variations of detail, the myth of Prometheus may itself suggest different meanings. This is generally true of Greek myths, much less so of traditional stories in the repertories of other lands. It is one reason why Greek myths have had such lasting influence on literature and art and also on theorizing of all kinds. Myths like the Prometheus story are as large and general as human experience, and at the same time concrete and vivid and peculiar. This combination of general and concrete raises the question of how such myths originate. The question has never been satisfactorily answered. Interpreters naturally resort to depth psychology, and lately to structuralism. Myths, we are told, are a necessary by-product of the mind, a virtual language for expressing tensions and ambiguities which we perceive but cannot in any way resolve. This approach is often helpful, but at the last it still does not explain why a given story is so concrete and vivid and peculiar. Let me remind you of how the Prometheus story unfolds in its fuller context, which is the creation and ordering of the world: the Greek creation story.

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The creation story Prometheus himself is not a late-born rebel but the survivor of a fallen regime, the Titan gods who ruled before Zeus. The name “Prometheus” has a transparent meaning: “Foreknowing.” Prometheus knew that his own kindred, the Titans, could not resist Zeus when he rose against them. Therefore Prometheus sided with the usurper. He also knows that Zeus in turn will be threatened. Only he, Prometheus, can reveal the danger. The Titans and Zeus represent successive stages in the creation story. Mankind is caught between. Under the Titans, men lived at ease, without any want or hardship. But Zeus is sterner. Men’s life becomes much bleaker, and they are close to perishing. Prometheus, the last Titan, now displays his love of mankind, his “philanthropic nature.” Zeus as the god of sky and weather controls the element of fire. Prometheus steals fire and gives it to men as an unfailing resource. Fire enables them to survive and even to flourish by means of various crafts. Zeus punishes Prometheus for defying him. He is affixed to a mountain rock, and lashed with wind and rain and lightning, and tormented by the eagle that tears out his liver. The punishment continues for long ages, and Prometheus’s suffering is terrible. But at last Heracles comes to the mountain and shoots the eagle. Mankind is punished too. Zeus orders the first woman to be cunningly fashioned and adorned with every beautiful and endearing feature. This is done by several divine craftsmen, including Hephaestus the smith and Athena the patron of crafts. The woman’s dress and crown and veil are marvels of craftsmanship. It is as if woman were the most exquisite artifact and comfort that technical skill can produce. Since man’s offense was to acquire fire and its technology, the punishment is condign. Here we seem to go beyond the original story of Prometheus. The first woman is a theme of story-telling everywhere. Although it comes into the Prometheus story very neatly, it is not integral to it.

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There is another episode that is probably secondary. It is said that even before Prometheus stole fire, he played Zeus a trick. Gods and men were gathered together to dine on the meat of an ox, a sacrificial victim. Prometheus divided the meat into two parcels, for gods and men respectively, and asked Zeus to choose on behalf of the gods. But he had put most of the meat in the parcel that appeared less alluring, so that Zeus was deceived. He chose the parcel wrapped in glistening fat; Zeus was a robust eater. The deception explains why the meat of sacrificial victims is mostly consumed by the worshippers, and only a little is burnt up on the altar, with the help of the flammable fat. Stories like this are told everywhere, and any trickster will suffice. Prometheus was brought into it when he was already known for opposing Zeus in other matters. Epimetheus The episodes of the first woman and the first sacrifice are only halfserious. There are even burlesque variations. The first woman with her fine clothes and beguiling ways is given as a bride to Prometheus’s dim-witted brother, who receives her joyfully. His name is Epi-metheus, “Knowing afterwards”—“Hindsight” instead of “Foresight.” No sooner is the first woman inside the house than she removes the lid from a huge jar, evidently the storage jar that was sunk in the earth floor of a Greek peasant household. The effect is to release a multitude of ills into the world. The story illustrates woman’s nature, which from a peasant point of view is inquisitive and improvident. This is another popular tale that has become attached to the original Prometheus myth. Other peoples besides the Greeks tell how life’s ills were once released from some container by some heedless person, typically a woman. Epimetheus also has a role in the creation of man. Long ago, when living creatures were first formed from earth and other substances, he and Prometheus had the task of equipping them with attributes sufficient for survival. Epimetheus went ahead and happily lavished the various attributes on various animals: strength and

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speed, warm coats and sharp teeth and so on. When he came at last to man, no attributes were left, so that puny naked man had little prospect of survival. This is why Prometheus stole fire as the only remedy. Comic variations The Prometheus story was also a subject for comedy, quite apart from the allusions I spoke of. In fact, comedy took up the story much earlier than tragedy and made it popular. Aeschylus—the authentic Aeschylus, not the author of Prometheus Bound—was renowned for his satyr plays, in which a chorus of satyrs cavort through some mythical landscape. Satyric performers are naked and unadorned except for certain exaggerated features at their middle. Aeschylus produced a satyr play entitled Prometheus the Fire-Lighter. It showed satyrs scorching their fingers with the fire they have just discovered; they attempt to use it to attract some nymphs. The play was a favorite, to judge from several Athenian vases that are decorated with one of its scenes. Prometheus looks rather mystified as he stands among capering satyrs. Besides Athens, Syracuse in Sicily had an early form of comic drama and a renowned playwright named Epicharmus. In one of Epicharmus’s plays Prometheus is praised for the gift of fire, but chiefly because it was inconvenient before to cook with sunlight and take cold baths. Hesiod These are variations for comic purposes. But even Prometheus himself is not a serious figure in the earliest telling of the story. He is a mischievous rascal, grinning and impudent, who dares match wits with Zeus. Zeus has the last laugh. This version comes from Hesiod, a poet almost as early as Homer. He is the first to tell the creation story, leading up to the victory of Zeus and the present order of the world, including human society and the human condition. If there are

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flaws in the present order, the reason for Hesiod is that Zeus was preceded and opposed by other gods, including Prometheus. Some enemies of Zeus were violent, and were put down with violence. Prometheus was not violent but cunning; yet even so he could not prevail against the mind of Zeus. When Prometheus plays his trick with the meat, Zeus is not really deceived; it is rather that he has already resolved to punish Prometheus and mankind. Afterwards, Zeus sends the first woman as the ultimate trick, and laughs in triumph. There is very little in all this that resembles or anticipates the tragic presentation of Prometheus. The common ground is simply that a certain Prometheus, “Foreknowing,” opposes Zeus by stealing fire and is spectacularly punished and finally released by Heracles. What was it that first suggested this figure and his fate? Prometheus the fire-god? The usual answer is that Prometheus was, so to speak, a god in real life who was taken up into the creation story. He is supposed to be a minor fire-god worshipped with a certain ritual that inspired the tale of his stealing fire from Zeus. This minor fire-god is hypothetical. It is true that Prometheus was given a certain role in Athenian festivities. Outside the city of Athens, in the groves of the Academy, there was an altar of Prometheus. Nearby was a relief sculpture showing Prometheus and Hephaestus together, as the elder and younger deities of fire. The altar was the starting point for a favorite event in the program of several public festivals, a relay race in which the runners carried burning torches. Yet these picturesque furnishings, the altar and the relief sculpture, are much more likely to be, not the source of the Prometheus story, but a consequence of the story. Very probably, the Athenians borrowed the mythical Prometheus to adorn their torchrace custom. When they did this is impossible to say; it may have been as late as the fifth century, when Prometheus was a subject for comedy and tragedy. If we look outside Athens, at all the other

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Greek cities in which the Prometheus story was told, there is virtually no trace of the fire-god. At a couple of places, Prometheus was fabled to be a local hero; one place even boasted a tomb. Bogus tombs and relics were commonplace. The drastic punishment So we must give up the hypothetical fire-god. He would not do very well in any case to explain the peculiar details of the story, above all the punishment. >From first to last, in every version, the punishment is the most constant feature. In Hesiod’s creation story the punishment is mentioned first. In Prometheus Bound the whole action turns on the punishment. And the punishment is the only part of the story that is depicted in early Greek art. It is in fact a common scene. We see Prometheus sitting with his hands tied behind him and his back to a pillar or post to which he is tied; or else he is actually impaled on this fixture. Ropes or chains are always prominent. Meanwhile, either the eagle pecks at him, or Heracles shoots the eagle. Hesiod has the same notion. He says that Zeus bound Prometheus with heavy chains and drove a pillar through his middle. When Prometheus Bound was performed in the theater at Athens, the central figure on the stage was Prometheus on the rock. In the first twenty minutes or so, the minions of Zeus are at work hammering nails into this figure, cleaving his chest with a wedge, shackling and securing his limbs. The text describes their work with grim relish. The mountain setting is also described. It is a steep rock face above a deep gully. The point of this is that Prometheus is exposed to the elements and also the eagle. The minions say that he will be grilled by the sun and lashed by storms. In fact the play ends in a tremendous storm in which Prometheus disappears, as does the chorus too. They are daughters of Ocean who pity Prometheus. Winds rush, clouds whirl, thunder bellows, lightning flashes. The mountain shakes, and the gully is filled with a raging torrent that rises to engulf Prometheus.

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How this was managed in the open-air theater below the Acropolis we can hardly guess. When Prometheus Bound is revived on the modern stage, it taxes the ingenuity and the stamina of all concerned. The weather-god Now this extravagant spectacle—the mountain-top, the tremendous storm, also the darting eagle—is perfectly appropriate for Zeus as the mighty god of sky and weather. The creation story is very largely the story of how the weather god prevails over every foe with thunder and lightning as his weapons. The Titans and assorted giants and serpents rise up from land and sea to fight the weather god, who then draws upon his armory in the sky. As a rule, the monstrous challengers can be recognized as other violent phenomena of nature, mostly weather phenomena more extreme or irregular than the change of seasons under Zeus. Even though the monsters are now overcome and confined in deep or remote places, they are still refractory and cause eruptions and tornadoes and the like. The eagle sent by Zeus and killed by Heracles is only another image for the storm. A very common image, in fact. Not a literary or theological symbol, but the means by which people all round the world imagine storms in the sky. The storm-bird is found everywhere, among native peoples as well as in ancient Greece and the Near East. To shoot the storm-bird, to kill or injure it or drive it away, is to make an end of stormy weather. Many a hero besides Heracles has the task of dealing with the storm-bird or with stormbirds, plural. When the Argonauts are sailing after the Golden Fleece, they twice encounter flocks of angry birds who bring dangerous storms. The proper recourse is to shoot at them. Shooting at the storm is not only an exploit for mythical heroes. It is well attested as a magic practice. Folklorists have many examples of shooting arrows at a stormy or lowering sky they also add a few more recent ones of firing cannons at the sky. Prometheus then properly belongs to a very old story pattern, the creation story in which the weather god establishes the order of the

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world. The story was told, with some remarkable similarities, all across the ancient world in which the weather and the seasons were much the same: in Greece, the Levant, Syria, Mesopotamia. This is the area in which Old-World archaeologists have long been toiling to produce a rich harvest of documents in newly deciphered languages. A class of documents common to the whole area is the creation story. Zeus had his counterpart on every side, under many names. This obsession with the weather god reminds us that every ancient community, whether city-state or kingdom, depended on a narrow, fragile subsistence economy for which the only parallel today would be the most backward rural villages in India or southeast Asia. They depended on a few staple crops, especially grain, cultivated everywhere at the same seasons with the same implements, and so they depended on the weather god who controls the bright sky and the fertilizing rain. The ritual background The weather god is not an abstract concept. He is summoned with urgent magic rites at the great festivals that mark the change of seasons. During the autumn, while the grain is being laboriously sown, the weather must be fairly dry. But at the end of the sowing, rain is needed straightway. In late spring, while the grain is at the last stage of ripening, bright still weather is essential. Behind Prometheus and his punishment, we can discern the ritual of autumn. The magic instrument that is used everywhere for producing rain is the fleece of a freshly slaughtered sheep. In the Old Testament, where the Lord is repeatedly shown to be a more effective weather god than any local Baal, Gideon lays a fleece on the ground and asks for two signs which are refinements of ordinary magic. First the fleece is to be soaking wet while the ground beside it is dry; then the fleece is to be dry while the ground is wet. The Hittites of Asia Minor hung the fleece upon a pole and left it under the open sky; the following year the soiled fleece was removed and replaced with a fresh one.

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In Greece, at the autumn festival of Zeus, the fleece was carried up to a site high on a mountain. The officiants waited, sometimes for days, until a sign came, whether lightning or rain or just a cloud. The fleece was credited with magic power to attract the weather god, and was called either “fleece of Zeus” or simply “Zeus,” as if it were the weather god. From this background, fleeces were adopted for private magic too. When someone wanted a dream or other visitation, he slept on a fleece, or sat on it, or stood on it, or wrapped it round him. After Zeus had sent some sign, the fleece was left at the site to exert its magic power throughout the winter. It was either hung on a tree or laid on a rock. Both arrangements are seen in vase-paintings which illustrate the story of the Golden Fleece. This is another myth inspired by the autumn festival. A wicked stepmother has enchanted the grain so that it will not sprout. The remedy prescribed by an oracle is to sacrifice the children, but in the event a golden ram appears. After he is sacrificed, the fleece is hung on an oak tree or fastened to a rock. Since the fleece is to remain beneath the open sky, it needs to be securely fastened. Hence the punishment of Prometheus, nailed to the rock, or tied to a pole, or even impaled, and always lashed by storms. It may seem odd that the Greeks should personify an object, even an important one like the fleece, as a mythical figure. Yet to personify both the actions and objects of ritual is a common practice in ancient myth. An example that is easily recognized is Adonis, a beautiful youth cut off in his prime. The name is the cry adonai, “O lord,” a ritual lament that was raised at the reaping of the grain. In Greek myth, sacrificial victims are frequently personified under riddling names like “Swell-foot,” “Black-face,” “Broadface,” meaning respectively pig, black ram, and cow (the Greek names are Oedipus, Pelops, Europa). In the story of the Golden Fleece, the boy who is led to the altar with his sister is Phrixus meaning “Shaggy”— another name for the sheep and its fleece. The fleece is also called Prometheus, “Foreknowing.” It is used at the autumn festival to evoke a sign, lightning or the like. The hope

36 Robertson: Prometheus the Foreknowing

is that rain will fall thereafter throughout the winter. In Greece, this is not a certainty, only an anxious hope. To personify the fleece, to call it ‘Foreknowing,’ is itself a kind of magic, a way to make things happen. Myth, ritual, and literature Thus the story of Prometheus was first inspired by ancient ritual. Most myths of Greece and the Near East come from this source. Life was bound up with ritual. When the magic purpose of a rite was forgotten, and it always was, observers told stories. The ritual, they said, reenacts a strange event of long ago. “What we do with the fleece,” they said, “Zeus did with Prometheus.” This equation between myth and ritual is often made explicit in Greek literature. In the Hellenistic period, when all the old myths had been treated in literature many times over, it became the fashion for poets to seek out quite obscure myths from odd corners of Greece. In doing so, they were always careful to report the corresponding rite. To trace the myths back to this source is not to make them trivial and uninteresting. Rather, it is to understand that the power of myths is rooted in the most ancient and fundamental human experience. The narrow subsistence economy that lies behind the creation story was shared by the Greeks, but they were able to transform it into an association of free men and active citizens, the city-state. They still kept many old ways, above all the old festivals. In fifth-century Athens, the fleece of Zeus was still carried forth in autumn, and both the author and the audience of Prometheus Bound undoubtedly had it in mind—verbal echoes of the rite can be detected. The story of “Foreknowing” in its tragic presentation is a measure of the long road man has traveled.

Prometheus (1773) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Cover your heaven, Zeus, With cloudy haze And practice, like a boy Decapitating thistles, Your skills on oaks and peaks! Yet you must leave My earth untouched My hut, which you did not build, And my hearth, Must envy me Its warming glow. I know nothing more empty Under the sun than you gods! You feed your majesty On sacrificial dues And gasping prayers And would starve of want Were there not children, beggars, Hopefilled dupes. When I was still a child, And knew not where to turn, I lifted my searching eyes Unto the sun, as if beyond There were an ear to hear my plaint, A heart like mine, To offer mercy to the grieved. Who aided me Against the Titans’ insolence? Who rescued me from death, From slavery? Did not you, holy, radiant heart, Achieve it all yourself? And youthful still and good, redeemed, Send ardent thanks, deceived, Unto the dormant god above? I honor you? What for? Did you once soothe the grief 37

38 Schutz: Goethe and Daimonic Love Of one so burdened? Or still the tears Of one distressed? Was I not forged a man By an almighty time And by eternal fate, Your lords and mine? Did you think perhaps, I should hate life, Escape into the wastes, Because not all My budding boyish dreams came into bloom? Here sit I, shaping humans Conforming to my image, A race to seem like me, To weep, endure, Enjoy and to rejoice, And not to pay respect to you, As I! (Translated by H. Schutz)

Goethe and Daimonic Love Herbert Schutz

For Goethe the theme of Love never ceased to be the central theme of his literary work. During his long life (1749–1832) he found in it the recurrent inspiration for his poetry, novels, and plays. In its earliest stages love was expressed in his poetry in the light, airy, playful, and gallant style of the Rococo, then in the intense explosiveness of his Storm and Stress, only to be transformed into an emotionally controlled and directed expression of growing maturity

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during his middle, pre-classical period. During each phase a woman was at the center of his consciousness. In each phase it was a woman who was the catalyst of his writings. But in each phase he was also responding to the need to express the dominating drives that determined his personality. The overall transformation of his literary persona ranges from a young and impetuous love that first centers on the self, which, in the form of an inverted triangle, derives from a base line outside of himself and rushes into himself, to a mature love which extends to all mankind, which in the same inverted triangle originates within the self and projects outward to embrace all of nature. Throughout, his work is an organic whole of themes and forms, characterized by an alternating inward contraction and outward expansion that inhales the world as a divinely created macrocosm and exhales it again as an artistic microcosm in a dynamic, pulsating, poetically recreated form. Goethe is not the exponent of an established and accepted world view, but one who experiences and formulates the world view. At all times he imposes the projections of his most inward being onto the world in order to bring it back into himself as experience. The experience ranges from an enthusiastic, ecstatic, and exuberant perception of himself as an integrated, rejoicing, even hubristic part of the universe, to the anxiety of being a worthless, desolate, rejected, and isolated individuation, dejected unto death. His work is thus a reflection of his own inner way, with its encounters, experiences, and occasions. The encounters are often women, the experiences are a life to be communicated to others as their experiences and the occasions are the motivations of his work as a result of Anschauung, intuitive contemplation. The way presents itself as a graded transformation from turbulence and spontaneous involvement, to mature acceptance, before becoming aloof distance, disappointed resignation and stoic renunciation. In his late phase he was to speak of this process as Selige Sehnsucht, a Blissful Longing, of which the essence was continuous Dying and Becoming. For Goethe the search was for

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reintegration in the primal oneness of all things, and that was to be found in love. In dealing with this topic I am going to concentrate on Goethe’s poetry. It has the advantage of compressing his emotions into a most condensed lyrical form. It has the disadvantage that the unique quality of Goethe’s poetic language orders connections into the tightest linguistic structures and is therefore very difficult to translate and only with unavoidable loss. In his autobiography Goethe states that what has become known of his work are fragments of a great confession. On the one hand, the focus on the lyrical first person allows the reader to become the lyrical participant in whom the emotional highs and lows can be reexperienced. Goethe did see that to be his function when in his Tasso and again on a later occasion he stated Und wenn der Mensch in seiner Qual verstummt, Gab mir ein Gott zu sagen wie ich leide.

Or, in my translation, And when mankind succumbs in silence to its pain, A god gave me the words to tell my sorrow.

On the other hand, in this postmodern period of deconstructionist criticism such lyrics are perhaps not fashionable, though they do speak to the personal condition and I have no fear that they will survive. By temperament Goethe was an unrestrained lover. Yet in almost all of his work the reality of his passions must be deduced from the rhythm of his words or from between the lines, for he banished them from his literary imagination. However, in his love lyrics they always function as the secret source of his motivation and it is curious that he would wish to excise that which brought the works into being in the first place. The answer may lie in his attempt to turn life into art, experience into poetry. Goethe was completely committed to life, and as a challenge to fate, even to its suicidal extent. At the same

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time he was wholly dedicated to love and unable to yield even when life demanded renunciation from him. As a Werther-type he can conceive only of death as a way out. Very competent and assertive in life, in love he does not have the decisiveness to renounce or to compromise and to accept less. In the total love for and of a woman he believes to have found the union which will appease his inner turmoil and reintegrate him with the peaceful totality and harmonious one-ness of all things. It is apparent why renunciation is out of the question, because, as Faust says, What have I, If I have not all? As long as renunciation is unacceptable, like his Werther, he tries to find a way between the “either-or,” as the only compromise open to him. Repeatedly in his love he is capable of passion-motivated action to support and enhance this love, but is unfree to decide actively to destroy it in himself and in the other. Years later Goethe would say that he who wants to live must renounce, but that he who renounces must behave destructively towards what he loves. That insight came after much pain to himself, to others, and with great pangs of guilt. He resolved the dilemma repeatedly by taking flight. Goethe’s earliest preserved poems date to his childhood, when he was 7 and 8 years old. These are poems for certain occasions—to the New Year, to the parents and grandparents. There is also a curious commissioned poem, 5 pages long, entitled Poetic Thoughts on Jesus Christ’s Descent into Hell, written in 1764 or 65, just prior to his departure to Leipzig, to attend university there between 1765 and 68. He was to become a lawyer. At the time Leipzig was something like the German cultural capital, a slightly decadent city of intellectuals, a center of literature, music, and the theater. They called it Klein Paris, where the gallant style of the Rococo dominated taste and where young Goethe could taste life to the fullest. He could not complete his studies. Totally exhausted and ill he had to return home to Frankfurt. The recovery took nearly two years. From his Leipzig period two plays, as well as three sets of poems and songs are extant. He burned the rest. Among the poetry there was a set of 19 poems with the title An Annette. The young lady was one

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Anna Katharina Schönkopf—pretty, cheerful, pleasant, and loving, who “for a while merited being set up in the shrine of the heart as a little saint in order to dedicate that veneration to her which often is more pleasure to give than to receive.” From these poems we can deduce little of the true emotional and physical attractions between them, let alone any of the torments of love, for the poems are composed in the frivolous, playful, anacreontic style of the dallying, gallant Rococo and following the formal conventions of the day. He had actually ruined the relationship by playing insincere and moody games until she couldn’t stand it any more. Sensual desire, actual closeness, or even love are hidden behind formula names and stock situations. Such poetry has the advantage that it can be used on more than one occasion with more than one lady. The aim of the poem is seldom the exposure of the heart, but a clever witticism at the end. For instance (and freely translated), I just pursued a pretty maid And easily I held her tight. She said, “Let go of me, Or I will scream with fright.” “I’ll kill,” I cried with spite, “whoever dares disturb us.” “Be still” she whispered, “dearest, still, Someone nearby might hear us.”

Although he is not yet ready to experiment with the expression of his feelings, already in these early poems Goethe betrays the future master of thought and efficient use of language, as even this little poem proceeds briskly to the erotically humorous point which rests in the discrepancy of the girl’s two statements. At the end of March 1770 Goethe arrived in Strasbourg to conclude his study of law. That October he met Friederike Brion, the charming and lovely daughter of the vicar of Sesenheim, who awakened Goethe’s ability to love deeply, something which was to create for him many deep crises for the rest of his life. It was mutual

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love at first sight when he compared her entrance into the room to the rising of a brilliant star. In Friederike he found the emotional partner with whom he could share the drives, feelings, and inner tensions of his Storm and Stress and with whom he could form a deep emotional bond. The spontaneous expression of feelings found youthful liberation in poetry of then unknown artistic vitality and enthusiastic rhythms. Sentiments, words, and forms became one in exuberant, euphoric poems that needed no revisions. Two poems stand out, both written in the Spring of 1771: the emotionally spontaneous outbursts Maifest and the more narrative Willkommen und Abschied. Both poems are poetic accounts of real events—the first follows a day when he had danced with Friederike from 2 till midnight; the second describes a spontaneous ride to see her. The May Song is an exclamatory breathless celebration of life and love in which the poet feels overwhelmed as he finds himself to be one with and within the active totality of all creatures and things in the world. Love is the catalytic principle which fills him with rapture, as by means of detailed observation he registers the same elation in all things. Here the inner principles are also the outer ones that thrust and burst all around, reducing all participants to a state of ecstatic stammer, as though seized by a divine madness, and exuberant and sobbing utterance, where being and feeling are one, as all-embracing perceptions of earth, sun, elation, and joy come to be focused on the loved girl and then break out in a lyrical sigh to love, which like the rays of the rising sun beautify nature by gilding the morning clouds, the tips of the mountains, casting a blessing on the fields bathed in dew, enveloping the whole world in the fragrance of blossoms. All of this compressed into one single exalting explanation, creating words where previously there were none. His vast encompassing sweep focuses on the girl he loves with another set of exclamations that are at the same time questions— Oh dearest, dearest, How I love you!

44 Schutz: Goethe and Daimonic Love How sparkling your eyes, How you must love me too!

And he explains the fundamental nature of his love as the basic force of life for the lark, for instance, which seems to be disembodied being and nothing but audible song in invisible air, or as vitalizing as the morning dew—seen here as a heavenly fragrance—is to the morning flowers. And he sees her to be his inspiration who gives him youth, joy, and courage to create new songs and new dances. Throughout his declaration of love the poet has returned to the first person, the “I” in the duality. The poem ends with a wish for her happiness in her love for him, a case of ironic foreshadowing. As described earlier, the poem begins in the breadth of nature and gradually reaches the focal point within the speaker. It is quite clear that the poet projects his own state of elation onto the world from where it is reflected to resonate within himself. Goethe once said that the purpose of all of his writing was the re-creation of the world round about him through his inner world. The second stanza begins with a little word which was to take Sigmund Freud a long way: es = id. This “es” in German is a word filled with mystery, for it identifies that unknown inner principle, that element within which resides the mysterious causality in living things. Here it introduces that intriguing force in nature which drives blossoms to appear on twigs, and the thousands of voices of nature to our ears and feelings of joy and bliss out of our breast. In a later poem (1817) entitled Urworte—Orphisch (Primal Words—Orphic) he places this drive under cosmic law, subject to which the individual cannot do but what is his personal prescription—an echo of Leibnitz’s Monadology. The point here though is that Goethe calls it Daimon; hence the title of this paper. In that same poem Goethe also deals with Eros and its duality as frivolous Cupid and as pain-laden elation. According to Plato Eros is a Daimon that has the power to take over the whole person. It is the urge to affirm, perpetuate, and increase the self. That is the case in the poem Willkommen und Abschied (Welcome and Farewell). The poem rushes forward with a

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sudden outbreak of impetuosity that is instantly translated into the rhythm of the galloping horse’s hoofs as the need expressed in the heartbeat is registered as a need for action—quickly to horse. It was done almost before the thought had been completed. It is important to note that for Goethe the horse is a symbol of the demonic, which in this poetic moment carries the rider into the mysteriously threatening darkness in which things and sounds are felt to encroach upon the solitary traveler. However, Daimon-Eros counteract from within the ominous surroundings with a “nevertheless.” The fire in his veins and the glow in his heart drive back any anxious, purposenegating inclinations. Here the Daimonic is the expression of the innermost generative processes within the individual which focuses his powers and sensitivities into a triumphant self-assertion. When he meets her the poem undergoes a complete change of mood. The galloping iambic tetrameter is interrupted by a dactyl, a little waltz, to be followed by stabilizing trochees as the effect of her nearness allows him to experience a gentle joy, loving glances, tenderness, but also the mutual sorrows of departure. Nevertheless, what a joy it is to be loved and what a joy it is to love. The poem concentrates on the essentials, those most strongly felt—Daimonic drive generated by the exuberant feeling of love and the temporary satisfaction of that love in the specific case at the same time opening the individual up to love in general. The sequential logic of the last two lines would suggest that the fortune of being loved is superseded by the ability to love. Goethe’s love in these instances comes from the heart, is sincere fulfillment, one of deep feelings that solicit spontaneous, impulsive exclamations and, by our conventional standards, irrational actionre-action responses. Love is no longer play. Friederike lit the world up for him in living colors as if with a wand and it had an effect on his poetry. Rather than writing fictitious monologues for an abstract audience, he needed a loving being, equal and complementary to himself as a woman, so that his experiences could become “sayable.” She was his real audience, a being with whom a co-responsive understanding of hearts was possible. The

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poems written for her were parts of letters to her, hence of the most personal sort. From the summer of 1771 comes one of his best known poems, Heidenröslein, often put to music either as “Lied” or as “folksong,” a triptych describing an archetypal drama, the boy-girl encounter, in which both sustain pain. In this poem Goethe has transformed his and Friederike’s situation from the personal to the objectively universal. The “es” of earlier versions is suppressed here at the opening of the first line, however, its presence is apparent throughout the poem. A curious boy sees a freshly opened and beautiful wild rose and is drawn to it immediately to look at it more closely. Quite evidently the rose is a feminine symbol. Not satisfied merely to look he wants to possess and that urge introduces the rose’s tragedy. Goethe reduces the language to an economic minimum as we become wit nesses to a violation, a defloration in fact, all because Daimonic Eros decides to be the mischiefmaker. His “I’ll break you” is answered by her “I’ll prick you so that you will remember me always and I will not endure it.” The impetuous youth does not heed the warning and breaks the rose which makes true its promise to resist. Here the German becomes ambiguous, for the “ihm” can refer to “him” as well as to “it” but is usually taken to refer to the plaint of the rose, making the outcome very uneven. However, an earlier version is more callous and lets the boy forget the moment of sharp pain in the enjoyment of his pleasure. This version makes it clear that the “ihm” is “him,” revealing the more mature Goethe looking upon this situation, and on his own behind it, as one in which there is pain for both. The experience had become an idea and the idea a symbolic image. Goethe left Friederike that summer. Both were marked by the experience. For Goethe it provided the basis for the recurring theme of fateful guilt, so important in his work. Goethe wrote a counterpiece to this poem, called Das Veilchen (The Violet), where the violet is male and in love with a young shepherdess who strides across the meadow. But rather than being picked by her and pressed

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against her breast for even just a moment, the girl doesn’t even notice the violet and tramples it. It rejoices as it dies, for it was allowed to find death through her and at her feet. Though this little poem suggests self-critical and ironic distance, it also suggests a degree of expiation of his guilt. There follows a number of Sturm und Drang poems reflecting Goethe’s working out of his poetic role and position. These poems may be educative, in that in cathartic fashion they draw out his inner reality and thus enable him to discover with greater clarity the reality of the outer world as well. German allows an association between “wirken” (to effect) and “Wirklichkeit” (reality), thereby linking the perception of the world with an active, effecting involvement in it. In Goethe’s context the recognition of the task and the symbols involved paints to the solution, as by means of a process of elimination he works out an accepting of acceptance which then promotes his integration through the cathartic relationship with symbols and myths. In Wanderers Sturmlied (Wanderer’s Storm Song) of 1772, the wanderer through a mytho-poetic world is driven by feelings of strength and the force of genius and rises to elation only to descend into dejection as he counters chilling adversities with the radiating glow from within in a sifting process that resembles a stream of consciousness approach toward a sense of poetic identity. Goethe tried to deal with the problem of the towering personality in a number of plays about Caesar, Egmont, Faust, Mohammed, and Prometheus. Faust, Egmont, and some others came into being but the Mohammed and Prometheus plays remained fragments. The Mohammed play was intended as a rejection of Voltaire’s play in which Mohammed was depicted as a fraud. In Goethe’s play the present poem Mahomets Gesang, translated as “A Song to Mahomet,” was originally to be a sequence of alternating statements spoken by Ali and Fatema. The poem was to be the first of Goethe’s water poems. It uses the metaphor of the river to describe the emergence of the great individual, who begins in the clouds, in the company of benevolent spirits, as rain to form a rivulet among the

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crags in the mountains from where he steps into the plain with the confidence of the leader and incorporates other brotherly streams into his course, bestowing life’s bounties onto the valleys. Immune to temptations and overcoming hindrances the river strives into the plain. Other rivers cheer him and join and recognize the leader in the brother and beg to be taken along to merge also with the paternal ocean that awaits them with open arms for otherwise they will not reach their goal. And the lordly stream calls to them “Kommt ihr alle!,” in German a clear allusion to Matthew 11.28, Christ’s invitational words “Kommet her alle . . . ” (Come unto me, all ye that labor . . . ) and the swelling stream creates life, commerce, and prosperity for cities and whole landscapes along its way until it is reunited with its eternal source, in the bosom of the paternal ocean. The obvious feature of the poem is the cyclical nature of water. More important is that this poem also points to the developing theme of the individual’s emanation out of the divine as a “Verselbstung.” This is a concentration of the self within the self which is a characteristic of the Daimonic, self-directed, determined, and charismatic leader who actively follows his sense of predetermination and especially of the unproblematic greatness of a teacher-prophet, before it becomes a reintegration with the divine through “Entselbstigung.” This is a deconcentration away from the self by a brotherly integration of and augmentation through other selves, until the interaction with the world facilitates the loss of the self in a merging embrace, in the reintegration in the divine absolute. Repeatedly Goethe returns to water symbolism and metaphors as allegories for human nature and the human soul. While the poem Wanderers Sturmlied deals with the process of self-cognition and with a subjective view of genius, Mahomets Gesang provides an objective view of genius. Both deal with the unfolding of the ego through interaction: the first through the Daimonic preoccupation with the self, the second with the preoccupation with an identity whose purpose extends far beyond the self. However, just as the microcosm is an analogy of the

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macrocosm, so the finite houses the infinite, while the infinite resides within the finite, directing it toward the great totality. In that sense self-cognition leads to the cognition of the divine. The finite, which can appear as nature or love, then takes on the character of a symbol. Three additional poems can be used to attempt to clarify this process: An Schwager Kronos (1774), Prometheus (1773) and Ganymed (1774). By means of free syntax, free rhythms and free verse sounds, feelings, expressions of exuberance and ecstasy contribute to the overall effect of rebelliousness, linking the first two poems to Wanderers Sturmlied, the Ganymed to the reconciling Mahomets Gesang. When taken together the five poems reflect the stormy, pulsating life of the emerging Sturm und Drang personality on its path from rebellious search to reconciled antagonisms and reintegrating syntheses. In An Schwager Kronos (To the Coachman Kronos) Goethe returns to the theme of the wanderer, this time as the passive passenger in a horse-drawn coach being driven at breakneck speed through life into the Underworld. In 1774 Goethe had just become Germany’s most celebrated author with the success of his play Goetz von Berlichingen and the epistolary novel Die Leiden des Jungen Werther and the self-esteem over these triumphs (the great Klopstock had just visited him and Goethe had accompanied him on his return journey) stimulates the poetic transcription of a journey into a Daimonic account of a bumpy, speedy, at times dizzying trip over rocks and roots in a reckless downhill rush into life—“Rasch ins Leben hinein.” Though the next ascent is laborious, it is motivated by striving and hope and is rewarded by a sweeping view into life, where across the mountain tops the traveler gains intuitive knowledge of the Eternal Spirit’s eternal existence. Off to the side there is a refreshing but transitory diversion—a frothing drink offered by a girl—“For me too, girl, this foaming drink and your friendly health-restoring glance.” But then, restored, the passenger rushes downhill again driven on by his Daimon, past the ages of man, facing the last rays of the setting sun, blinded, intoxicated, and

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staggering. The coach charges into the dark gates of Hell. “Sound your horn, postillion, that the Underworld may take notice of the arrival of a prince and that the mighty down there may rise from their seats.” It probably doesn’t need stressing that for the young, dynamic, and impertinent personality the interlude with love is just a brief diversion which must not delay or halt the bursting surge through life, till he too takes his place among the immortals. The pride of this Daimonic individuality is inordinate. It is an arrogant affront to the gods and carries within it a predisposition to its own destruction. Here too there is the demonic presence of the horses and their dynamic and compelling influence on the coercive forces of life which rise from the depth of his being and care little for whatever the resident immortals may have accomplished. He sets a new tone. In his dynamic enthusiasm he may find himself isolated among his fellows and alone, were it not that in his world he can’t really be alone but rather “all one” with his world. In the poem Prometheus Goethe resorts to a very popular figure in the development of the idea of genius in the eighteenth century. Shaftesbury, for instance, speaks of the poet “as a second creator, a true Prometheus.” In the context of this paper the poem represents the height of “Verselbstung,” the mythical exaggeration of the subjective view of genius. Goethe had originally conceived of the subject as a play which was intended to represent the creative principle heightened into the mythical figure of Prometheus. The poem came about parallel to the play as Prometheus’s monologue. Goethe thought it was to open an intended Act III. In this monologue Goethe presents the peak of Prometheus’s rebellious antagonism to Zeus, who has become an empty and impotent divinity. To Prometheus all the gods have lost their creative powers and depend for their survival on the foolish, pious hopes of children and fools. As a confused child Prometheus had mistakenly turned his eyes beyond the sun, as if there were an ear there to hear his plaint or a heart like his to have pity on his tormenting needs. In a crescendo of accusing questions he demonstrates to the god his early

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misconceptions when he thanked Zeus erroneously for benevolent intervention on his behalf, when actually it had been his own heart, aglow with fervor, which had accomplished everything. “I honor you? What for?” The demonstrated indifference of the gods can only be met with spiteful disrespect, Daimonic self-reliance, and an egocentric belief in his own genius. All-powerful time and eternal fate, to which even the gods are subject, have forged Prometheus into the being which he sees himself to be. Self-awareness defines the personality. “Did you think I should hate life, or withdraw into the deserts, just because not all my budding boyish dreams came into bloom?” These rhetorical questions are answered with an unstated, yet loudly defiant “No!” Instead he turned to his creative abilities to form mankind in his own image, a race that would resemble him, i.e., a Promethean race enlivened through the breath of his spirit and capable of suffering, of tears, of pleasure and of joy, and to be disrespectful of Zeus as he is. By means of his creations he defines himself. Note that the last word is “ich.” While the traveler in the coach only wanted to shock the Immortals in the Underworld out of their complacency through his arrival, the Promethean attitude assails the empty and impotent authority and expects to replace it with dynamic vitality and emotional capability. On the one hand Prometheus is the active individual who has to clear for himself the open space into which to place himself and his work, free of traditional authority and of those who support it uncritically. On the other hand the Promethean personality strives for that egocentric, or better, Monadic isolation which is the distinguishing characteristic of the individual personality, in whom self-aware existence involves the recognition of the self and of others as subjects and not of objects. It is in this sense that Prometheus is a heightened wanderer, whether as river or as passenger, on the path to the delimitation of his individuation. At the same time it is a falling back into the most primal principles of human nature.

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I indicated above that Mahomets Gesang anticipated the poem Ganymed of 1774. The yearning expressed by the waters to merge with the paternal ocean is the urge of the concentrated self for dissolution in the greater totality, i.e., “Verselbstung” into “Entselbstigung.” It fits into that body of thought dealing with the “unio mystica,” the mystical union, in which individuation seeks reintegration into an all-embracing divine unity. In Goethe’s own time several currents supported the ecstatic imagination: the underlying effect of the medieval mystics, the mysticism of the Baroque period, Leibnitz’s Monadology and the monad’s striving for ultimate union with the “Actus Purus”—God, Protestant mysticism, especially Pietism, Pantheism, Shaftesbury’s Enthusiasm, and especially the newly discovered Neo-Platonism. The figure suggested in the title Ganymed intends to be no more than an allegorical positioning in Classical Mythology: Ganymede was lifted by Zeus’s eagle onto Mt. Olympus. For Goethe this poem is an even more ecstatic extension of the earlier Maifest. While in that poem the encounter with radiant nature led to love’s intensifying embodiment within the self—“Verselbstung,” in Ganymed we witness an ex-stasis, an enraptured disembodiment in which being seeks a return to the source of life, the union with the highest being, in the context of a love relationship in a fervent religious mode. This poem begins as a nature poem which is at the same time a love poem and in which the “ich” yearns to become one with “du,” the personification of spring, in itself an anthropomorphic cipher for nature and which is identified as the lover. The “ich’s” perception of the “du” as lover is a seductively erotic exclamation followed by the emotional “ich” elaborating in a sultry tone on the “Wie”—“how with a thousandfold loving bliss, (you) infinite beauty strain to my heart with the holy feeling of your inner warmth.” That this is a vexing endeavor is expressed in the following frustrated plea, “How much I would like to take you in this arm!” The following lines lament in Werther fashion the hindrance encountered in the NeoPlatonic urge to surrender the human individuality within a

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restorative embrace of and by nature. The lament is contained in the “Ach.” “Against your bosom I lie and thirst while your flowers and grasses strain toward my heart.” It is important to note that in both stanzas the urge is perceived to originate from without and to be aiming into the “ich.” This “ich” takes on the form of the nightingale in a sort of transformation of being and it is the nightingale calling from the misty vale that describes how the gentle morning breeze stills the parching thirst of its breast. And the “ich” hears the inaudible voice of the god-nature calling it to come and it responds “Ich komme! Ich komme!” But again there is the dejected “Ach”— for the direction is not known, “Wohin?” Ach, wohin?” There is upward striving, but there is downward movement of the clouds as they bow to longing love, to the “ich.” And the “ich” pleads for upward movement, embracing while being embraced. “Upward, on your bosom, all-loving father.” The mystical relationship climaxes in the “Embracing, embraced” and seems to undergo wish fulfillment in the ascent and in the fusion on the father’s breast. Goethe describes here the mystical yearning, meeting, and union of two entities without the loss of their distinction in an ascending and descending, outgoing and returning pulsation, an active embracing and passive embrace, rest in movement and movement in rest, in which both entities are perceived as subjects and remain subjects. Throughout the poem the longing love of Goethe’s Ganymede and Goethe’s Zeus remains a background implication while in the foreground there is the soul’s ecstatic experience of the nearness of the divinity culminating in possible real, but probably projected, anticipated wish fulfillment. In concluding this section I should mention that the enthusiasm expressed in Ganymed has much more to do with the essence of Storm and Stress than does the hubristic titanism of Prometheus. The poems reflecting the next two love relationships are not as exuberantly cheerful as the poems inspired by Friederike. One provides the background for Werther. The other with Lili Schönemann begins in confusion and ends in pain, leaving only ten

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pages of mainly short poetry. He is enthralled by the magic of a lovely female form and they become engaged. The poems, however, don’t attain any significant height of emotion. Light, airy, and scented, they seem to be marked with the emotional scar left by the Friederike experience. Escape is a frequent theme in them. Though Lili is a beautiful example of nature and he sees “Neue Liebe, neues Leben,” she is tied to the somewhat superficial social world of the salon, a strange world for him—in one poem, Lilis Park, Goethe sees himself as the tame pet bear in her menagerie—and tensions lead to separation. In November 1775 the 26-year-old Goethe arrived in Weimar. He had accepted the invitation of the Duke of Sachsen-Weimar, a petty principality in the center of Germany. He was to stay there for the rest of his life, first as companion to the teenaged duke, then as his counselor and Lord High Everything Else. For a ten-year period a lady of the court, Charlotte von Stein, occupied the central place in Goethe’s emotions. Following his Werther-experience Goethe needed the presence of a being who could justify a life with love, one which was decisive without being hard, who was constant and who could renounce, yet also recognize, the hated realities without losing her charm and grace. Goethe seems to have sought and found in Charlotte a woman quietly occupying a middle ground. She was not the idealistic enthusiast but the charmingly graceful realist. In her he encountered both challenge and fulfillment, a woman who could balance in measured harmony the needs of the dynamic, freedomseeking personality and the restrictive conventions of a formal courtly society. She was seven years older and seven pregnancies had left her prematurely aged and physically frail. Goethe had seen her silhouette earlier and had wondered how the world would be reflected in her soul, but deduced that she saw the world as it was, yet through the medium of love. Throughout their relationship of ten years she kept him at a distance, insisting on the social proprieties of a small Protestant court. Even though she loved closeness, she taught him restraint and he tried to accept that the

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spiritual act of loving was of the greater human value. It seems that at this stage in Goethe’s life it had to be a woman who could never be completely real to him and she did remain denied to him. She embodied the ideal unification of dignity and gracefulness, of natural and spiritual life, the gentle correspondence of the emotions and of social ethics. Goethe felt urgently drawn to her, he burdened her with his difficulties and his torments and received sustenance, measure, understanding, and clarification from her. His poems to her were parts of his letters, private expressions which he never considered to be poetry, never copied, and finally forgot. Yet they are his most tender as they gradually reflect her influence, her esthetics, ethics and her love. Without knowing the biographical details the reader of the poetry can notice Goethe’s transformation and share great sensitivity of perception, delicateness of expression, elegance of form, mutual understanding, and especially a knowing spirituality finely tuned to reach the “du” in her. The poems make us witnesses to a unique love, distinct by its distance, intimacy, spirituality, and deeply felt fear of renunciation, loss, and ultimate resignation. The harmony of her reconciled personality healed him of his exuberant urges and his restless love and guided him to attain that wisdom which characterizes his work. Under her gentle direction he underwent a change and his self-centeredness yielded to feelings that would attempt to bring gratification to a greater number. The conflict between his love for her and the ethical dictates against his love for her she elevated into the abstract realm. By making her oldest son his special protégé, he was assured acceptable and unhindered admission into her presence, but in the long term such an abstract love was not to his liking. Since she insisted that his relation with her excluded any other, it had to come to an end. For her the end was very distressing. The first poem to her, and the only one with which I will deal here, usually goes by its opening line: “Why did you (fate) bestow on us these penetrating insights—to see our future so intuitively, not to rely blissfully on our love, on our happiness? Why then, fate, did you

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furnish us with the feelings to see into our hearts? Just to see our true relationship within all our unfamiliar turmoil? Thousands who barely know their own hearts and drift about aimlessly and hopelessly in unforeseen pain rejoice over unexpected joys, while to us loving unfortunates mutual joy is denied. It is for us to love one another without understanding, to see in the other what he never was, to pursue eagerly happy reveries and to waver even when the dangers are those in dreams. Empty dreams and suitable intentions may bring happiness to some. For us every meeting, every glance unfortunately only serves to reinforce our dreams as dreams and our premonitions. What has fate in store for us? How did it bind us so precisely?” And Goethe introduces an element here to which he gave serious consideration—that in earlier lives she had been his sister or his wife. From here on he writes in the past tense as he summarizes their earlier life together. However, what he describes to be past is at the same time a prophetic projection of their relationship to come. In the poem she is said to have known every trait of his being, the vibration of every nerve, to have read at a glance him who is so inscrutable, to have gently cooled the fervor in his blood, to have given direction to his errant course, and, by allowing him to repose in her angelic arms, to have restored his shattered breast, to have kept him in a tender bond and made time disappear. Lying thankfully at her feet no happiness resembled such bliss. He felt his heart strain against hers, regained in her presence, in her eyes, his sense of worth, just as his senses regained their clarity and she calmed his rushing blood. Of such a past a vague memory hovers about his uncertain heart as he feels within a dormant truth, painfully reawakened in this situation. Feeling seemingly half alive, the brightest day appears as dusk. But with a sudden change of rhythm he snaps out of the mood and proclaims cheerfully that even though fate may torment us, it cannot change us. The poem is a tender reminiscent retrospective of most highly wished and unbearable, dreaded things to come in their lives. With

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sensitive awareness he recounts that state of his being, retraces a burdened unconsciousness, demonstrates the almost blissful mystical meeting of two beings and the penetrating stabilizing effect of that meeting upon his hyperactive personality. He appreciates that his Daimonism, which he had experienced only as a blind shove, must be reined in and guided but not constrained or falsified. However, even though a transformation is in progress, the Daimonic in him reasserts itself in the last line, rejoicing in the realization that circumstances cannot affect a fundamental change in us. It is again the idea expressed in the stanza “Daimon” of 1817 referred to above: “Following the law, in accordance with which you stepped forth. You must be thus. You cannot flee from yourself . . . And neither time nor force can fragment a minted form as it evolves.” Of course, what the mature Goethe expresses so wisely, some forty years later, is still a persistent, darkly felt urge in 1776. It contributed to his sudden escape to Italy in 1786. When the life-asserting side in him gained a new strength he once again rushed out into life, to Italy, there to experience physical enjoyment. With the separation from Charlotte von Stein certain valuable traits in him also withered. He saw no resolution in the relationship, no “rescue” in any form. Unfortunately, any decision had to destroy what was vital and essential to the relationship. This love had developed into a situation needing a decision, which indicates that it was already badly injured within. This is illustrated in an episode when Goethe wrote to Charlotte from Italy asking her to rewrite his letters to her and to replace the intimate “Du” with a formal “Sie” and omitting the confessions pertaining to her specifically, leaving only what he could edit into “Literature.” The woman who for a decade had been the driving force, the focus of his longing, was asked to assume the function of censor. She refused. In the end she asked him to return her letters to him and burned everything. The other poems of this period reflect Goethe’s endeavor to gain mastery over his life. Though the subject matter is generally didactic,

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Goethe is his own pupil. The poetry continues to be subjective so that the reader can assume the role of the subject throughout. Rather than treating the earlier theme of monadic isolation, Goethe now speaks of man’s limitations, self-mastery, acceptance, directed action, balance and generally projects the integral nobility of man in a reconciling vision of universal harmony. In internalized dialogues he admonishes himself to know himself and to live in peace with the world, to nurture his gifts, not to squander his insights but to reveal his vision of the truth draped in the veil of poetry. Upon his return from Italy in 1788 he began a relationship with a young woman, Christiane Vulpius. She was socially not acceptable, yet Goethe was captivated by her and would not part from her despite loud criticism, and this brought about the final rupture with Charlotte von Stein. Christiane was a robust type, of the people and very different from Charlotte. Christiane now brought order into his domestic life, made a home for him and became the mother of his children. What scandalized Weimar society even more was that Goethe and Christiane lived in open marriage. Goethe was actually against marriage. To summarize his position briefly: nature obeys laws which are based on inexorable correspondences between the movement of molecules. Thus it is with human hearts. Culture imposes an elaborate superstructure to subordinate nature to its demands. Marriage as wedlock is against nature. It was the French victory at Jena over the Prussians in 1806 which persuaded him to marry Christiane. She had thrown herself between him and marauding French soldiers when they intruded into their house. In 1813, 25 years after first meeting her, he sent her a poem in a letter as a mutual reminiscence. Since he usually corresponded with her about household matters, it was all the more noteworthy that he included a poem in this letter to her. The sincerity of the poem Gefunden is convincing in its simple naïveté. It is a wise counterpiece to the earlier impetuous Heidenröslein. Gefunden, the title itself is a lyrical “Eureka,” reverses the earlier motif. Here the poet uses the first person as he translates lyrically his meeting with

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her. Unintentionally, the wanderer in the forest sees a bright little flower growing in the shadows. At first he wants to break it, but it asks whether it was merely intended to wilt. The question affects the wanderer and he transplants it with all its roots into his garden, there to continue to grow and bloom. The charming simplicity of the original has nothing of the earlier boisterous, pain-inducing insensitive intensity. Maturity, after only a little admonition, causes him to select the long-term enjoyment over the short-term pleasure. The gentle lesson to be learned is that the tenderness with which one treats one’s love will make it blossom again and again. The hidden story in this poem is that Goethe took Christiane and her aunt—the roots in the poem—into his house. Considering the social climate of the day, Christiane could not participate in his public or social life. Whether used for his pleasure and then rejected, or being totally cut off from any social contact, she would have withered. Instead he transplanted her with her environment. They lived happily till her death in 1816. Goethe was to live till 1832. Several loves were yet to animate him. Two distinct types of women played a role in his life and work. Among his characters strong, firm, clear, and decisive companions who are equal to their men define one of his conceptions of woman. His mother may have provided their model. Christiane belonged to this group. In real life and in some of his characters he is evidently attracted to the girl-woman, the gentle creation whose nature is determined by a spiritual quality and who is receptive of and responsive to a more ethereal love that allows the poet to translate ever-new drives and desires into the longing for and fulfillment in ideal forms. He allows that this pursuit could be self-destructive, but it is the innate determination to risk the “Dying and Becoming” which validates existence. The hazard, it seems, lies in the willingness to discover, to be surprised by one’s daimon, to fall in love, and in the willingness to undergo transformation, in the preparedness to be vulnerable and to risk being manipulated, regardless of the emotional cost. In his book Exuberance, Paul Kurtz

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indicates that Promethean man has audacity, is intrepid, insolent, and impudent, that the Promethean virtues are central to the humanist frame, which is an activist frame. This activist frame is characterized by the willingness to take destiny in one’s own hands, to tempt fate and to turn it about to suit oneself. Goethe’s poetry touches on these themes, though his novels and plays develop these themes much more fully, especially the theme of salvation through action—Faust. In this paper I have used the term “Daimonic” to elaborate kaleidoscopically Goethe’s treatment of the topic of “Love.” I could have used the terms “Protean” or “Promethean” equally well. In closing I would like to return to the poem Urworte-Orphisch. In it the stanza entitled Eros is placed centrally in the poem. For Goethe Eros swoops down from heaven and envelops heart and mind, draws near and withdraws as elation alternates with pain. Many a heart is dissipated in common concerns—Goethe himself interprets this to mean duty which develops into thousands of other lesser ones, sanctioned by official ceremonies and safeguarding contracts—yet the noblest of hearts will rise above these and devote itself to the pursuit of the one—Love. As long as Goethe lived he never ceased being in love and falling in love, as though he sought what would have been remarkable and even paradoxical, that transitory love become a lasting yet fulfilled longing. It is the expression of very advanced age that makes the intensity of his late love lyrics rather tragic. With passion he transforms the perceived youth and beauty in the world around him into beautiful lyrics, while at the same time he half expects and half wishes death to be near, and out of that tension come cries of deep despair. Not all of the poetry of the old Goethe is only observational contemplation. Much is the veiled expression of deep feelings felt as though for the first time. Youthfully he relived the revitalizing, lifeasserting, and inspiring thrills, not so youthfully the ensuing crushing and life-negating renunciations. It seems as if again and again he sought and found in the women with whom he fell in love that

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fundamental reaffirming principle of love, of life, perhaps Das ewig Weibliche, the Eternal Feminine, which drives us on.

Part Two PRAGMATIC NATURALISM AND HUMANISM

Pragmatic Love John M. Novak

Pragmatism is often depicted as a no-frills, action-oriented philosophy developed in a young, wealthy, but unreflective country. As such it is seen to display power but not wisdom, energy but not depth. Evaluated from this perspective, pragmatism is at best shallow and at worst nihilistic, especially in terms of deep-seated issues of individual and social existence. This chapter takes exception to these portrayals and argues instead that pragmatism is essentially a penetrating and evolving philosophy of love centered in a deep and abiding commitment to connection and experience. After first responding to crass and paternalistic criticisms of pragmatism, this chapter next makes explicit some basic commitments of pragmatic love, and then shows how these commitments are articulated in the works of John Dewey and Paul Kurtz. Finally, some possibilities for extending pragmatic conversations and exploring new constellations of interests are suggested. Since love is more than mere words and pragmatism more than an academic approach to abstract issues, let’s turn first to some musical reactions to the thought of pragmatic love. Gulp! Pragmatic Love To some the notion of pragmatic love will sound pointedly foolish, and perhaps dangerous. Conjuring up definitional conjunctions of “efficient affection,” pragmatic love seems as absurd an oxymoron as “Friendly Fire.” Let’s call this oxymoronish reaction to pragmatic love the crass interpretation and follow its train of thought.

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According to this interpretation, love makes your heart sing and pragmatism is about purse strings. Thus conjoining pragmatism and love might give you a sequence such as this: “ . . .the best thing in life are free, but you can keep them for the birds and bees, ’cause I want money, that’s what I want . . . ”1

From this perspective, pragmatism concerns itself only with efficiently and greedily making it in the status quo and those adhering to this approach do not have the time or inclination for anything but crass materialism. This, in the realm of humans’ relating, leads only to the physical and the instrumental. There is no place for love, only self-centered attempts at satisfaction. This, quite naturally, leads to the following: “ . . .You must understand, though the touch of your hand makes my pulse react . . . What’s love got to do with it anyway?”2

Crass materialism leads to emptiness, to just going through the motions. Nothing really matters if we are merely self-serving problem-solvers competing only to make a buck in a painful world. Still the heart fights back against nihilism, but it may not be enough. “ . . .Please lock me away and don’t allow the day, here inside, where I hide with my loneliness. I don’t care what they say, I won’t stay in a world without love.”3

Personal and social retreat, escapism, are inevitable because we have a deep-seated need to live in connection. Escapism however, doesn’t bring love, only an angry or frightened resignation about what the future will bring. 1. From “Money,” recorded by the Beatles, Capitol Records, 1964. 2. From “What’s Love Got to Do with It?,” recorded by Tina Turner, Capitol Records, 1984. 3. From “A World Without Love,” recorded by Peter and Gordon, Capitol Records, 1964.

Promethean Love 67 “ . . . In the year 2525, if man is still alive, if woman can survive. They may find in the year 3535 . . .everything is in the pill you took today.”4

The one-dimensional pragmatic future is a nightmare. If we survive, we have lost touch with ourselves, each other, and the world. We become pragmatic captives in a world truly without love, purpose, or meaning. A second reaction to pragmatic love is a little more understanding, a little more sympathetic. According to this view, pragmatism is a philosophy that developed in another time and, so it seems, another place. There naïveté and optimism reigned. However, this time and place are gone (if they ever really existed), never to return. The world has changed and this philosophy of change did not go deep or far enough to supply the moorings we needed to remain whole in a dividing world. This paternalistic perspective might look upon pragmatic love as follows: “And they call it puppy love. They’ll never know how a young heart feels . . .”5

From this paternalistic perspective, pragmatic love, although well intentioned and filled with feelings, needs to be superseded in order to avoid the “VOID.” The consequence that naturally follows not maturely dealing with the depths of existence or the heights of reality might look like this: “ . . . I poured it on and I poured it out I tried to show you just how much I cared. I am tired of words and I am too hoarse to shout. You have been cold to me so long, I am crying icicles. And all I can do is keep telling you: I want you, I need you and

4. From “In The Year 2525,” recorded by Zager and Evans, RCA, 1969. 5. From “Puppy Love,” recorded by Paul Anka, ABC-Paramount, 1960.

68 Novak: Pragmatic Love there ain’t no way I am ever going to love you. And don’t be sad, because two out of three ain’t bad.”6

Good but naïve intentions lead ultimately to unfulfillment. Something is lacking for the pragmatists but through their philosophy of accommodation they have learned to live with this love gap. Sadly, they may even think this alienation from love is the normal condition. Thus, they have pragmatically adjusted to a lack of wholeness in their life. Please excuse the license to take these lyrics out of context to construct philosophical caricatures. However, the crass and paternalistic interpretations of pragmatism still abound. The crass interpretation of the union of pragmatism and love is obviously a misreading. Pragmatism, as a serious philosophy of love of experience, is of course strongly opposed to valueless materialism, using people, escapism, and a joyless future. A fundamental notion of pragmatism is to seek imaginative and concrete ways to construct lives filled with value; lives worth living. It is sad that effort still has to be used to fight this caricature made public by such notable philosophers as Bertrand Russell and Martin Heidegger and by such present writers as Alan Bloom and Richard Francis.7 Perhaps with the publication of so many new works on different aspects of pragmatism,8 critical conversation can at least begin at a less crass level. 6. From “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad,” recorded by Meat Loaf, Epic Records, 1977. 7. Bertrand Russell, “Pragmatism” (1909), in B. Russell, Philosophical Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966). Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). Richard P. Francis, “The Human Person in American Pragmatism” in D. Goicoechea, J. Luik, and T. Madigan, The Question of Humanism (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1990, pp. 235–43. 8. Some recent new books not mentioned later in this article include: Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn, Politics/Sense/Experience: A Pragmatic Inquiry in the

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The paternalistic view is also lives on. For example, John Miller, in his book The Holistic Curriculum,9 presents, in ascending value, three positions for viewing education: The Transmissive, The Transactional, and The Transformational. According to Miller, pragmatism is a part of the transactional model. Although this is an improvement over the transmissive model it does not go far enough into the depths of the inner person to affect holistic transformation. Two out of three might not be bad, according to Miller, but really we need the “whole” for true education and fulfillment to appear. One of the many difficulties with Miller’s paternalistic interpretation of pragmatism and the love it engenders is that it smugly locks pragmatism into a questionable box;10 it fails to address a key point that a major pragmatist, Dewey, began his career with a “Holistic” Neo-Hegelian transformational view but later developed a pragmatic transactional model because he considered pragmatism a much better vehicle for substantive change. To Dewey, Miller’s emphasis on the inner person would only be a partial “within” perspective. It is in the realm of the “between” that real appreciation and transformation take place. For Dewey, attempts at transformation that do not begin with real appreciations in concrete situations are ungrounded and fly away in eulogistic abstractions and moralistic wishes. True, deep, and abiding transformations are the result of the intelligent, creative, and persistent development of the goods of experience. The time has come to move beyond the crass and Promise of Democracy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991); Larry A. Hickman, John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990); Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Raymond D. Boisvert, Dewey’s Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1988); Thomas Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizon of Feeling (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987); Ralph W. Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey’s Conception of Philosophy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986). 9. John P. Miller, The Holistic Curriculum (Toronto: OISE Press, 1988). 10. Miller, pp.58–59.

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paternalistic views of pragmatic love and locate it within the “stuff” of life. Appropriating Pragmatic Love Robert Nozick, in his book The Examined Life11 makes the claim that one of the criteria for a loving relationship is not seeking to “trade up” for your love partner. By committing ourselves to grow with, in, and through a primary relationship, we are loving, and thus growing together, rather than coming apart. A “we,” an authentic loving relationship, is developed that enables us to appreciate each other in the present and move together in a caring way. Using Nozick’s “no trade clause” as a guide, it could be said that pragmatic love is a love of experience. This pragmatic love of experience does not seek to trade upward toward some absolute or metaphysical, holistic realm. To do so would be to denigrate and dilute the present and its aesthetic and realistic possibilities. Rather, those interested in promoting pragmatic love seek ways to appreciate experiences in the present and creatively extend them in the future. Pragmatists aim to savor and reflect upon present experiences and use these as the basis for future growth. The pragmatic love of growth comes, in part, from concrete transactions based on interests and desires that have been appreciated in the present and imaginatively projected, planned for, and enjoyed at a deeper level at a later time. This pragmatic love of growth is based on experience lovingly connected to education and democracy. For pragmatists, experience is our live-connection with life. It is a noncognitive connection that includes the total of interactions we are participating in. As such it is the source and goal of our lives; it affects what we have, what we attend to, and what we attempt to appreciate and better. Thus, particular and concrete experiences ground us and provide the basis for imaginative projects. To 11. Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).

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correctly understand the pragmatist’s participative notion of experience it is important to think of experience as not merely what happens to us but also as what we can do with what happens to us. Related to what we can do with experience is the commitment to seek within experience its own regulative standards. By not seeking to “trade up” and go outside of experience we grow with, in, and through our experiential commitments. As Kupfer12 points out, our evaluative experiential standards involve notions of what is good, deficient, or perverse. Good experiences, ones that have the excellences we find in a fulfilling life, grow through a commitment to education. Education is the process of getting smarter about important things. When experience becomes problematic, when there is a felt difficulty in a situation, we are free to respond in a thoughtful or thoughtless way. The former involves avoiding rigid or impulsive thinking and using the method of intelligent inquiry, experiment, and evaluation to better grasp felt difficulties located within specific situations.13 Getting smarter about important things enables us to make connections within experience and then imagine, try out, and evaluate new possibilities. As education becomes more deliberate, we thoughtfully increase the possibilities for experience. Democracy is the deliberate social extension of the thoughtful method of experience. For pragmatists, democracy is not merely a formal political arrangement but a way of rich, varied, and principled communicative living. In the process of communicating about matters of importance in our daily lives, we find ways to hold things in common, inquire, extend experiences, and form communities. The hope of democratic living is based on the notion that the potential exists, in and through the process of coming together, to authentically communicate so that 12. Joseph H. Kupfer, Experience as Art (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983). 13. The emphasis on education for thoughtfulness is developed more fully in Francis Schragg, Thinking in School and Society (Routledge: New York, 1988).

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people will be able to hold things in common and form communities of caring and self-correcting inquiry. In doing so, the hope here is that people will become smarter about important things, develop more fulfilling characters, and find more meanings, possibilities, and values in and through their communicative experiences. Communicative experiences thus provide the means for the development of personal integrity and creativity, deeper relationships of understanding, more articulated and defensible knowledge and value claims, more varied and integrated organizations, and better social ideals. This is quite a lot to expect from education, democracy, and communication, but my hope is that this will become clearer as we become more comfortable with the pragmatists’ loving stance toward experience. The Pragmatic Loving Stance Pragmatism possesses an honorable and diverse tradition made up primarily of philosophers and educators committed to experience, education, and democracy. Beginning with philosophers who started their careers in the nineteenth century such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead, carrying on to such educators from Columbia such as William Heard Kilpatrick, John Childs, and George Counts, continuing with such diverse contemporary philosophers as Richard Rorty, Richard Bernstein, Cornel West, and Paul Kurtz and elaborated by such current educators as Nel Noddings, Maxine Greene, and Donald Schon, pragmatists have been deeply involved in philosophical, educational, and social issues in the twentieth century. Certainly there are differences in this group—Kurtz is a secular humanist while West is of the prophetic Christian tradition; Rorty is a selfproclaimed bourgeois liberal who supports schools which aim for liberal socialization, while Counts was a social reconstructionist who dared the schools to create a new social order. Differences and intramural feuds not withstanding, allow me to present five prima

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facie principles of pragmatism that attempt to pinpoint this unique experiential and experimental approach to life. 1. The process is the product in the making. In looking at the completeness of an action, pragmatists find that rigidly separating means and ends leads to a distortion of both. How you go about doing something lives on in various ways in culminating experiences. Education abounds with countless numbers of “successful” students who learned to hate what they studied. Certainly, that is not the goal of education. 2. Rather than seeking THE GOOD, THE TRUE, or THE BEAUTIFUL, pragmatists are more humble and grounded and instead seek the better, the warranted, the enlivening. The pragmatic orientation attempts to build on what we have found to be of worth in our experiences rather than aspiring to find what has been called a “God’s-eye view.” We have to work with the materials and possibilities that surround us if we seek to improve life. For pragmatists, there is no getting around or beyond this. 3. Instead of asking “What’s THE ULTIMATE TRUTH?” pragmatists find it more helpful to ask “What’s the alternative?”14 The latter question invites inquiry while the former tends to terminate conversation. When we stop talking we limit the possibilities of social intelligence. Life goes on and we have to ask questions that move with it. 4. Knowing the limitations and dangers of questing for certainty, pragmatists instead seek good judgment. The quest for certainty tends to remove us from the contexts and changing realities we seek to understand. Good judgments tend to build from experience and provide a questioning and self-correcting perspective. 5. In practical situations the pragmatic emphasis may not be on making “THE” right decision but on making the decision right. The 14. This point comes directly from Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Ironists, according to Rorty, are to be differentiated from metaphysicians, those who seek an ultimate vocabulary.

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is no magical answer for many of life’s ill-structured, existential problems. There are many ways to view, inquire, and evaluate issues. Focusing on what we want to become as a person or group and using dramatic rehearsal to envisage creative possibilities enables us to actively construct a character we feel is worthy of our efforts. Commitment, refinement, and self-correcting inquiry are vital as we put into practice our choices for a fulfilling life. Let’s now look to the life of John Dewey as an instantiation of pragmatic love. Dewey’s Life of Love Recently, two excellent and extensive biographies of John Dewey have been published: John Dewey and American Democracy by Robert Westbrook and John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism by Steven Rockefeller.15 Let’s look at each of these briefly to see their portrayal of Dewey’s loving commitment to experience, education, and democracy. Let’s begin with Westbrook. John Dewey and American Democracy presents an evolving picture of John Dewey as the quintessential advocate of the ideal of participatory democracy. According to Westbrook, the heart of Dewey’s social theory and social activism is a commitment to democracy as a way of life for best enhancing individual character development and an ethical and evolving social order. Westbrook develops this theme as he works his way through four phases of Dewey’s life: (1) Advocate of the Social Gospel; (2) Progressive Democrat; (3) Seeker of the “Great Community”; and (4) Democratic Emeritus. What makes Westbrook’s biography especially satisfying is that he takes Dewey’s major texts on naturalistic metaphysics and aesthetics and shows how these complex philosophical topics are vitally connected with democracy as a social ideal. 15. Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991). Steven Rockefeller, John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

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Westbrook shows how Dewey’s Experience and Nature, his chief work on naturalistic metaphysics (that is how things in general hang together in general), really points to a view of the universe that is quite compatible, and perhaps even friendly, with a democratic way of life. Stressing Dewey’s contention that life is a conjunction of stable and precarious change, Westbrook shows why a metaphysics of events in process is a sensitive and intelligent perspective for dealing concretely with the cultivation of experiences worth having. Moving to the realm of aesthetics, Westbrook next shows how Dewey’s Art as Experience provides a thoughtful framework for constructing a life filled with unified and consummatory experiences. As Dewey says in this book, his approach “accepts life and experience in all its uncertainty, mystery, doubt, and half-knowledge and turns that experience upon itself to deepen and intensify its own qualities—to imagination and art.”16 It is clear that Westbrook’s Dewey is no mere instrumental adjuster to the status quo but an ethical and political participant whose vocation involves the development of a fundamentally connected way of savoring and extending the goods of individual and social existence. Turning now to Steven Rockefeller’s version of Dewey, we get a story of a life centered around a love of authentic unity, a devotion to unifying the ideal and the real, or as Dewey put it, idealizing the world. Rockefeller, a teacher of religion and philosophy at Middlebury College, provides a more religious interpretation of Dewey’s life. Using some sources that Dewey never intended for publication (his poems and private correspondence with Scudder Klyce), Rockefeller provides a more personal and psychological account, revealing more of Dewey (and perhaps Steven Rockefeller) in the process. According to Rockefeller, “the comprehensive problem with which Dewey concerned himself as a philosopher was the uniting of the ideal and the actual in the context of a democratic technological 16. Found in Jo Ann Boydston, editor, The Later Works of John Dewey (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1987/1989, Volume 10; p. 41).

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culture and an evolving universe.”17 This was Dewey’s problematic. According to Rockefeller, democracy provided for Dewey a deepseated sense of purpose and belonging that was necessary to sustain a life worth living. This, for Rockefeller, is a religious commitment. >From his point of view, Dewey was “opposed to any idea that might weaken the will in people to take responsibility for their situation and that could draw their attention away from the world of natural relationships and shared experience.”18 For Rockefeller, seeking to go otherworldly dilutes what he calls a religious democracy.19 Dewey’s love of experience and its possibilities committed him to avoid seeking to trade upwards. Transcendental tendencies, according to Rockefeller’s Dewey, get you less of life. Dewey’s work to get more life for all in a pluralistic technological civilization on a small fragile planet emphasized “individual self-realization, human responsibility, a sense of interdependence with nature, the organic connection of self and world, a process view of reality, experimental intelligence, an experimental method of moral valuation, progressive education, and a shared faith in the democratic way of living and growing together.20 These are all inter-related ways of working within and through the flux of experience to get more life. Westbrook and Rockefeller are sympathetic but not uncritical in their portrayals of Dewey’s life-work. The former clearly points out shortcomings and inconsistencies in Dewey’s work and projects. Perhaps the largest deficit pointed out by Westbrook is Dewey’s lack of specificity of a political strategy. Even though Dewey found that in an attempt to democratize society you could not use education to do an end-run around politics, his plan for activating educated 17. Rockefeller, p. 467. 18. Rockefeller, p. 533. 19. Rockefeller extends this point in an interview. See Bill Moyers, A World of Ideas II: Public Opinions from Private Citizens (New York: Doubleday, 1990, pp. 167–174). 20. Rockefeller, p. 563.

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publics was uncharacteristically vague. In this all-important area, Dewey was more wishful than thinking. Rockefeller, on the other hand, is more praiseworthy in his Deweyan story, but near the end makes the point that there is an unacknowledged religious reality in Dewey’s love of experience. For Rockefeller, “the paradox of being able to realize ultimate meaning in a changing world where nothing is fixed and where nothingness is always underfoot . . . [means] . . . there is a source of ultimate meaning in the midst of this impermanent world hidden in the mystery of its being.”21 We will save an analysis of these Deweyan criticisms far another time. It is now time to move on to Paul Kurtz’s appropriation of pragmatic love. Paul Kurtz’s Pragmatic Love In tracing philosophical lineage it might be said that Paul Kurtz is John Dewey’s grandson by way of Sidney Hook, a student and longtime close friend of Dewey. At the very least, Kurtz has been strongly influenced by Dewey and may have been “Hook-winked” in his interpretations of Dewey somewhere in his philosophical development. Certainly the family resemblance between Kurtz and Dewey is visible. Kurtz calls himself a pragmatic naturalist and is very much a public philosopher; like grandfather, like grandson. In addition, Kurtz shares Dewey’s love of life and unabashedly writes books titled The Fullness of Life and Exuberance: An Affirmative Philosophy of Life.22 An energetic sense of life abounds in Kurtz’s works. Let’s now see how he fights for his pragmatic view of life in his struggle against efforts to trade upward. In Kurtz’s first book of his recent trilogy, The Transcendental Temptation: A Critique of Religion and the Paranormal,23 he points 21. Rockefeller, p. 534. 22. PauI Kurtz, The Fullness of Life (New York: Horizon, 1974). Paul Kurtz, Exuberance: An Affirmative Philosophy of Life (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1978/1985). 23. Paul Kurtz, The Transcendental Temptation: A Critique of Religion and the Paranormal (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1986/1991).

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out the history and dangers of seeking to go outside of experience to make sense of life. Ultimately, he argues that people have to use rationality, courage, and creativity to construct the moral and psychological equivalents of the ever-persistent deep hunger for the beyond. Next, in Forbidden Fruit: The Ethics of Humanism,24 he returns to earth in his fight to show people it is not only possible but also desirable to be morally responsible without belief in religion. Common moral decencies develop out of cultural experience and are furthered by a rational humanistic ethics. Finally, in Eupraxsophy: Living Without Religion,25 he argues that the development of good practical wisdom enables us to seek happiness, face death with resolute courage, and live fully by sharing the creative joys and sorrows of life with others. There is an unmistakable Deweyan ring to Kurtz’s life-work. They are closely related on vital issues. If we are in it for life, they both seem to say, let’s get the most out of it. Still, there are some family disputes. For example, in Eupraxsophy one gets the distinct impression that Kurtz thinks of Dewey as too kindly and certainly too vague in his use of the term “religious” in A Common Faith. Kurtz wants to get right to the point, stop using the term, and cut through the obfuscation that has developed because of Dewey’s unfortunate linguistic choice. Still, the religious is more to Dewey than morality tinged with emotion. In particular, it is a pervasive quality of experience which connects purpose and social unity. For Dewey, experience, education, and democracy were the best vehicles for this unifying purpose. Replacing Dewey’s use of the word “religious” with “eupraxsophy” does not quite fill the Deweyan bill, at least not yet. It is a step in the eventual right direction; but at present its strength may also be its weakness.

24. Paul Kurtz, Forbidden Fruit: The Ethics of Humanism (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1988). 25. PauI Kurtz, Eupraxsophy: Living Without Religion (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1989).

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Eupraxsophy is clear, concise, and new. It is a sharp tool for cutting through the complications and confusions caused by the supernatural residue of the term “religious.” But Dewey’s patience to work with the murky, the convoluted, and old enabled him to reweave old problems into new possibilities. The old is not demolished just because we rationally deconstruct it. It lives on and on and on in our experiences. Dewey, as a pragmatist, felt the energy of old is better redirected by reconstructing rather than demolishing it. This reconstruction is his challenge for education, aesthetics, and politics. It is a lot messier, but then again, so is life. However, life changes and Kurtz’s eupraxsophy may be helpful in eventually getting out of a conceptual and existential mess. People are talking about so many different and contradictory things under the umbrella of the “religious” that it is a hindrance to communication and clarity in living. Perhaps we cannot have it both ways, i.e., keep the word “religious” but use Dewey’s meaning. The key point in judging eupraxsophy, however, will be its pragmatic value: Does it keep alive and extend Dewey’s sense of purposive living and social unity? If these are diminished, there will be a love-loss. The differences between Dewey and Kurtz may actually run deeper however. For example, one could not imagine Dewey saying (especially after his return from China), “Promethean men and women refuse to bend to nature, except at the moment of death— they seek to transform nature to suit their purposes.”26 The Dewey of Experience and Nature (1925), Art as Experience (1934), and Experience and Education (1938) has a less-combatant sense of self and nature. Nature is not merely something to be done to, but also something to be undergone. For us to be connected, we not only have to talk and act, we also have to listen, especially to the subtle and long-term effects of our action. Rationality and courage are important, but so are sensitivity and patience. Stated another way, in 26. Paul Kurtz, Transcendental Temptation, p. 467. Granted that the phrase “suit their purposes” can be interpreted in many ways, there is an unmistakable tone of conquest in the cited quotation.

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relation to nature, one could perhaps summarize Kurtz’s tone as “Let’s get on with it,” and Dewey’s tone as “Let’s get into it.” Both Dewey’s and Kurtz’s emphases are important for the pragmatic version of the full life. The job now is to find concrete and context-specific ways to “get on with getting into more of life.” This cannot be done with a mere touch of a philosophical wand. In the spirit of Dewey’s commitment to communication, democracy, education, and the problems of our concrete social life, his pragmatic love of experience now will require an openness to voices previously left out of philosophic discourse—women, people of color, the disenfranchised; it will require the expansion of cultural practices that authentically listen to and build on the neglected aspects of experience and possibilities of the people placed on the margin; it will require a resolute hope and creative intelligence to construct possibilities for fulfillment for all involved in pursuing the democratic ideal. From a Kurtzian perspective, the pragmatic love of life will require the courage to get over and beyond the transcendental temptation and face life on its own terms without the escape valve of supernatural intervention; it will require an ethics that feels strongly rooted in common decency and the desire to work out differences; it will require that the wisdom of good practice, eupraxsophy, permeates all of life. The conversation between Deweyan and Kurtzian versions of pragmatic love needs to continue. Done well, it will create new forms of talking and listening, and, as a consequence, new pragmatic experiences with richer and deeper possibilities. Certainly the success of this conversation is not guaranteed. It requires the recognition that there are new constellations on the horizon as we participate in what Richard Bernstein calls an “engaged fallibilistic pluralism.”27 Such a spirit of conversation can only help to shed new light on pragmatism, love, and experience. Returning once again to 27. Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, p. 336).

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the musical interlude, for conversational pragmatists, “We’ve only just begun.” Conclusion To some, pragmatic love seems obvious, desirable, or at least acceptable. Crass or paternalistic interpretations of pragmatism miss the care and devotion to others, experience, education, and democracy pragmatists find necessary for a loving commitment to life. This commitment to life involves the development of Life’s constituent parts: “I,” IF,” and “LIE.” Allowing again some artistic license, the “I” is the live connection and the basis for continuity and interaction. The “IF” is the foundation for creativity and imaginative possibilities. The “LIE” is the belief that we have to go outside of experience for the love that will sustain us. Pragmatic love is centered on the quality of the unique and contingent live connection made by each individual; the “I” is vital for life. This live connection needs the courage and creativity to persist in applying and evaluating the “IF” assertion to felt difficulties; if we try this what might develop? Combating the “LIE” is the continual belief and hope that life is worth living because experiences are worth having, sharing, and extending; this is a commitment to a life of love and a love of life. And so, I have argued that pragmatism is based on a concrete, creative, and courageous type of love. Is there really any other? Both John Dewey and Paul Kurtz seek a time when the notion of “pragmatic love” will be unnecessary because it will be seen to be redundant. In response to the question, “What’s love got to do with it anyway?” the pragmatic answer is “Everything!” That is quite a lot for a young and still-evolving philosophy.

Promethean Love and Humanism Timothy J. Madigan Paul Kurtz is a modern-day iconoclast. He has devoted much of his life to slaying sacred cows, unmasking false mediums, and applying rational principles to supernatural claims. In his magnum opus, The Transcendental Temptation (1986), Kurtz attempts to show the harm in believing in myths, especially socially sanctioned myths that tend to advocate exclusivity, a rejection of reason, or a longing for a transcendental perfect world. However, there is one myth that he does identify with: the myth of Prometheus. In The Transcendental Temptation, Kurtz writes that “there is a basic war between the saint and the practical man, the mystic and the doer, Jesus and Prometheus . . . ”1 It is clear which particular side of the war Kurtz supports. What is it about the Prometheus legend that so inspires him? In Kurtz’s view, Prometheus symbolizes the virtues of humanism. He sees Prometheus as representing that side of human beings which demonstrates creative audacity, the desire to seize the day and use one’s practical knowledge to one’s full advantage. In his popular work Exuberance: Your Guide to Happiness and Fulfillment (1977), he expresses this view thusly: That is the Promethean element: to wish to achieve something new, to strain every nerve and muscle, to make something of our lives and society, to build castles and skyscrapers, to compose works of love and adoration, to discover and create new worlds

1. Paul Kurtz, The Transcendental Temptation (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1992), p. 466. 83

84 Madigan: Promethean Love and Humanism of visions and ideas. In brief, we exist as doers and creators, not as passive spectators.2

Kurtz therefore sees Prometheus as the paragon representative of secular humanism, and traces this Promethean element throughout the various religions, philosophies, and (to use his word) eupraxsophies that have contributed to contemporary humanism. Quoting again from Exuberance: . . . the heroic virtues that attempt to bend nature to our will, to express the stout spine, strong heart, or firm jaw transcend our culture and typify resilient characteristics of the human enterprise. These Promethean virtues expressed the strong impulses in the pagan hearts of the Greeks and Romans; they reappeared during the Renaissance and modern times (in opposition to the Christian virtues of submissiveness and piety); and they were proclaimed anew by Nietzsche at the beginning of the century.3

Kurtz’s mention of Nietzsche presents some difficulties, however, for it is by no means clear whether or not he belongs in the humanist pantheon. In “The Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles and Purposes,” which he drafted and which is found on the back page of his journal Free Inquiry, Kurtz attempts to list the core values of humanism. Chief among these are reason and compassion. But Nietzsche strongly challenged both values. Reason, he held, was a false god that had bewitched philosophers since the time of Socrates, while compassion was the sickly poison spread by Christians to keep the naturally strong and healthy from advancing a master morality. If the Übermensch represents Nietzschean Prometheanism, it is difficult to see how Kurtz could square it with his own view.

2. Paul Kurtz, Exuberance: Your Guide to Happiness and Fulfillment (N. Hollywood, CA: Wiltshire Book Company, 1977), p. 57. 3. Ibid., p. 13.

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I would like to explore Paul Kurtz’s commitment to reason and compassion, in light of his view that secular humanism is a eupraxsophy for all people, and not just a select few. In what way, then, can humanism be said to be universal, especially in regard to the field of ethics? And how does the myth of Prometheus relate to humanism’s supposed universalism? Let us begin by taking a closer look at this myth, as it is presented by one of humanism’s most noted precursors, Protagoras the Sophist. Protagoras was the man who uttered the humanist credo: “man is the measure of all things.” In Plato’s eponymous dialogue, Protagoras engages in a spirited discussion with Socrates over the question of how people should be governed. He gives his answer in the form of a parable, relating the story of Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus. It was the latter’s task to equip all living things with powers suitable for their survival. To some creatures he gave strength without speed, others speed without strength; to others wings, hooves, sharp teeth, poison sacs, using all the ingenuity the Titans were famous for. He took care to evenly distribute all of these powers, so that no species could be destroyed, either by their environment or by natural predators. But Epimetheus lacked the cleverness of his brother Prometheus, and it was only after using up all of the powers available to him that he realized he had forgotten one species: the human animal. When Prometheus came to see his brother’s handiwork, he noticed the poor, naked, homeless, wingless, slow-moving human beings, and realized that they could never last by themselves. Moved to pity by their plight, Prometheus—unable to apportion any earthly powers to them—stole from the gods the gifts of fire and skill in the arts, and freely bestowed these upon the human species, knowing full well that he would bear the wrath of Zeus for his impunity. But, Protagoras continued, these gifts, while protecting humans from elemental forces and predators, could not protect them from each other. Refusing to live together or form communities, they misused these gifts by devising weapons of slaughter and engaging

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in warfare. It was Zeus who, fearing the total destruction of the race, decided to step in. He ordered Hermes to bring more gifts to humans: a sense of justice and a respect for others. When Hermes asked if these gifts should be distributed as were the other arts, with some humans getting more than others, Zeus replied that all humans should have an equal share, for without this equality, no human society could survive. Thus, while Prometheus gave to humans the gifts of technical knowledge (reason), it was Zeus who gave them the desire to love one another (compassion). The gifts of Prometheus, freely given by him out of a sense of compassion, were not enough to save the very humans he pitied from themselves. There is a cautionary element in Protagoras’s version of the legend, which I will return to later. One can see, then, that the legend of Prometheus demonstrates that reason without compassion can be a deadly tool. The hope that human societies can be built solely upon a rationalistic basis is a hope fraught with terror. For instance, the ancient Stoics spoke glowingly of a cosmopolis (a universal city), in which all people could live in harmony, both with themselves and with nature. Their motto was “reason unites, faith divides,” and they derided the ways in which religious dogmas can drive people apart as well as be used to justify the most heinous crimes against humanity. The only way to have universal peace, they felt, was for humans to emphasize the power they have in common—the power to reason. Yet the greatest of Stoics, Marcus Aurelius, used his position as Roman Emperor to attempt to massacre all Christians in his realm. His was a dispassionate slaughter: the Christians had to go, because they were irrational, talking of an afterlife, worshipping a crucified deity, and refusing to pay homage to the myriad gods of the empire. If such irrationalism was allowed to spread, then it would infect the entire Roman world. Therefore, it must be eradicated. In this impersonal, logical calculation one can also see hints of Robespierre, singing the praises of the Goddess Reason as he sends his former colleagues to the guillotine.

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Indeed, many critics of the Enlightenment Project—the hope that reason, unshackled from the chains of superstition, would lead humans toward an indefinite perfectibility of society—express the opinion that such near-deification of reason leads inexorably to totalitarianism and intolerance towards those deemed to be “unreasonable.” In an essay entitled “The Rage Against Reason,” Richard J. Bernstein discusses Theodor Adorno’s criticisms of the Enlightenment conception of reason (which Adorno labeled “the philosophy of identity,” the desire for a universal community of identical agents). In Bernstein’s words: But for Adorno this identity rationality always seeks to deny, repress, and violate otherness, difference, and singularity. This form of reason—when unmasked—is intrinsically domination; the domination and control over nature inexorably turns into the domination of men over men (and indeed men over women) and culminates in sadistic-masochistic self-repression and selfmutilation. The hidden “logic” of Enlightenment reason is violently repressive; it is totalitarian.4

What Adorno is especially critical of is a rationality of repression, an abstract justification of violence done in the name of the state or the people. He traces this identity logic not to the Enlightenment but to the very beginnings of Western philosophy, back to the ancient Greeks. In the cause of reason, it has been all too easy to overlook the suffering that ensues. Nietzsche’s disavowal of compassion had its roots in the ancient Greek theodicy of good fortune: Make the best of your situations, and don’t grieve for those who suffer at the hands of fate. One of the strongest critics of the Enlightenment Project’s mythbusting mission was Arthur Schopenhauer. An atheist himself, he shied away from attacking religion; not because he felt it was true, but because the great religions of the world addressed themselves to 4. Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), p. 42.

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the central issue of compassion, which he considered to be the basis of ethics. Schopenhauer contrasted the ethics of the Old and New Testaments, claiming that the former posited an absolute moral law, applicable to only a chosen few, who need not have any concern for those outside of this group. On the other hand, the New Testament taught that this absolute moral law is insufficient, and replaced it with the notion of love: to love one’s enemies, and see in them a fellow suffering creature. Buddhism, Schopenhauer felt, taught a similar message in its notion that to live is to suffer. And Hinduism is correct in its message of resignation: one cannot change the basic facts of life. In Schopenhauer’s view, there is a world of difference between the ethics of the Greeks and that of the Hindus. The object of the former was to make life as pleasant and fulfilling as possible, whereas the object of the latter was to liberate and free people from life itself. Christianity in its true sense (notwithstanding Protestant and rationalistic misinterpretations, he adds) follows in this line. “Between the spirit of Græco-Roman paganism and the spirit of Christianity,” he writes, “the real antithesis is that of affirmation and denial of the will to live—in which Christianity is in the last resort fundamentally in the right.”5 Schopenhauer saw in Hegel’s rational philosophy a continuation of the Old Testament absolute law, this time applied relentlessly to all of humanity—a universal system of blind optimism that would only succeed in exacerbating the everpresent suffering of humankind. Schopenhauer was particularly critical of rationalists who attempted to take away the illusions of the masses, and replace their religious beliefs with talk of “the triumphs of science” or universal fellowship. He offers the following parable to show his disdain for those who look at the world from a rationalistic perspective: A mother had, for their education and betterment, given her children Aesop’s fables to read. Very soon, however, they 5. Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms (London: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 62.

Promethean Love 89 brought the book back to her, and the eldest, who was very knowing and precocious, said: “This is not a book for us! It’s too childish and silly. We’ve got past believing that foxes, wolves and ravens can talk: we’re far too grown-up for such nonsense”!—Who cannot see in this hopeful lad the future enlightened Rationalist?6

Schopenhauer was content to leave myths alone, if they were able to alleviate to any extent the horrendous suffering of the world. The boundless optimism of Hegel was no more than a variation of the Greek meddling into nature, trying to improve both society and the environment and only succeeding in making things worse. For Schopenhauer, it is compassion, a sense of fellow suffering, that makes life bearable. He recommended that we look upon life not as a land of opportunity but rather as a penal colony, and other human beings as fellow prisoners within it, serving out our sentences for the crime of being born. Schopenhauer writes: The conviction that the world, and therefore man too, is something which really ought not to exist is in fact calculated to instill in us indulgence towards one another: for what can be expected of beings placed in such a situation as we are? >From this point of view one might indeed consider that the appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not “monsieur, sir” but “fellow sufferer, compagnon de miseres.” However strange this may sound it corresponds to the nature of the case, makes us see other men in a true light and reminds us of what are the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity, which each of us needs and which each of us therefore owes.7

Schopenhauer also gave his own interpretation of the Prometheus myth, and said that it represents the human element of rationality— but also shows how that element is limited and often ineffective, as witnessed by Prometheus’s torment. “A vulture, i.e. care, gnaws at 6. Schopenhauer, p. 235. 7. Schopenhauer, p. 50.

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his heart.”8 When it comes to the choice between Prometheus or Christ, the atheist Schopenhauer is quite clear about which myth he prefers. Perhaps Nietzsche was mistaken—the last Christian did not die on the cross, but rather was the author of The World as Will and Representation. How different is Schopenhauer’s pessimism and resignation from the worldview of Paul Kurtz, author of Exuberance, a book which begins with the stirring words: “There must be something wrong with me. I am happy, exuberant . . . I usually wake up singing and am joyful throughout the day. Life is wonderful. I feel literally as if I am bursting at the seams.”9 One wonders how Schopenhauer would view such a passage. Consider his statement: “If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world . . . ”10 It is hard to think of a greater contrast in outlooks! Paul Kurtz has been taken to task for his exuberance and his Promethean vitality, not only by religious critics, who often claim he lacks a tragic sense, but also by his fellow humanist Marvin Kohl. In 1980, a collection of essays entitled Humanist Ethics: Dialogue on Basics was put together. In his essay entitled “On Suffering,” Kohl asserts that Kurtz has been misinterpreting the Promethean legend by focusing too much on the Titan’s audacity rather than his compassion. According to Kohl, a humanism that takes Prometheus as its “patron saint” must be universalistic and altruistic. Prometheus broke the bonds of selfishness—in his pity for humankind, he risked the wrath of Zeus to bring them fire, in order to do what he could to alleviate their suffering. In Kohl’s words, “to the extent that we emulate this great and loving Titan, we should be caring and giving to our fellow creatures, even though this, at times, may entail

8. Schopenhauer, p. 219. 9. Kurtz, Exuberance, p. 9. 10. Schopenhauer, p. 41.

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considerable risk or sacrifice.”11 He goes on to warn against a Prometheanism that assumes that all suffering can be eliminated— the sort of Prometheanism that leads to Adorno’s totalitarian rationalism. In a reply to Kohl in the same volume, Kurtz takes issue with the view that Promethean humanism need be universalistic or altruistic. He fears that Kohl is confusing the Titan with the Nazarene, and claims that the virtue which Prometheus represents is not selfsacrifice (indeed, for all his suffering, Prometheus was eventually released from his bonds by Hercules) but rather moral courage—the courage to battle even the gods themselves to achieve one’s aims. In Kurtz’s opinion, compassion without moral courage leads to passivity, an acceptance of one’s lot in life, and if taken far enough, a despair over being alive at all. “Granted,” Kurtz writes, “that Prometheus had a philanthropic concern for humanity; yet, he expresses independence as a chief virtue insofar as he was willing to challenge the gods.”12 In this, one can also see Kurtz’s quarrel with the Schopenhauerian outlook: compassion in and of itself is not ethical if it leads to a sense of futility regarding attempts to better social conditions. Prometheus not only gave humans the gift of fire— he expected them to use it wisely. One of the chief concerns of Paul Kurtz’s career has been the increasing awareness among human beings that there is now a real world community. Global consciousness, for will or for woe, is on the rise. The Stoic ideal of a cosmopolis is not as far-fetched as it once seemed: while peoples of the world are united neither by faith nor by reason, they are at the very least connected through telecommunications, global economies, and travel. The lure of universalism—a desire for all people to be united under one banner—is more potent than ever. But, as ever, the question remains: whose universalism? Richard J. Bernstein, in his essay 11. Marvin Kohl, “On Suffering” in Humanist Ethics: Dialogue on Basics, edited by Morris B. Storer (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1980), p. 176. 12. Kurtz, in Humanist Ethics, p. 177.

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“Incommensurabilism and Otherness Revisited,” discusses the relevance of a universalist stance: Learning to live with (among) rival pluralistic incommensurable traditions—which is one of the most pressing problems of contemporary life—is always precarious and fragile. There are no algorithms for grasping what is held in common and what is genuinely different. Indeed, commonality and differences are themselves historically conditioned and shifting. The search for commonalties and differences among incommensurable traditions is always a task and an obligation . . . . In this sense the plurality of rival incommensurable traditions imposes a universal responsibility upon reflective participants in any tradition . . . .13

Both Bernstein and Kurtz come from the pragmatic tradition, and have been particularly influenced by the democratic instrumentalism of John Dewey (1859–1952). Dewey was also leery of the excessive optimism of many Enlightenment thinkers, but he nonetheless found their agenda to be both worthwhile and at least partially achievable. While sharing Schopenhauer’s respect for the intent of most world religions, he nonetheless found them to be often impediments to the growth of knowledge, the fostering of fraternal feelings and the alleviation of suffering through technological improvements. Always trying to break down distinctions, Dewey considered himself neither a pessimist nor an optimist, but rather a meliorist (someone trying to make better the world he found himself in). He had an appreciation for the tragic sense of life and a realization that perfection is impossible; that for every solution to a problem, new problems emerge, which in turn must be dealt with. Still, the pragmatic tradition exults in the problem-solving abilities of humans, especially when they solve their problems in common. In regards then to the twin virtues of reason and compassion, Kurtz would admit that unbridled reason can indeed lead to oppressive gulags and dispassionate executions. Likewise, Schopenhauerian compassion can lead to resignation and a contempt 13. Bernstein, p. 66.

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for life itself. The lure of both extremes must be fought against: an abstract analysis that ignores the possible victims of its planning, or an all-encompassing compassion that allows the caste system to go unchallenged. One can utilize the twin virtues of reason and compassion while still accepting an underlying plurality, an acceptance of “the otherness” of people from differing traditions. As Irving Singer writes in his book Meaning in Life (1992): Compassion does not require an intuition of underlying unity, as Schopenhauer thought, but only sympathetic recognition that life in others—as in ourselves—includes a concern about something that matters. What matters to the other may not matter to us, but in feeling compassion we show that we care about this different exemplification of the life we have in common. Out of this arises (though not ineluctably) an interest in preserving, extending and improving life in general.14

Singer’s point is worth considering. Concern for others does not seem to arise ineluctably: witness again Protagoras’s parable. Even with the gifts from Prometheus, humans were in peril, until Zeus granted them the further gifts of justice and concern for one another. The dilemma we face today is, how can such concern for social justice be advocated without concomitantly subsuming all people under a single category, a cosmopolis ruled either by reason or by faith? Paul Kurtz has grappled with this dilemma in many of his works. He clearly recognizes the danger of a Nietzschean Prometheanism, a master morality with no regard for the weak or suffering. In The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche provides an indictment against the compassionate religions of Christianity and Buddhism (and, not coincidentally, his indictment against his mentor, Schopenhauer). He boldly proclaims that: “The weak and the failures shall perish: first principle of our love of man. And they shall be given every possible 14. Irving Singer, Meaning In Life: The Creation of Value (New York: The Free Press, 1992), p. 128.

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assistance.”15 Such a deliberate renunciation of compassion, coupled with Adorno’s identity logic, can have truly chilling repercussions. In response to this, and again following in the pragmatic tradition, Kurtz’s Promethean humanism is dedicated to the principles of democracy. Like Dewey, he has been a strong critic of social engineering, either from the left or the right, and has been highly skeptical of all political claims to perfect (rather than to improve) humankind. In his book The Fullness of Life (1974), Kurtz expounds on his views of what a democratic ethic entails: In its concern for the worth and dignity of the individual, democracy recognizes his right to do what he wishes and restricts undue interference in the sphere of individual choice and action. It provides the opportunity and conditions for personal realization and growth. The democratic ethic recognizes that insofar as we respect the individual’s right to personal freedom, we contribute not only to his growth but to our own; insofar as we can appreciate others we can learn to share their stores of experience, wisdom, truth. In being tolerant of diversity, the democratic approach enlarges our horizons for discovery and insight . . . 16

Kurtz goes on to say that the preconditions for a democratic society are public knowledge and an access to information, for an uneducated populace is unlikely to make wise decisions. Nor is it likely to foster the sort of mutual respect needed for any sort of harmonious living. Kurtz’s universalism, then, is based upon the principles of democracy, a system that would allow for the free development of its citizens without imposing upon them a single worldview. And, if myths are needed to get this point across, there is one readily available: the parable of Protagoras discussed earlier. 15. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, edited by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 570. 16. Paul Kurtz, The Fullness of Life (New York: Horizon Press, 1974), p. 157– 158.

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I. F. Stone, the modern-day gadfly and journalist, devoted a section of his book The Trial of Socrates (1988) to a discussion of Protagoras’s parable as the premier justification of the virtue of democracy. Stone wrote his book partly as a defense of Athenian democracy, which he felt tended to be too easily dismissed by exponents of Plato’s dialogues. Stone castigates Socrates (the original gadfly) for advocating a political rule by an elite few, and for having too little regard for the common people. While not everyone is born a statesman, nonetheless those who are ruled should have considerable say concerning the policies of those who rule over them. In Stone’s view, Protagoras’s myth provides mythological underpinnings for the right to self-government. It is, in his words, the “founding fable of democracy.”17 Surprisingly enough, Stone does not mention Prometheus at all when he relates this tale from Plato’s Protagoras. Instead, he begins it at the point where Zeus sends Hermes to give human beings the gifts of a sense of justice and concern for others. It is to Zeus, then, that Stone gives the credit for bestowing the art of politics upon human beings: an art that reached its apex in Athenian democracy, where political issues were debated by all the citizens, since all alike shared in the virtues of good sense and respect for the rights of others. How galling it would be for Paul Kurtz, the proponent of Prometheus, to have to pay homage to Zeus—Prometheus’s tormentor—for originating the concept of democracy. Stone, I think, does a disservice to his founding fable of democracy by not mentioning Prometheus’s crucial role. Without his gifts of intelligence and technical know-how, the political wisdom granted to humans by Zeus would have been worthless, and his gift would never have been given. Of course, one must be careful when discussing myths. While the extreme rationalist might, as Schopenhauer saw it, miss the point of Aesop’s fables because asses don’t talk, the opposite extreme— 17. I. F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), p. 48.

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believing that they do—is also a danger. The myth of Prometheus is stirring, but it is also malleable. Still, myths do serve a purpose. Often one can stress a point much better using poetry than didactics (as Protagoras, that wily Sophist, no doubt knew better than most). To demonstrate the effectiveness of the Prometheus myth, I would like to close by breaking the Titan from his chains, through briefly discussing Percy Shelley’s masterpiece Prometheus Unbound (1819) and its relevance to the theme of universal love. Shelley, while usually considered an exponent of Romanticism, was very much influenced by the Enlightenment philosophers. He was an atheist—indeed, he was expelled from Oxford for having coauthored the inflammatory pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism (1811/1813). He was a strong advocate of the scientific method, and was influenced by the English empirical tradition. Shelley expressed skepticism over any possibility of life after death. Still, he felt that the rationalists and empiricists alike gave short shrift to the poetic instinct of humans, their story-telling and myth-making abilities, and he warned against advocating the view that humans could do without poetry or drama; the imagination is one of humanity’s most cherished abilities. Moreover, Shelley shared the Enlightenment vision of universal peace and fellowship, but saw this as a moral possibility, not an inevitability. Furthermore, like Schopenhauer, he worried that rationalists, in their haste to de-mythologize, would disregard the moral truths often contained within those myths. But Shelley was equally wary of excessive religiosity or Schopenhauerian despair. In his view, despair reaps its own reward. Shelley called for a radical reform of society, grounded upon the principles of social justice and love for others. His views are brilliantly expressed in Prometheus Unbound. While he discouraged critics from trying to read this poem didactically, one can nonetheless find certain messages therein. The lesson of this work is that the basis of social inequality and class hatreds lies within the human heart, and that in order to reform society one must first reform one’s self.

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As the poem begins, Prometheus—whom Shelley refers to as “the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and truest motives to the best and noblest ends”18—has long endured his imprisonment. But he has given up the hatred of Zeus so vividly expressed in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. When the curses Prometheus uttered against Zeus are repeated to him, he regrets them, saying: It doth repent me: words are quick and vain; Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine. I wish no living thing to suffer pain.19

Through relinquishing the hatred in his heart, Prometheus breaks his chains, and comes to realize that it was his hatred that had imprisoned him for so long. We discover in Shelley’s version of the myth that it was Prometheus, and not Zeus, who gave to humans the gift of love: . . . and Love he sent to bind The disunited tendrils of that vine Which bears the wine of life, the human heart . . . . 20

Now Prometheus too is rescued by love. As the drama ends, the tyrant Zeus is toppled from his throne by the forces of enlightenment originally set in motion by Prometheus’s gifts to human beings. With the fall of Zeus, human society is no longer splintered into groups torn asunder by hate and conflict. Prometheus, once again the savior of humankind, is reunited with the goddess Asia, who represents love, and they watch over the regeneration of humankind taking place. The Earth, Prometheus’s mother, sings out a hymn of joy to reunited human beings, no longer divided by incommensurability: 18. Percy Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 6. 19. Ibid., p. 24. 20. Ibid., p. 63.

98 Madigan: Promethean Love and Humanism Man, oh, not men! a chain of linked thought, Of love and might to be divided not, Compelling the elements with adamantine stress. . . . Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul, Whose nature is its own divine control, Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea; Familiar acts are beautiful through love; Labour, and pain, and grief, in life’s green grove Sport like tame beasts, none knew how gentle they could be!21

The Earth goes on to describe the technological wonders that regenerate humankind is capable of, now that the gifts of Prometheus are being put to their proper use. But Shelley cautions the reader that such love is fragile, and if it is not cultivated, then the inner serpents within the human breast can easily return, and once again bring back moral chaos. I dare say that the Promethean vision of Paul Kurtz, and of secular humanists in general, is closest to the spirit of Shelley: A Prometheus combining the classical morality of Ancient Greece and the compassion expressed by Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. In the closing words of Shelley’s poem, spoken in honor of the Titan by the character Demogorgon, who had dethroned the tyrant Zeus, one reads: To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.22

21. Ibid., p. 105–106. 22. Ibid., p. 113.

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It is a delicate combination, to be sure, but the effort to reconcile the “basic war between the saint and the practical man” is still worth striving for, in the spirit of Promethean Love.

Love in Naturalistic Perspective Tad S. Clements The term “love” is both equivocal and vague. Many sorts of things are referred to by this term and all of the concepts involved are more or less unclear. There are commonly employed conceptual distinctions, such as those given in dictionaries for “eros” (usually conceived as physical attraction, often involving sexual desire), “filial love” (found in an idealized parent-child affectionate relationship and in similar bondings), “Platonic love” (either in the sense of an abstract love of spiritual or ideal beauty or in the sense of an intimate relationship between people in which sexual components are absent), and “Agape” (either in the sense of the love God or Christ, or other similar supernatural being, allegedly has for humanity or in the sense of an unselfish, brotherly, or spiritual love of one person for another, traditionally of one Christian for another). In addition to these commonly employed terms and distinctions, there are other usages in which “love” involves even more remotely relevant applications. For instance, our word “philosophy” was derived from the Greek roots “philein” and “sophia,” where “philein” meant love in a sense quite different from most common meanings. In a similar way, we speak of the love that a dog has for its master or mistress or the feelings that masters and mistresses have for their dogs; we speak of the love of riches or of fame or power; or the love that one has for nature or for art; and so on. From bibliophilia to love in the sense of mystical experiences; the applications seem almost endless. Naturalism is not opposed to such distinctions if they can be shown to be useful distinctions. Its goal is simply to try to understand and explain “love” in all its manifestations in naturalistic (i.e., rational and scientific) terms and correlatively to try to eliminate 101

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surreptitious, unjustifiable metaphysical assumptions, mystification, and word magic in some of the discourse about love. What I have in mind when I refer to “surreptitious, unjustifiable metaphysical assumptions, mystification, and word magic” is probably best illustrated if we consider some of the things that have been said about Agape and examine the utterances of mystics and others when discussing divine love encounters. Such claims should never be accepted at face value. To accept them at face value would lead to unsupportable assumptions and obscurantism. Consider, for instance, the first meaning I mentioned for “Agape.” Supposedly it involves a unique kind of love God has for humanity. Such a claim is packed with obscure metaphysical/theological notions and questionable assumptions. What is meant by “God”? Are there any philosophically persuasive reasons for accepting the reality of God? Is the supposed love really unique, i.e., totally different from any ordinary form of love? If so, how could anyone speak meaningfully about it? Is divine love compatible with the reality of evil? So such claims cannot be accepted at face value—we don’t know what they mean and/or they cannot be justified on rational and/or scientific grounds. I will return to mystical and other alleged religious divine encounters shortly, after touching on some of the reasons for considering more ordinary forms of love naturalistically. Naturalism takes its cue from the natural sciences and other scholarly disciplines. It seeks to understand all phenomena, including those referred to as expressions of love, in terms of objective realities. Naturalism already has at its disposal overwhelming evidence from diverse fields (including ethology, comparative psychology, and neurophysiological psychology) that love in all of its ordinary manifestations (erotic, friendship, parental, romantic, and so forth) has natural causes. Ethological and comparative psychological studies clearly show that the roots of erotic love, friendship attachments, and parental love can be found among nonhuman animals, even in some animal groups considerably removed from our close primate relatives. Neurophysiological

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psychology, and related areas in biology, have discovered some of the neurological, hormonal, and other biochemical structures and mechanisms involved in erotic attraction in nonhuman and human subjects (for instance, studies of pheromones). Sociobiology, which is still in its infancy, has developed some rather intriguing speculations concerning possible genetically based, evolved strategies, expressed in human relationships, which tend to lead to reproductive success (hence genetic survival) and to a variety of social-cultural adaptations. And, as I’m sure you all know, sociologists, social psychologists, and cultural anthropologists have revealed many of the ways in which cultures and socialization processes shape the expressions of all forms of love. Much remains to be discovered, and a synthesis of the results of diverse investigations and speculations is not yet at hand, but it is already obvious that naturalistic philosophy has reason to be optimistic about understanding ordinary forms of love in naturalistic terms. Now let’s return briefly to mystical and other forms of religious experiences which are frequently interpreted as love encounters. When we consider such reported experiences, especially those which are said to involve some nondescript, impersonal, featureless, spiritual sea of being (probably best exemplified in Gnana Yoga Hinduism and in Classical and Hinayana or Theravada Buddhism) honesty seems to compel us to admit that naturalistic understanding is far from adequate. In terms of present knowledge, it is not at all clear what neurohormonal and other physiological processes may cause such depersonalized mystical experiences. We do know that they usually occur in connection with certain mental and physical disciplines, such as focusing one’s attention, regulating one’s breathing, fasting, and repeating verbal formulae.1 This suggests that we are dealing with an altered brain state that will in time be susceptible to more precise scientific explanation. Certainly at the very least, the principle of parsimony and a justifiable skepticism 1. We may also note here some of the similarities found in chemically induced experiences of nitrous oxide.

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should prevent us from accepting the mystics’ metaphysical/theological interpretations at face-value. That is, there does not seem to be any good reason to believe that there actually is, outside the mystics’ mind, any impersonal spiritual reality that the mystic unites with in his or her ecstatic experience. So, if it is to be called love, it is probably unrequited. Let’s consider another related matter. Many people, both those who have claimed to have such experiences and those simply describing them in a scholarly manner, have drawn a sharp distinction between what appear to be interpersonal, I-Thou (as Martin Buber called them) encounters and impersonal mystical ecstatic states. I suspect that these sharp contrasts are probably misleading. If one examines the accounts of experiences of both types they seem to form positions on a continuum, stages of abstraction. My hypothesis is that in certain trance-induced interpersonal encounters the brain becomes primarily preoccupied with feelings associated with the more or less vaguely conceived supernatural personality—primarily feelings of being cared for, protected, loved, guided, and enlightened. In other words, in such experiences the fuzzy anthropomorphic personality involved begins to take second place to feelings of love, security, serenity, and illumination. From such a stage in I-Thou encounters, it is not a great distance to seemingly impersonal mystical experiences. It probably does not require anything more than disciplines which focus attention still further until all that is left are feelings of oneness, love, ecstasy, and enlightenment (satori or whatever other names mystics have used). If I am correct in holding this hypothesis, it suggests an interesting connection between the most mundane form of love (sexually based eros) which humans share with all sexual forms of animal life at one extreme and the supposedly indescribably sublime forms of interpersonal and impersonal religious and mystical experiences at the other extreme. In other words, I am suggesting that there is an experiential continuity involving stages of abstraction

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from eros to mysticism and thus, in principle, all are understandable in terms of a naturalistic, organism-centered perspective. Testing this hypothesis must await further careful studies from a multitude of scientific and other scholarly disciplines, but there is reason to be optimistic.

Part Three SPIRITUALITY AND CHRISTIANITY

Psychic and Humanistic Love Richard A. Berg

Psychic and Humanistic Love If there is such a thing as humanistic love with characteristics distinct from those of other types of love, then its distinctive nature could be partly defined by contrasting it with some other type of love in circumstances that underline their differences. This for the most part is how I have chosen to define humanistic love, mainly by contrasting it in the circumstance of bereavement with another kind of love that I call psychic love, though I conclude by calling attention to what I think they have in common. The various circumstances of the tragic story of bereavement from which I take my point of departure are narrated by two storytellers, one psychically and the other humanistically inclined. One the one hand, I have chosen as champion of the psychic Bishop James Pike who felt compelled to deal with the loss of his twenty-year-old son Jim Junior to suicide February 4, 1966, by interpreting various psychic phenomena including supposed poltergeist activity and séances with Ena Twigg, George Daisley, and above all Arthur Ford in terms of Jim trying to get in touch with him from the other side of death’s door as indicated in his autobiographical account of these events, The Other Side (1968).1 Another psychic viewpoint on the events that followed young Jim Pike’s death is provided by Allen Spraggett, religion writer for the Toronto Star at the time, who arranged and moderated the landmark 1967 Pike-Ford séance on the W5 program on CTV and who later 1. Bishop James Pike, The Other Side (New York: Dell, 1968), p. 85. Abbreviated Henceforth as TOS.

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authored books on the two principals, The Bishop Pike Story (1970) and Arthur Ford: The Man Who Talked with the Dead (1973).2 Included in the first of Spraggett’s two works is a brief account of the vision or dream of Pike’s death and transfiguration by his third wife, Diane Kennedy, which, anticipated the finding of his body in the Dead Sea desert on September 7, 1969.3 On the other hand I have selected as humanistic narrator the late lamented science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, whose psychology was as turbulent as that of any psychic, yet whose posthumously published novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982) is recognizably a humanistic attempt to come to terms with the deaths of his friend Bishop Pike and Pike’s rejected mistress, Maren Bergrud, who was also Dick’s mother-in-law. Since his death on March 2, 1982, Dick has received narrative support for his point of view from literary friends and critics. Some, like Gregg Rickman in Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament (1985) and D. Scott Apel in Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection (1987), have tried to make Dick out to be another psychic in the last phase of his career along the lines of Pike and his sympathizers; while others, like Lawrence Sutin in his definitive biography Divine Invasions (1989) and Norman Spinrad in “The Transmogrification of Philip K. Dick” (1990), argue more compellingly for the humanism of Dick’s final autobiographical work of science fiction.4 The method I will be using to elucidate the concepts of psychic and humanistic love on the basis of this material is the phenomenological method. This methodology requires me to do three things. First it requires that I perform a phenomenological reduction on the narrated events which brackets, suspends, or postpones all questions as to their reality in order to pose first the 2. TOS, p. 195. 3. Allen Spraggett, The Bishop Pike Story (New York: Mentor, 1970), pp. 167–169. 4. Norman Spinrad, Science Fiction in the Real World (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), pp. 198–201.

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question of their meaning for those who narrate them. Secondly, it imposes the obligation to describe or interpret the meaning of these phenomena as the unfolding of certain kinds of love. Finally, it imposes a free imaginative variation on these descriptions to help reveal the invariable essence of psychic and humanistic love and of what they share in common. I But in order to reveal the meaning of psychic and of humanistic love, I must first remove whatever is covering or concealing them. For I confess I do believe there is something like a tacit misunderstanding which does a great deal to cover up the deeper philosophical issues raised by psychic phenomena like the séances with which Bishop Pike consoled himself after his son’s death. That misunderstanding is the generally accepted view that the problem of a psychic phenomenon like mediumship, for example, is at its root a question of truth and knowledge. I want to set aside this view before proceeding any further because in assuming that the problem of psychic phenomena is basically an epistemological problem, Professor Paul Kurtz, his Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), founded in 1976, and its journal the Skeptical Inquirer have transformed the problem into a truly Herculean labor. Like Hercules, Professor Kurtz and company struggle with a manyheaded hydra, clubbing each head to death only to find that as soon as it is crushed, two or three more grow in its place. The futility of this approach is perhaps best illustrated in an anecdote told by magician and fellow psi-cop James Randi. As a result of his first foray into the field, a visit to the spiritualist Assembly of Inspired Thought in Toronto at the age of fifteen when he exposed the standard conjuring techniques the medium was using to contact the dear departed, Randi found himself promptly jailed by those he sought to help. Commenting on this and other people’s

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failures in similar circumstances to appreciate ghostbusting services rendered, Randi concludes: “People just don’t want to know.”5 I believe that Randi is fundamentally right about this, indeed more right than he seems aware. Bereaved people who seek out a medium do not really want knowledge. What they really want is consolation for lost love. And as long as this unmet need for love is ignored by skeptics, there will always be another psychic claim to knowledge, another head to crush. An essential part of the problem is that Kurtz and company thrive on this kind of controversy.6 For disputes about psychic phenomena are self-perpetuating at least partly as a result of having been misconceived as problems of truth and knowledge. The fascinating thing about this misconception is that it has benefits for both parties to the controversy. For it is on both sides a labor of love. Neither side engaged in this cover-up is ever at a loss for what to do. And most importantly this in turn means that no one ever has to face the really tough underlying problem of love and loss. So it comes about that the most fundamental aspect of the problem is actually concealed by the very controversy that is supposed by the disputants to resolve it. It is often observed by sociologists that social groups most obviously at odds with one another on the social surface of things tacitly sustain each other as social institutions in a way best described as a kind of social transaction performed on the basis of tacit agreements. Two such agreements lie at the root of the perpetual controversies among social groups as diverse as psychics, skeptics, and fundamentalists who address the issue of psychic phenomena. Psychics like Arthur Ford and skeptics like Paul Kurtz obviously disagree about whether mediumship attains to truth, and whether it is a valid means of knowledge. They do so, however, on the basis of a more fundamental agreement that the issue of mediumship is an 5. Chris Dafoe, “Magician spearheads war against supernatural claims,” The Globe and Mail, Friday, May 29,1987, D8. 6. “Gadfly thrives on controversy,” The Chronicle-Journal, Tuesday, April 14, 1987, p. 19.

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epistemological issue, a question of truth and knowledge. Similarly, defenders of the psychic like Bishop James Pike and attackers like fundamentalist theologian Merrill Unger disagree on whether the alleged supernatural source of the psychic’s presumed knowledge is good or evil. But again they do so on the basis of the tacit agreement that mediumship is a valid source of knowledge, moreover one that makes use of supernatural means. Having said this, what I want to do now as part of my phenomenological method is to bracket, suspend, and set aside all such tacit agreements in order to address the basic issue of psychic phenomena, which is the question of how love copes with loss. I will describe first the psychic strategy and then the opposing humanistic strategy for dealing with this problem. II I begin my brief phenomenology of psychic experience with the observation that the meaning of our existence as human beings is augmented or diminished by our relationships with others. The lives of Bishop James Pike and Philip K. Dick, for example, were enriched (albeit by duplicity) when Dick’s 1964 letter to the bishop persuading him to address Maren Bergrud’s civil-liberties group unexpectedly resulted in Pike and Bergrud beginning a three-year love affair with a secret apartment in San Francisco, Bergrud retained as Pike’s secretary, and Pike and Dick becoming friends through a family connection as Dick’s fourth wife Nancy Hackett was Bergrud’s step-daughter.7 On the other hand, the meaning of Pike’s life was diminished by the suicide of his son Jim Junior in New York, February 4, 1966, and by the brevity of his mourning with family and wife Esther cut short by his return to Cambridge, February 15, 1966, to finish writing a book.

7. Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions (New York: Harmony Books, 1989), p. 149.

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It is in the traumatic aftermath of this tragedy that Pike began to transform the meaning of his life by drawing a new circle of friends and intimates into the psychic drama of his grief as Pike, Bergrud and another Episcopal priest, David Barr, moved into the Cambridge apartment shared only eleven days ago by the Pikes, father and son. There they began to single out phenomena which they interpreted, not as manifestations of grief but as poltergeist activity8 calling for consultation with a medium Ena Twigg recommended by the Episcopal Church’s chief ghost chaser in England, Reverend John Pearce-Higgins. The intended meaning of these discrete phenomena9 was fulfilled in two séances with Mrs. Twigg in London March 2 and March 14, 1966: Jim Junior was still alive on the other side of death’s door; he had returned to those he loved.10 Through Mrs. Twigg, Jim Junior was supposed to have told his father that in spite of finding himself in a place like hell, nobody there blamed him. He expressed the hope that none of the living would blame him either, but rather treat him as he was being treated on the other side with compassion and understanding.11 Jim Junior continued to express his love of father, mother, sisters and friends until he was in effect interrupted by another speaker claiming to be a deceased friend, Paul Tillich, to whom Pike had just dedicated a book “to Paul Tillich, principal mentor and dear friend much missed.”12 Finally Jim Junior ended the séance providing assurances that there would be no more poltergeist disturbances, the psychic equivalent of the benediction “Peace be unto you.”13

8. TOS, p. 83: “poltergeist . . . the spirit of a dead person . . . causing some kind of disturbance in the house where the person had resided before dying.” 9. TOS, p. 85: “What was the unifying explanation of these events? I was slow to accept the possibility that it was Jim . . . yet we could think of no other explanation . . . psychic phenomena.” 10. TOS, pp. 99–114, 128–134. 11. TOS, p. 105. 12. TOS, p. 109. 13. TOS, p. 114.

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Certainly on the basis of this first séance it is possible to limn some of the essential features of psychic love. For the psychic, love means first never having to be blamed for our actions but being treated instead with compassion and understanding. Secondly, it means never having to miss dead friends and family since they are still alive and with us. Thirdly, it means not being diminished by the loss of their love since they love us still. Finally, psychic love means being granted remission from the emotional trauma associated with the death of loved ones such as Pike had just begun to experience. Pike’s next two séances in Santa Barbara in August and September 1966 with medium George Daisley14 were preceded by Pike’s resignation as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California, by Maren Bergrud becoming the first director of the New Focus Foundation created to disseminate Pike’s new views, and also by Jim Junior supposedly once again leaving his calling card of poltergeist activity.15 Again Maren Bergrud accompanied Pike to both these séances. On the first occasion Jim Junior was said to have been feeling anxiety because Pike mistakenly persisted in feeling grief for him. The deceased psychic Edgar Cayce was supposed to have told Maren that he wanted to help her develop the gift of spiritual healing, something that she had been working on since having to give up her ambition of going to medical school, first on account of having to support and care for her dying husband and then because of her own struggle with cancer.16 Jim Junior, still feeling anxious, ended the first séance with the warning that Pike would experience more psychic disturbances. The only significant material to emerge from the second séance with Daisley is an apology from Jim Junior for the grief and anxiety his suicide caused those who loved him, and the assurance that he was feeling better. Pike left this séance with the feeling of closeness

14. TOS, pp. 156–168,171–174. 15. TOS, pp. 138, 173. 16. TOS,pp. 160–161, 165–166.

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and friendship he had felt with his son during their brief time together at Cambridge just before their separation by suicide.17 Here again some essential features of psychic love are revealed, starting with the view that grieving is wrong since it causes anxiety both in the living and the dead.18 Then there is the wish-fulfilling belief in the healing power of love. Finally there is the concept of intimacy as possible solely on the basis of one’s own feelings, or with passive acceptance of apologies, but with no mutual obligation to apologize, or to ask for forgiveness. Two other séances with Daisley in September and October 1966 were of little consequence, one attended by Pike and Bergrud, the other by Bergrud and the newly married Dick and Hackett,19 whom Pike acknowledged in his foreword to The Other Side (1968),20 omitting Bergrud since her suicide in June 1967 would have made mention of her contribution an embarrassment to him. In spite of Pike’s cover-up,21 Bergrud’s suicide was a matter of some consequence, being followed in July with the mercurial Dick suffering a nervous breakdown and Pike enduring two more disappointing séances with Daisley supposedly in a vain attempt to ask Maren why she did it.22 From Pike’s point of view, her suicide was a case of him again being struck by a tragedy all the more

17. TOS, p. 174. 18. TOS, pp. 159, 174. 19. Philip K. Dick, “Transcript of a Séance,” The Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter, number 12, October 1986, pp. 5–6. 20. TOS, pp. 5–6. 21. TOS, p. 6: “The thinking through and writing of the book in the midst of other responsibilities has been possible only due to the collaboration from start to finish of Miss Diane Kennedy, Director of New Focus Foundation,” Cf. TOS, p. 186. Cf. also Philip K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (New York: Timescape, 1982), p. 168. This last comparison should be treated with caution since the novel is a work of fiction. 22. TOS, pp. 189–191, Daisley’s explanation through Jim Junior was so fatuous that Pike was left with the uneasy feeling that perhaps communication with the dead was not so plausible after all. Cf. Lawrence Sutin, op. cit., p. 160.

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difficult to bear because it necessitated a painful reassessment of the death of his son.23 This informal audit of Pike’s unsettled accounts with his son and rejected lover serves to indicate his state of mind leading up to the two séances with Arthur Ford, which marked the highlight of his psychic career.24 Although it was the first of these, videotaped September 3, 1967, in Toronto for the CTV program W5 that identified Pike forever in the public eye as an advocate of the psychic cause, provoking front page news coverage in The New York Times, Time magazine, and Newsweek, it was at the second Ford séance, which took place privately in Philadelphia on December 16, 1967, where Pike, accompanied by Diane Kennedy, came closest to settling accounts with Maren and Jim Junior.25 The séance opened with Ford as Jim Junior expressing regret at having done what he did after getting close to his father for the first time in his life at Cambridge.26 When the younger Pike tried to justify his action by saying that he would have caused his father a lot of trouble had he lived, Pike replied appropriately that they could have worked out these problems together. However, when Pike in turn expressed remorse at not having faced these problems while his son was still alive, Ford as Jim Junior shortchanged him by concluding lamely that “if you can talk things over, then you can forgive yourself.”27 Pike’s conversation with Ford as Maren took a different turn as she asked his forgiveness for not having been willing to face a recurrence of cancer, and he asked hers for having failed to perceive her condition. The financial metaphor of forgiveness of debt does not appear out of place here even though the two may have been trading

23. TOS, p. 189. 24. TOS, pp. 203–230, pp. 274–285. 25. TOS, p. 285. 26. TOS, p. 278. 27. TOS, pp. 279–280.

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in counterfeit coin as Pike’s expressed fear of platitudes would seem to indicate.28 The moral aspect of psychic love being developed here is briefly summarized. The general drift seems to be that psychic love does not call for forgiveness by others. Or it requires forgiveness more for insensitivity to others’ needs than for wrongdoing. In any case the preferred solution for guilt is simply to forgive oneself. The rapid denouement of the Bishop Pike story included his leaving the Episcopal Church on the occasion of his marriage to Maren’s successor, New Focus Director Diane Kennedy in November 1968, a study tour in Israel in September 1969, and finally the ill-fated expedition into the Dead Sea desert ending with the discovery of Pike’s body September 7, 1969. On that day Diane Kennedy put the finishing touches to the story by anticipating this discovery with a vision of her husband’s death and transfiguration which included seeing him reunited with his son. As the two embraced, they were surrounded by a crowd of people in the air, a sight she described as a triumph of love more beautiful than anything she had ever seen before.29 Once again we have a case of psychic love transcending a tragedy, this time even before the circumstances are fully known. Again, psychic love is seen to involve something less than a full acceptance of the compelling necessity of grief and pain in a situation of loss. Now if humanism were simply to define itself in terms of its opposition to the psychic on each of the points developed in connection with psychic love, it would arrive at a concept of love that includes not allowing sympathy and understanding to obscure the basic obligation to accept responsibility for our actions, including acceptance of blame when merited. A humanistic concept of love would have to include missing deceased friends and family when they are gone, and living with the sense of being diminished by the 28. TOS, p. 282. 29. Allen Spraggett, op. cit., pp. 167–169.

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loss of their love. It means accepting that there is no remission from the emotional trauma of these occasions. It means accepting that grief is a necessary and healthy part of the healing process, indeed that healing cannot be complete without it. Finally, humanistic love requires accepting that there can be no true intimacy in love without an active engagement in the relationship, which at times requires mutual confession and forgiveness. However, the method of simply opposing psychic and humanistic love on these points fails to consider whether there is something the two share in common that may still be obscured by the epistemological controversy between psychics and skeptics or by my simple method of contrast. III At this point the phenomenological method requires a free imaginative variation on the Bishop Pike story to inquire more deeply into the meaning of humanistic love in relation to the psychic. Such an imaginative variation on the story already exists in Philip K. Dick’s posthumously published novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982). Despite the novel’s preface which claims that “Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental,” critics and readers alike have had little difficulty seeing Bishop James Pike in Bishop Timothy Archer, Jim Junior in Jeff Archer, and Maren Bergrud in Kirsten Lundborg.30 Further insights are added by Lawrence Sutin, who reveals that the character of Edgar Barefoot is based on Alan Watts,31 and most importantly by Norman Spinrad who recognizes Philip K. Dick not only in Angel Archer, the fictional daughter-in-law of the bishop, but

30. Paul Williams, The Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter, number 12, October 1986, p. 5. 31. Lawrence Sutin, op. cit., p. 279.

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also in some aspects of the bishop himself, as well as in the fictional character Bill Lundborg, Kirsten’s schizophrenic son.32 Now Dick, as previously mentioned, did attend one of Daisley’s séances with Nancy Hackett and Maren Bergrud, leaving behind a set of notes published in the Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter (1986) that apparently served as the background research for the four séances discussed in the novel. Although these fictional séances differ significantly from Pike’s séances reported in The Other Side it is morally insightful to read them as imaginative variations on the originals. The first séance mentioned in Dick’s novel is attended by Bishop Timothy Archer and his lover Kirsten Lundborg, who claim they consulted their first medium Dr. Mason only to verify what they already know, that the poltergeist activity plaguing them means that Jeff, the bishop’s dead son, has come back to them. Unlike Ena Twigg, however, Dr. Mason has both the moral acuity to understand why they have really come, and the courage of this conviction to convey the message that Jeff forgives them and forgives his widow Angel too.33 Although Angel Archer is not morally prepared to respond to this message, I take it as a sign of Dick’s humanism that he raises the issue immediately in the context of the first séance. In real life, it took Pike at least nine séances with three different mediums to reach this point, and even then neither the sitters nor the mediums acting as the deceased were fully prepared to face up to it. Nevertheless, the moral reason for the séance appears to be the compelling reason at this point. Indeed, it may be argued that the bishop, whether he admits it or not, feels morally compelled to seek out his son even beyond the grave to settle moral accounts with him. The bishop’s irrational compulsion points to some important insights about wrongdoing, confession, and forgiveness. Although a wrongdoer may confess, be forgiven, and have his punishment 32. Norman Spinrad, op. cit., pp. 200–201. 33. Philip K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (New York: Timescape, 1982), pp. 108–109.

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remitted, those affected still have to live with the consequences of his action. Loving psychics and humanists alike then have at least implicitly understood the moral obligation to seek forgiveness while having different views on the force of circumstance that prevents such an obligation from ever being fulfilled in the bishop’s case. The novel’s second séance may be described as the pivot on which the story turns. Unlike the medium George Daisley who served up moral platitudes to reassure his clients, his fictional counterpart Rachel Garret conveys the shocking message that the unhappy couple are soon to die, Kirsten first followed soon after by the bishop.34 The moral dilemma created by this message is succinctly expressed by Kirsten: if she believes it really is Jeff speaking from beyond the grave, then she has to believe that she will die.35 Distressed that her illicit relationship with the bishop is forcing him out of his ecclesiastical career and fed up with their ongoing deceit, she decides that this is no kind of life and acts accordingly.36 Now Dick’s humanist, Angel Archer, finds herself caught in a moral dilemma of her own. For she sees that the bishop and his mistress are so steeped in guilt over Jeff’s death and so caught up in the intrigue and deceit required to maintain their relationship that they need help.37 But she recognizes that any effort on her part would be futile since they have compelling moral reasons to continue believing that Jeff has returned. Moreover, if she were actually successful in destroying this belief, they would be left with staggering guilt, which in her estimation neither of them could live with.38 So she keeps silence with the result that Kirsten dies. Both psychic and humanistic love then can be caught in moral dilemmas that stem, not from anything so exotic as our views on the afterlife and the possibility of communicating with the dead, but 34. Ibid., p. 159. 35. Ibid., p. 167. 36. Ibid., pp. 170–172. 37. Ibid., p. 112. 38. Ibid., p. 114.

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rather from the mundane way in which we are inextricably caught up in one another’s lives. This point is more fully demonstrated in connection with the third séance discussed in the novel when Bishop Pike comes to Angel after Kirsten’s death to invite her to go to Israel with him. When he tries to persuade her by appealing to more allegations of poltergeist activity and another séance with Rachel Garret, who is supposed to have told him that he would die in the desert if Angel doesn’t go with him, she refuses this attempt to compromise her autonomy even before discovering that there were no disturbances and no séance, only bad dreams that have disturbed the bishop’s sleep.39 Although Angel as humanist knows enough to guard her autonomy against the bishop’s attempts to manipulate her even without knowing that his representations are fraudulent, this knowledge is no protection later against the self-recrimination that destroys her spiritually when he goes off to Israel without her and dies in the desert. Angel’s moral dilemma then goes to show how vulnerable people are in their love relationships to individuals like the bishop who respect neither others’ autonomy nor their own. While the essential difference between psychic and humanistic love was previously seen to turn on their different attitudes toward the force of circumstance, the insight added by Dick’s third bogus séance is that these circumstances are sometimes forced on people by others, and that when this occurs the one who loves, whether psychic or humanist, is vulnerable to injury, pain, and suffering. A final impromptu séance occurs when the two survivors, Angel Archer and Bill Lundborg, meet at the instigation of New Age guru Edgar Barefoot, whose seminars they have been attending in the wake of Tim’s and Kirsten’s deaths. After announcing rather pitifully that he is Timothy Archer come back to those he loves, Bill draws upon their common fund of experience to create for Angel a sense of the bishop’s presence.40 But at the same time she recognizes that 39. Ibid., pp. 207, 210. 40. Ibid., p. 229.

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Bill’s account of the bishop’s return displays all the symptoms of a schizophrenic breakdown.41 When Angel discovers that it was Barefoot who taught Bill to interpret these experiences in terms of the bishop having come back,42 she decides it would be better if she rather than Barefoot were to take care of him. This compassionate decision marks the beginning of her spiritual rebirth, something she thinks the bishop would have been happy about if he were alive to see it.43 What psychic and humanistic love share in common then, as well as vulnerability to suffering, is the compassionate response that suffering provokes. Just as Ena Twigg impersonating Jim Junior wanted him to be treated compassionately rather than being judged for his actions, so now Angel Archer wants to treat Bill Lundborg compassionately but without suspending her critical judgment about the value of his claims that the bishop has returned. This refusal marks the most essential difference remaining between the two loves in the compassion they share in common.

41. Ibid., pp. 231–235. 42. Ibid., p. 234. 43. Ibid., p. 253.

Autonomy, Arrogance, Agape Hendrik Hart

Our world is one world. On our TV screens in our living rooms we watch what happens as it happens no matter where it happens. We often know more about current events in Yugoslavia than about what happens in the rest of our apartment building. But our one world is also a divided world. The stories of our lives, the narrative traditions of our communities, the worldviews present in our cultures inspire, frame, and move us all in wildly divergent directions. Free trade in North America is both preached as last hope and condemned as the beginning of the end. Apartheid in South Africa is both defended as the last vestige of civilization and dismantled as core of a people’s rottenness. Environmental doom all over the world is both explained as a demonstrably unavoidable consequence of our present lifestyles and ignored as the scare tactics of enemies of progress. These divisions are debilitatingly deep. They can petrify us. They also mask Armageddon-provoking positions. The Oka conflict in Canada, the Los Angeles riots in the United States, the BosniaHerzegovina civil war in Europe, the Palestinians and Israelis in the Middle East, and the Tamil insurrections in the Far East all show the depth of unresolved conflict in our “modern” world. No significant Western community can these days count any longer on an articulation of its identity that has universal agreement within that community. Christians are not united, major Christian traditions are not united, major denominations within major traditions are not united. The same holds true for Humanism and its traditions, But the solution does not lie in our conversion to one fundamental tradition. “God protect us from civilization homegrown in England” say the heirs of Ghandi. “May God have mercy on us all if Christians set the 125

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agenda” says the memory-laden Jew. “There will be no end of weeping if the new world order will be that of the American way of life under the unchallenged leadership of George Bush” say the people of El Salvador. “Save us from the liberal arrogance called tolerance” say the Marxists. But if we do not find a way to live together we will soon not be able to exist together in the same one world. So the Brock Philosophical Society’s ten-year project of exploring love seems right on, especially when we as Westerners face serious critical exposures of traditional attempts to find unity in logocentric truth, that is, truth grounded in the centrality of reason. Such truth offers us certainty no longer, because the rational consensus is failing us. Promethean humanism seeking for freedom within the bounds of reason may have spoken to the imagination of moderns, it will have much less to offer to postmoderns. We have become aware that unity found in agreement based on conceptual orders capitalizes on a universality that ignores otherness, difference, individuality, and subjectivity. This critique comes from within atheist humanism, from thinkers such as Rorty and Derrida. Critics point out that in talking about love in the logocentric tradition we can safely ignore real people and instead analyze x’s love for y. Other critics see no need to deny the cognitive truth of poetic language. For them the poet puts into language a truth that is lost when translated into general propositions. Conceptual sameness, according to these critics, becomes an instrument of power for the sake of domination, mastery, and control, say these humanist critics, which marginalizes difference and weakness and takes no responsibility for the suffering caused by privileging what is same. Though its roots were in emancipatory hopes, the fruits of rational autonomy count too many poisonous berries among them. Our conceptual orders imprison us and render us incapable of finding the freedom we need for liberating the environment from our control or for feeding the poor. Philosophers may still savor our rational

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freedom, but others choke on it because of the lack of freedom our rational control has created for them. We care little for species that are not human and are glad to sacrifice these different species to the power of rational autonomy. In the same vein our Rawlsian liberal justice, which like truth is tied to the public boundaries of a rational framework, favors sameness and is unavailable for blacks, aboriginals, lesbians and gays, or women who are other and different. So if we want to live together, we need to look beyond reason and justice. In that context our looking at love here may help us find an alternative to reason as a channel for living together in one world. Reason will always have its place, of course, but not as the common ground for the common life. Love has its own problems, however. Conference discussions have shown that we do not share one love and as philosophers we are conditioned to choose among alternatives by means of logocentric criteria. This conference fills a decade in part because there are so many loves to sort out. And as a philosophy conference, it is tied to a rational tradition of problem solving. But we may possibly get another angle on these problems for the future if we imagine what it would be like if we attempted not so much a conceptual journey to discover rational truth about love, but more of a search via the venture of practicing love itself, no matter how deeply different our loves may be. The visible eupraxsophic fruits of our loving, to put it in the language of Paul Kurtz, may help us learn how truly to love. The search for one objectively true concept of love continually divides. But if I, for example, try to embody agape in exploring Promethean love, this alternative route might allow me to support and respect Promethean love even in contemplating its weaknesses; perhaps especially then. If we listen and share, I would say, more than argue and criticize love itself might let our different loves be love. The classical philosophical tradition tempts us to look for a conceptual same in agape and Promethean love, in a way that tempts each different love to push into the margins what is different in the .

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other. This is, I think, an unavoidable consequence if we subordinate love to reason by concentrating on objectivity and sameness. To rationally consider love as a concept, one that will meaningfully indicate some same, some constant and common element in all ten years of this project, runs the risk of obliterating the other of the different loves. For where sameness is our focus for truth and reality, difference will become incidental and other will be reduced to otherness. But the other, another, is just what love is eager to seek. So let us explore Kurtzian eupraxsophy, doing philosophy not so much as a battle of abstract argument, but as the shared pursuit of communal wisdom embodied in love. For all his Promethean audacity, Paul Kurtz has shown much eupraxsophic grace and humility. In his address and responses he has stressed that autonomy cannot survive without altruism. I gladly venture into an agapic discussion in relation to his Promethean love, hopefully with the joyful generosity exemplified by David Goicoechea’s “Humanistic Welcome.” Thus I will not embark on a traditional rational justification of what love I have to offer, but instead I will offer what love I have, in the hope that its fruits may tell its story. Of course, for me to pretend I possess either the wisdom or the love I have in mind would be arrogance. But to learn to pursue it in humility, to seek it eupraxsophically, might release hope for the future. Because in love as I know it I trust something that, if we could learn to practice it, might bind us together. It would hold us together even if we loved differently. Love might enable us to begin to find one another in our madly and violently divided world without pushing important differences into a private and noncognitive sphere, à la Enlightenment liberalism, and without wanting to force us all to believe the same, à la Christian orthodoxy. Love might let us be the different people we are without devouring one another or the rest of creation. So let me begin with the arrogance of agape. To those in search of love in autonomy, agape is arrogant for a number of reasons, chief

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among whom is that in the Christian tradition whose ancient narratives recommend agape, agape itself is often painfully absent; often preached, but not often practiced. As a Christian I stand ashamed when this truth is mentioned, because it is a truth that does turn the preaching of agape into a lie. The love which is said to be exemplified in self-giving and self-denial is too easily found exemplified in religious wars, heresy trials, efforts at keeping the community pure and unpolluted, and barriers to keep out infidels whose beliefs are not the same, women whose sex is not the same, races whose color is not the same. Talk of agape in this context sounds arrogant indeed. Whatever small beginnings of agape may have existed in the early church lost its vitality when the ecclesiastical tradition began to focus its love on beliefs of doctrine, that is, when reason became the model for faith and as a consequence love for the different became improper. Ever since the Christian tradition embraced logocentric power, it has been reluctant to let go of itself and since the middle ages has rejected the different believer as heretic, the different woman as witch, the different man as faggot, the different ethnos as Jew. It seems supremely ironic that a tradition which is spiritually homoerotic to the extreme should flex its muscles, as happened in Toronto the very day this paper was read, when it encounters in its midst a homoerotic priest who is different. The mention of agape in the context of Jim Ferry’s trial in an Anglican Bishop’s Court is arrogant indeed. Another offense to love for autonomy is the heteronomous command in which agape is rooted in the New Testament tradition. This offense, however, may allow us to pursue agape in spite of arrogance among those who have sought to practice it. If we recall that the roots of agape are in memories narrated in political images, the political process on which Canada is focused at this very time, may help us appreciate agape not as heteronomous interference in human affairs, but as a road to survival written into their constitution by people who had a vision of agape as way to the well-being of all

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humanity. That does not mean people were expected to produce the goods of agape as an instant and fearful response to a heteronomous power, but rather that people would seek agape as a life-giving search for self in other. Hence there is no need here to look upon the command metaphor in the agape tradition as an order that, against a people’s will, robs them of their freedom. In this context contemporary agape language is what Richard Rorty would call final vocabulary language. Paul Kurtz might refer to it as language intended to “recommend a way of life and an attitude of response,” which is how he refers to religious language in the essay “Pragmatic Naturalism in American Philosophy” in Philosophical Essays in Pragmatic Naturalism (PEPN, 37). Agape in the New Testament is a “final vocabulary” sort of word. It points not so much to a value, but names a total human disposition in which all values have been summarized; it is not so much one moral principle next to others, but the unity of all moral principles. Certain Promethean humanists regard love and nonviolence as dangers to the human species because they threaten humans with a vulnerability to extinction. There is no interest in fighting for survival. But Christians regard agape as a powerful road to survival, precisely by embracing vulnerability as the key to human life. Allow me then, in spite of the arrogance admittedly present in the agape tradition, to suggest two features of agape relevant to our concerns. The first is that its traditional language is that of selfdenial, of finding oneself in losing oneself. Postmodern language for this is: agape de-centers, agape is agency in progress, agape hopes for courage to let go of false selves, agape learns to seek the face of the other. The neighbor to love, as in the parable of the good Samaritan, is not of your own kind, has no social power, has fallen victim, and is ignored by the establishment. The second feature also has traditional language, most dramatically expressed as: greater love has no one than the love shown in laying down our life for another. Postmodern humanists would say: agape seeks to deconstruct centers of power that oppress

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selves without power, agape goes beyond the margins to be with those who suffer for lack of center-power. Both features point to a mystery, namely that of becoming a self in seeking another, gaining oneself in letting go, growing in strength by becoming vulnerable. Agape seeks to be a renewing, life-giving, redeeming love in the renunciation of power and control and the acceptance of vulnerability and suffering. It is not destructive of self, but rather seeks to let a self grow beyond being a self-centered self. This importance of agape can only be understood if agape is seen, not as a sentiment or feeling, but as the deepest core of human action. It is the active principle in and behind all social norms, human values, moral principles. Or, rather, all of these do not meet the measure of their authenticity unless they serve as avenues of agape. Without being a distinctive expression of agape, every human act is hollow. Such is the teaching of Paul in 2 Corinthians 13, which is another way of phrasing the teaching of Jesus in Matthew 22 that love fulfills the law and the prophets. All human action depends for its authenticity on being a form of agape. Promethean autonomy is very different. It has come through in various discussions at the conference as an autonomy characterized by rebellion in principle against authority and obedience and by a search for freedom in which human power is sought with the aim to be free from all constraints. Even though in actual human relations, such as government and parent-child relations, authority may be acknowledged and even though in practice many existing limits and constraints are acknowledged as unavoidable, the spiritual principles driving this form of humanism are fed by the uncontrollable urges of the egocentric individual to be in full control. And insofar as reason in our culture is the supreme form of access to control, it is not surprising that Promethean humanism also projects itself as an adumbration of the autonomy of reason. Now my aim is not to ask: how from this point of view do I understand Promethean love conceptually? Rather, I want to ask: how in this attitude do I relate to Promethean love? How can I relate

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to this different love? Since we are here pursuing conceptual understanding, given that we are doing philosophy, I might also phrase this is follows. I want to let our conceptual analysis not be its own rational focus, but I want to set it in a context of love, where this love directs our understanding, instead of letting a conceptual regime control our love. If there is no freedom for this pursuit I submit that rational autonomy and freedom may not be as interrelated as is often assumed. Now, the relationship of agape as other-seeking to autonomy as self-affirming may reveal a problem. The problem is not that agape, in seeking another, has difficulty recognizing Promethean love as different from agape. True, this difference need not be absolutized. The Prometheus of the myth has many echoes in the stories of agape. Prometheus and Jesus can in many respects travel in each other’s company. Yet it is clear that they are not sames, for many elements differ. And precisely among these differences there is a major difference that could be a problem. This major difference lies in agape’s hope to let go of autonomous self-control as well as of dominion over what is other than self. Promethean love, to the contrary, surrounds itself with autonomy and with the pursuit of what is rationally the same as an objective boundary of what is real, in order to control the real. The letter to the Philippians and the Prometheus myth, among important similarities, show this crucial difference. Both Jesus and Prometheus depart from the world of the gods for the sake of humanity and later, after having suffered, find acceptance in the realm they left. But Prometheus acts in rebellion and Jesus in surrender. So Promethean love has historically been a temptation for agape, the temptation to hold on rather than to let go. Historically agape’s failure has arguably been occasioned in part by jealousy of the power of Promethean autonomy. Promethean love presents a different, which perplexes agape. If agape encourages us to embrace this different, and this Promethean different is a self- and same-seeking love of autonomy, there may be a problem.

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Promethean humanism seeks freedom from bondage to what transcends the human, as well as free control and mastery over all that is not human. The freedom in question is autonomy, that is: freedom from heteronomous bondage and freedom to control what is other. The freedom is freedom to be autonomous, the autonomy is the autonomy to be free. Here humanity takes on the role of God in other traditions and this humanity is, therefore, atheist with regard to other gods. In this way Promethean humanism is a form of religion, showing evidence that a tradition shaped by a myth exercises its own form of final authority and demands, as tradition, loyalty to rebellion not as what some humans may at some time happen to desire, but as what it takes to be human. Promethean humans have no choice, in being human, but having to be rebels. In the humanist tradition Promethean freedom and autonomy have been differently interpreted as primarily freedom of the will or primarily rational autonomy. In Paul Kurtz I perceive primarily a focus on rational autonomy, which, to use his own description, may be found in his commitment to science (PEPN 12, 14). Critical inquiry, public, universal, and objective knowledge is not just what we pursue in the academy. We must rather respect them as limits to all knowing and seek in them the avenues of justification for whatever we claim to know. Kurtz still strongly believes in objective rational principles of criticism. Promethean autonomy within the bounds of reason is not just an emancipatory search for freedom from want, from superstition, from disease, from ignorance, from domination, and from other inappropriate self-limitations. It is more than a concern for individuality as locus of responsibility, the space for each of us to exercise our own subjectivity, our freedom for self-agency. The emancipatory interests in the Promethean humanist tradition are not simply those of autonomy and self-determination in the face of foreign powers, such as we witness in the three-way struggle between aboriginal Canadians, French Canadians, and Englishspeaking Canadians; or in the multi-faced struggle of the ANC, the

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PAC, Inkhata, and white South Africans; or in the emancipatory interests of women, homosexuals, and the poor. The Promethean tradition also seeks freedom to choose and impose limits in a way exemplified in what Pierre Trudeau was fond of saying during his first election campaign: I submit only to such authority as I impose upon myself. Given the history of arrogance in the agape tradition, I hesitate to point to it in another love tradition. But perhaps I am allowed to ask Promethean humanists: is autonomy and self-determination as freedom to stand above any and all determination that is not original with humanity itself, freely creating its own meaning, inventing its own values, seeking itself as the sovereign origin of its own limits, if indeed that is a fair characterization, is that not an autonomy that even in the Greek world of the Prometheus myth is feared as destructive arrogance, what the Greeks called hubris? Might not autonomy as law unto oneself, as human ultimacy, make it very difficult to see the other—whether a human other or indeed any other—as a limit, which is not an imposition, but an invitation to agape? Kurtz’s preferred route to freedom seems to be autonomous reason. Over centuries, reason grew to be a supreme law for humanists, as well as the supreme access to that law. Lately, however, postmodern humanist thought has discovered the limits of reason as barriers to freedom. There is talk of a dialectic of reason and freedom. A dialectic given with the tension between autonomy as rational control and autonomy as freedom, in which the control of rational authority is experienced as an assault on freedom and freedom without reason is experienced as degenerate arbitrariness. This sets up the choice between a rational autonomy that keeps the human will in bondage, and an autonomously free will run out of control. Charles Taylor explores this issue in the closing essay of The End of Philosophy (Baynes, Bohman, Mccarthy, MIT Press, 1987). It is possible that in Paul Kurtz’s thought this dialectic is also operative, if it is indeed a dialectic that holds Promethean love captive. One potential dialectic may be connected with the possibility

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that behind the drive for autonomous rational control lies a fear of letting go, which forever bars the way to real freedom. Another lies in Kurtz’s commitment to science as key to naturalistic philosophy (PEPN 12, 14), which may be in tension with philosophy as eupraxsophy. For if eupraxsophy is offered and recommended as a way of life it has, in Kurtz’s own language, religious overtones. But commitment to science renders religious language suspect. Yet another possible tension lies in Kurtz’s view of science as the prime gateway to autonomy. For in this view science dictates limits to human experience. Not in the sense that science has its own limits, but in the sense that outside of science human experience is rendered cognitively suspect. Experience outside of the scientific bounds of the same must be regarded as an other without cognitive power. In that view there is no place for truth and knowledge in poetry. The very meaning of truth and knowledge, arbitrarily so in the light of history, is kept within the bounds of science. If there is truth and knowledge hidden to science and speakable only in the language of poetry, then this form of rational autonomy is at the same time an authoritative form of keeping people in the dark. In that case the realities confronted by Bishop Pike in his relation with psychics, explored by Richard Berg in his paper “Psychic and Humanistic Love,” can only be interpreted as fraudulent. But how, in that case, could naturalism be nonreductive and contextual, how could it really make room for “many kinds of events, properties, and qualities . . .” as Kurtz clearly wants (PEPN, 15)? If by “limits of science” we mean “science is limited,” who could object? But if we mean science itself sets the limits to all cognitive experience, problems arise. Even if we say, as Kurtz does, that science is only “the refinement and elaboration” of common procedures of problem solving in ordinary life (PEPN, 22). may not these general, systematic, and abstract elaborations in turn threaten to become the legitimators of concrete and ordinary procedures? In ordinary life religious claims are never experienced by the religious as needing scientific grounds, verification, and cognitive significance

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for their authenticity. Yet Kurtz insists that outside of such limits we can make no reality claims (PEPN, 15). Richard Berg’s perceptive analysis of Bishop Pike’s experiences raises important issues here about what is meant by reality. I agree that religion and science differ. But if religion is, in Kurtz’s words, “central to human life’ (PEPN, 36) and recommends, as he says, “a way of life and an attitude of response” (PEPN, 37), it becomes important to ask how science relates to religion in terms of what he calls “‘our ultimate concerns’ and the basic ideals by which we live” (PEPN, 37). If commitment to science is itself ultimate and also part of eupraxsophy, the language of science participates in both the language of ultimacy and the language of verification. But these two languages are, in Kurtz’s own views, mutually exclusive. As commitment, commitment to science itself lies beyond verification. But in that case some of the fundamentals of commitment to science are beyond verification and are therefore cognitively questionable. To recommend the way of science as a way of life when the language of such a recommendation is noncognitive seems problematic. Reason by its own limits has a commitment to the same that can’t let the different be except within limits of the same. In the concept humanity all humans are the same. Their difference, when part of the concept, is a same difference. Hence, to repeat, humans loving one another can all be x’s and y’s. Conceptual grasping of reality is grasping of what is general and universal. Thus reason’s grasp is limited if in fact there is a good deal more to knowledge, reality, truth than what is the same. I find no fault with reason as such. Access to universality is a benefit to humanity, given to it only within the bounds of reason. But these bounds are themselves limited and cannot, I suggest, be a fixed, over-all limit to reality and experience. That would be a Promethean audacity too reductionist to do justice to reality. If we can accept knowing as a human privilege whose reality includes intuitions and intimations and if these intuitions and intimations will not in the final analysis allow themselves to be reduced to the limits of scientific reason, then we

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know that we know more than we can know scientifically or rationally and we know this legitimately. We know this because we honor our stubborn experience beyond the control of science. There is no reason to doubt that what we have come to indicate in our culture as logic, reason, and science are those procedures that, in giving us access to what is the same in things, access to universality, give us an instrument of control, control that can be of great benefit. It does indeed, in Promethean style, give us foresight. But if control of the same becomes another name for truth, essence, reality, and knowledge—as it has in Western tradition—then we have not only become control freaks, but we have also begun to deny ourselves contact with and knowledge of all that reality indicated by what is different to reason, the other of conceptual control. The same gives us appropriate controls and freedoms. But does it also give us the limit of all freedom and control? Promethean audacity and arrogance in the free creative spirit here seem hemmed in by rational autonomy. Values are created in rebellion against authority and simultaneously become objective, universal moral principles dependent on rational inquiry whose canons are not freely created. In the name of rebellion against authority, reason has rejected some kind of authority, only to replace it with the authoritarian rule of reason. Historically rational authority has become a domination of reason that destroys the difference of woman, the other of same-sex orientation, the a-rational cognitive source found in emotion, the reach beyond the here and now of religion, the subjectivity which is key to human responsibility, the individuality without which science itself would become stagnant I suggest that if the commitment to science becomes the limit of commitment to autonomy, it shows the way, it becomes—in Kurtz’s terminology—a recommended way of life, a religion. If religion as a final and last word is rejected by science, the way of science would be not to have a last word. Yet as self-proclaimed limit of all knowledge, science pretends to have the last word. As religion science can, viewed from within science as the last word, have no

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cognitive value, because the last word of religion is noncognitive according to science. So the minute science becomes itself the last word on what is cognitive, it speaks a last word. But when science speaks such a last word it becomes incomprehensible. Science functioning as recommended way of life interferes with selfknowledge of science within science, it sets up barriers to selfcriticism. It has turned in upon itself and become blind to the differences and others beyond the margins of science. Promethean audacity seems caught in a dialectic of defiant will and rational autonomy. Can it escape lack of solidarity and suffering with and for the different? Does not autonomy as control favor the strong? Promethean love bound within the limits of naturalistic humanism of the rationalistic variety poses serious problems, as I see it, from within the bounds of agape. Promethean love may suffer from our lust for control, for domination channeled along the lines of science. Such love has difficulty hearing the cry of women, the poor. and others. It may be, however, that Promethean love itself denies these limitations. Allow me, then, to pursue still one step further, if that is not intrusive, the road into Promethean love indicated by agape. I mentioned earlier the possibility that in the preoccupation with autonomy there possibly lies a vulnerability, a fear. Does autonomous self-control cover over a fear of difference, of what is mystery to the same, of what lies beyond human control? Is autonomy possibly a hidden form of self-marginalization? Is there perhaps even a different self within the same self, is there more to sell than rational self, for which Promethean autonomy has no eye and which places limits on Promethean love? Agape may be amiss in its perception of this love which is its other, even when the other is just what agape seeks. If that is so, how could, in a conversation between Promethean love and agape, agape offer support that is nonintrusive, empowering, and able to let the other be, without self-destruction in the process? How could agape find itself in this Promethean other here? I hope there may be something wholesome in suggesting that Promethean humanism

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continue to interpret the myth of Prometheus and look for elements in it that might help it overcome the tension in audacious autonomy between rational control and willful arrogance, between submission to reason and creative freedom. Promethean love may have more contact with agape than may appear at first sight. Promethean love will suffer for humanity, but so does the love of Christ. Promethean love prizes foresight, but so does the quest for agape with all one’s mind. Promethean love suffers, but so does the crucified one. Promethean love even, by its very name, affirms the power of mythical narratives in which divinities play powerful roles. So it might consider: what is the place in the myth of Prometheus’s reconciliation with Zeus? How can we read Prometheus’s deliverance by Heracles as autonomy? What is the significance of Prometheus himself being more than simply human? There are elements in the myth, I would suggest, that could re-orient a humanism of creative will and rational autonomy which professes to find its saint in the myth of Prometheus. Let me return to where I began. How will agape and Promethean love travel together in our one world? How will the one justify itself in the face of the other? Historically Christians have condemned humanism and humanism has banned Christianity to the private realm. I am open to being told by a Promethean: “Don’t tell me how to love, just show me your love, and I’ll decide for myself.” In turn I ask: “Give me that space in the public arena. Give me the space that is now blocked because autonomy limits the public to reason. If you want rational autonomy for yourself in order to be free, don’t impose that freedom on me.” We might well be able to move along, for some time at least, in what, according to Richard Taylor in his paper “Aristotle on Love and Friendship,” Aristotle called a friendship of utility.

Part Four SEXUALITY AND LOVE

Love, Sex, and Marriage A Problem Area Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie Bullough

Love is as much a cultural construct as it is a genetic biological need. Similarly, though sex is a biological drive, its place in society is socially defined. Throughout much of the history of Western culture love and sex have often been defined to exclude one another, and even when they have been grouped together on a more inclusive basis, it was not until the twentieth century that the two were united with marriage. For the most part in Western culture we have had a bipolar model of love, with romantic love, in which sexual passion was sometimes included, was not part of marriage. Marriage legalized sex activity but it was for procreation and family and, though it might have included compassionate love, only rarely did it also include romantic love. Like so many things in our culture, we can trace some of the origins of our differing concepts of love back to the Greeks who defined love in at least two different ways. One was eros, an ennobling feeling. The second kind of love was agape, a selfless concern for the well-being of others, which also included philia (friendship, brotherhood, sisterhood). Separate from these definitions of love was erotike, sexual passion, although later erotike was combined with eros to produce romantic love. For the Greeks, sex and love were different things; one was a material thing, the other an aspect of the mind or spirit. Most philosophical discussion of love tended to concentrate on eros and derived from Plato’s Symposium, where the beauty or goodness of an object aroused the subject’s love. The subject of the erotic feelings was always a man, but the object of his erotic feelings 143

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could be either a man or a woman. Love was not normally discussed as an experience of women, although some of the lost poems of Sappho may have done so. The Greeks did not dismiss erotike, but elevated eros above it and clearly separated it from marriage. In spite of its formulation in Greek thought, agape is usually discussed in terms of St. Paul and a Christian tradition, since this is the way it was interpreted in the West. In this Christian interpretation the attractive or unattractive properties of the object are entirely irrelevant. Agape became, in Christian terms, God’s love for each of us, and this was not dependent on a valuable quality in the subject. Even the unworthy person could be an object of God’s love. By implication it could be extended to humans who, in imitation of God, loved their fellow human beings. The concept of romantic love developed in the later Middle Ages. Scholars have spent a good deal of time and energy in trying to trace the sources of romantic love to Islamic lyric poetry, to Greek Platonism, to Ovid—apparently all contributory factors—but in a Marxist interpretation it also marks the economic emergence of women and their ability to act as patrons for the traveling poets. Romantic love was associated with knighthood and chivalry, and in poems and literature love was pictured as a despairing and tragic emotion that drove the male lover to accomplish great deeds of derring-do for his beloved and the Christian God. C. S. Lewis wrote that this new concept of romantic love first espoused by eleventhcentury French poets gradually spread throughout Europe and “effected a change which has left no corner of our ethics, our imagination, or our daily life untouched” and has led to the establishment of “impassable barriers between us and the classical past or the Oriental present.”1 In the chivalric literature, love was the emotion produced by the unrestrained adoration of a lady. Love might be rewarded by smiles, kisses, or still other favors, but the presence or absence of these was 1. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 4.

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not supposed to have any effect on the love itself. The male in love lost interest in food and drink, scarcely noticed whether it was hot or cold outside, and concentrated every fiber of his being on his love for his lady and in the process was ennobled by his lady. Note again that love is defined in masculine terms, and that sex is not part of it. The lady was a vision of love, and like the Virgin Mary she was unattainable. Undoubtedly, the frailties of human nature meant that sometimes the lady rewarded her adoring suitor by going to bed with him but this was not part of the philosophy. In fact it could not be, since the women patrons were usually married to another and these marriages had been arranged for dynastic or other reasons, and not for love. Some, however, sought to tie the ennobling passion of love, eros in other words, with erotike, or sexual passion. Putting forth this new vision of love was Andreas Capellanus whose patroness, Marie, countess of Champagne, was a major force in the transmission of the concepts of romantic love. Love to Andreas was a passion that came from looking at and thinking too much about the body of a member of the opposite sex; it could only be satisfied by embracing and fulfilling love’s commands, in other words by sexual intercourse. Love, however, was still separate from marriage. Marriage was a contractual obligation while love was entirely voluntary. True love might well become adulterous, but it need not end up that way. It troubled Andreas that he might really be sanctioning adultery or at least fornication, and his book is full of ambiguities. Andreas’s concept of love was also limited to the upper classes since he believed the lower classes would not have the virtues necessary for love. For example, if a man strongly desired a peasant woman, Andreas implied he could rape her on the spot since a courteous approach would only be wasted on a woman who could not possibly feel love.2

2. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, trans. J. J. Parry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), bk. 1, chap. 11.

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This changing concept of love represents both a vulgarization of Plato’s concept of love as well as a humanization of love, transferring it from God to men and women. Plato had conceived of love primarily as between two men or between a man and a youth, and this to the medieval church was anathema. When the study of Plato was intensified in the fifteenth century, many writers were concerned with avoiding the charge of homosexuality. They could do this either by attributing only an intellectual and moral fervor to those who loved members of the same sex or by attributing to women, not men, the personal beauty that excited men to love and impelled the lover to seek the highest forms of beauty.3 If these were the only alternatives the course of the Christian church was clear. The contradictions of medieval Christian views of sexuality were never made more evident than when the church’s very antisexuality and fear of sex that led Christianity to elevate women. The more materialistic concepts of courtly love were reinforced with the spiritual aspects of Platonic love. It was through the ennobling love of women that man could attain the contemplative state that led by degrees to a desire for things divine. In spite of Andreas, sex remained suspect and this suspicion was refortified by basic Christian hostility to sex. In fact by the end of the Middle Ages overpowering sexual desire was regarded as a sickness. Though the classical Greeks and the Romans were never as adverse to sex as the Christians, by the time Christianity appeared there was a strong Stoic and Neoplatonic tradition that downplayed the physical for the spiritual and expressed outright hostility to sexuality. In a sense this is an intellectualizing of what can only be called a deep distrust of passionate sexual love in both the Greek and Roman world. A good summary of this distrust was the saying that when desire was doubled it became love but when love was doubled it turned into madness. It was the madness of love that led Sappho to leap to her death and that robbed Lucretius of reason. 3. John Charles Nelson, Renaissance Theory of Love (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), p. 78.

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Since madness itself was an illness, then love too, especially a driven sexual love, could be and was described as an illness known as lovesickness. At the root of lovesickness lay an unfulfilled, sometimes unspeakable desire, and yet the mind and body were such close partners that bodily symptoms revealed what the patient repressed. Lovesickness entered the medical consciousness through the writings of Galen (c. 130–200). In a commentary on the treatise on epidemics attributed to Hippocrates, Galen listed the feverish results of love sorrows and encouraged those so stricken to take frequent baths, drink wine, ride, and see and hear everything pleasurable. If the disease prevailed it was necessary to call forth excitement, awake joy through competition, and counter the desire to quarrel and fight with others by seeking diversions,4 including sexual ones. Love was a practical problem to Galen, not a theoretical one, and one which called for medical intervention. One of his successors, Oribasius, went further than Galen and urged that the physician confronted with a specially troublesome case of melancholy prescribe therapeutic intercourse as an effective antidote.5 Other classical physicians adopted this idea for lovesickness itself as did Cælius Aurelianus (fifth century), who wondered whether it was best to encourage intercourse or to prohibit it.6 Generally the recommendation for men was to solve their problems by intercourse. Such a prescription, in an age of double standards, could not be given to women, even though lovesickness with them might lead to hysteria. Ultimately the solution recommended for them was digital manipulation of the genitals, i.e. masturbation. 4. This survives in an Arabic version that was translated into German by Franz Pfaff, Galeni in Hippocratus epidemiarum libr. VI comm. VI–VIII, Corpus Medicorum Graecorum (Leipzig: Teubner, 1940), vol. 10, 2, 2. 5. For a discussion of this see Mary E. Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), p. 10. 6. Cæelius Aurelianus, On Acute Diseases and on Chronic Diseases, edited and translated by I. E. Drabkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), V, “Mania,” 78, p. 559.

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Cælius Aurelianus’s solution was not passed directly into Western Europe although ideas of lovesickness continued to be talked about, usually as something that afflicted women more than men.7 It again became a subject for discussion with the arrival of Arabic-Greek medical writings through Constantine the African (d. c. 1087). He held that love was a pleasurable disease and wrote that many medical writers recommended sexual intercourse as the best remedy. Coitus, he held, not only expelled superfluous humors, but chased out fixed ideas associated with love.8 Moreover, such intercourse need not necessarily be with one’s beloved to be effective. Almost any old partner would do. Constantine, of course, is speaking of men, not women. Western European commentators followed Constantine in recommending therapeutic intercourse. Gerard of Berry in the thirteenth century, for example, recommended consorting with and embracing girls, having multiple intercourse with them, and switching to new ones as a sure cure.9 There are many others who followed the same prescription. One of the more fascinating aspects of this discussion is that it takes place in a society that theoretically emphasized celibacy as the highest ideal. Lovesickness continued to play a role in medical literature although there was always the counter Christian trend going back to Augustine emphasizing the potential evilness of sex. Some of this came over into the medical literature in the eighteenth century where lovesickness not only remained an illness, but sexual activity itself was considered a debilitating activity. In a sense this can be regarded as an attempt to give scientific justification to Christian ideals of celibacy and coitus only when offspring would result. This medicalization of sex coincides with a growing secularization in 7. This is the view of the encyclopedist Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive origimum, edited by W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), “femineus amor,” XI.2.24. 8. Wack, Lovesickness, p. 41. 9. Ibid., p. 69.

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Western thought but it has its intellectual basis in the appearance of new medical system makers who emphasize the necessity of an equilibrium between intake and outgo as essential to health. Their views about sexual activity are also influenced by confusing the sequellae of sexual activity with the symptoms of third-stage syphilis with sexual activity. The result was in the nineteenth century the widespread belief in masturbatory insanity and the “medical proof” of the dangers of sexuality. Many of the medical writers adopted the Augustinian ideas that sex was only supposed to be engaged in for the purpose of procreation. Most of the medical writers, almost all of whom were men, recognized the difficulty of celibacy for the male, and put the burden on the woman. Some writers such as the physician William Acton even went so far as to argue that women were made of finer material then men, and as such were not interested in sex, and only engaged in it in order to become mothers and keep their husbands at home.10 The result was a new variant of romantic love. Though in the nineteenth century, as arranged marriages declined, such love was possibly attainable since it would culminate in marriage, the women had to teach the male self-control over his own sexuality, something that was believed to be easier for them than for the male because they, or at least the good women among them, were not interested in sex except for the purpose of having children. Unrestrained sex was not only bad, but an illness that was regarded as a major cause of death. Women were a special creation. Dr. Gregory, a Presbyterian minister, summed this up in the instructions to his motherless daughters in the nineteenth century: Your superior delicacy, your modesty, and the usual severity of your education, preserve you, in a great measure, from any temptation to those vices to which we [males] are most subjected. The natural softness and sensibility of your dispositions particularly fits you for the practice of those duties 10. For a discussion of this see Vern L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

150 Bullough: Love, Sex, and Marriage where the heart is chiefly concerned. And this, along with the natural warmth of your imagination, rends you particularly susceptible to the feelings of devotion. . . . One of the chief beauties in a female character, is that modest reserve, that retiring delicacy, which avoids the public eye and is not disconcerted even at the gaze of admiration.11

Love and marriage in effect were no longer contradictory in the nineteenth-century popular literature, but sexual activity, though necessary to perpetuate the family, remained suspect. It was only the modesty and delicacy of the good woman who prevented marriage from degenerating into a sexual orgy. Historians, however, have a problem in determining what reality of sexual behavior was, as distinct from the prescriptive literature. Undoubtedly there was a great deal of skepticism among the populace about the supposed ills of sex, and even those who believed in it often could not practice the abstinence they felt necessary for health. Still the so-called spiritualization of sex was a significant development of the nineteenth century, and the result for those who did not adhere to the ideal could be massive guilt feelings. Women, even though it put the burden of denial upon them, were willing to take on such a responsibility if only to control the number of pregnancies they had. It also became a power play for women and one of the issues of women’s suffrage was the argument by many of the women and their male advocates that they would raise the level of politics by infusing their idealism into the arena. We know from the vast increase in prostitution in the nineteenth century and the decline in family size among certain groups in society that many women did deny the marital bed to their husbands. Romantic love was kept alive but it also meant often it was not consummated, even though it was legalized by marriage. Keeping alive the lovesickness tradition in a new guise were Freud and the psychoanalysts who reinterpreted the Galenic belief in lovesickness 11. Quoted in Vern L. Bullough, Brenda Shelton, and Sarah Slavin, The Subordinated Sex (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1988), p. 248.

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for men and hysteria for women. Freud argued that men who are deprived of regular sexual activity can fall victims to neurotic ailments. Women on the other hand become hysterical and complain of imaginary illnesses. Cure for the man is to find a sexual or other suitable outlet for his pent-up energies. Cure for hysteria can be sex given to the woman by a man, but the norms of the Freudian era did not include women seeking out sexual activity for themselves. Over the course of the twentieth century, norms slowly changed and sexual love became possible for women as well as men. This was made possible by the development of contraceptives; greater employment opportunities; changes in attitudes about premarital sex; increasing entrance of sexuality into public discussion; the emphasis put on female sexuality in advertising, media, and elsewhere; the increasing open discussion about sexuality; and ultimately the availability of abortion. A new message of love and sexuality and marriage was disseminated by several generations of reformers, many of them women. Most of these reformers felt that traditional marriage was a failure and it needed to be redefined if it was to survive, giving women greater freedom and eliminating the double standard. To do so they emphasized the sexual and affectional basis of intimacy and the importance of companionship in marriage, and tried to include not only romantic love but sexuality for both sexes within marriage. Though some of the early leaders in such a movement were men such as Havelock Ellis, it was often women who carried this kind of message to other women. One of the leaders was Marie Carmichael Stopes, an English author whose marriage manual first appeared in the 1920s and had sold over 900,000 copies by 1940. Strongly supportive of the concept of marriage, she pointed out the rottenness and danger of the unhappy marriage that came about when love was separate from sex, and both, she felt, should be part of marriage. Since the sexual discontent undermining marriage was something that could be remedied, advice writers such as Stopes took to writing marriage manuals on how to renew love through sex. They argued that while in the past marriage had been held together

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by the economic dependence of the wife, by the sense of duty of the husband, and by law, there had to be a new union of equals who chose to join their lives for companionship. This new force, which was to bind love and marriage, was sexual compatibility. Marie Stopes, for example, said: Where the act of coitus are rightly performed, the pair can disagree, can hold opposite views about every conceivable subject . . . without any . . . desire to separate; they will enjoy each other’s differences. Contrariwise, . . . if the sex act is not properly performed . . . all that harmony and suitability in other things will be of no avail.12

Margaret Sanger, another women writer of sex manuals, wrote that in marriage, as distinct from every other human relationship, the bedrock of lasting happiness in every “respect lies in a proper physical adjustment of the two persons, and a proper physical management of their mutual experiences of [sexual] union.”13 The cornerstone of a proper physical management for Sanger was built on the use of effective contraceptives so the life of the woman would not be governed by frequent unwanted pregnancies. It was believed and taught that once women’s sexual needs were accorded an equal status to those of men, the norms of companionship and mutuality in marriage would inevitably extend into the domain of sex and become the seal of love. Hannah and Abraham Stone said that “the sexual embrace should become the expression of mutual desire and passion. The joy of sex is increased when it is mutual.”14 The list of advice givers could go on to include Theodore Van de Velde, M. J. Exner, Eustace Chesser, et al., but the point to 12. Marie Michael Stopes, Enduring Passion (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1929), p. 22. 13. Margaret Sanger, Happiness in Marriage (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1926). 14. Hannah and Abraham Stone, A Marriage Manual (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939), p. 215.

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emphasize is that sex was seen as the cement, the binding tie that would keep romantic love alive through the long history of a marriage. Sexual intercourse was not to be an end in itself or simply voluptuous pleasure, but as a means of expression that made the couple one. For a brief time then, love, sex, and marriage were all grouped together with marriage as the cement holding them together. The dualism of the Greeks was no more. But why was marriage necessary? If it was, and as the couple aged, what could they do to keep the romantic flame alive which had brought them together? Sex, which had been so long excluded from discussions of love, came to assume more and more importance. If, as Stopes argued, sex was the key to successful marriage, then it was important that sexual eroticism be embedded into the culture of keeping alive romantic love. This became an increasing burden with the result that in the new union of sex and romantic love, sex became the most important. In other words, the pleasurable, expressive and communicative qualities of sex assumed an independent value and justification; sexual expression no longer relied exclusively upon a romantic rationale.15

Marriage manuals were replaced by sex manuals such as Joy of Sex, emphasizing that the purpose of sex was pleasure.16 Sex became a new form of pleasurable recreation. Comfort said: Sex is the one place were we today can learn to treat people as people . . . . If we really make it work it makes us more, not less, receptive to each other as people. This is the answer to anyone who thinks that the conscious effort to increase our sex range is “mechanical” or a substitute for treating each other as people— 15. This theme is developed in great detail by Steven Seidman, Romantic Longings: Love in America 1830–1980 (New York: Routledge, 1991). This quotation is from p. 126. 16. Alex Comfort, ed., The Joy of Sex (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977), p. 96.

154 Bullough: Love, Sex, and Marriage we may start that way, but it is an excellent entry to learning that we are people.17

Sex was still part of love in Hugh Hefner’s terms, but he added that sex is not, nor should it be, limited to love alone. He emphasized that “Love and sex are certainly not synonymous.” “Sex exists—with and without love,” and though it is preferable “as a medium of love,” “it is legitimate as a medium of pleasure.”18 Though the new emphasis on sex had started as an effort to revive romantic love within marriage, once sex as a medium of pleasure began to be emphasized in the media, as was increasingly the case, many questioned why it had to be confined to marriage. Once sex was recognized as having other purposes than procreation, other forms of nonprocreative sex gain legitimacy. Gay and lesbian relationships, which had always been there, emerged as a significant proportion of the sexual activity of the society. Such relationships could also be defined as including love. The definition of love was broadened but once again also sex was seen as independent of love. Obviously there was a backlash to this, evident in campaigns against pornography, homosexuality, abortion, teenage pregnancy, and many other aspects of sexuality. In the words of a psychiatrist and critic hostile to the developments taking place, Willard Gayling: “The only empirical results of . . . the sexual revolution seem to be the spread of genital herpes and AIDS, an extraordinary rise in the incidence of cancer of the cervix, and a disastrous epidemic of teenage pregnancies.19

Interestingly the backlash did not return to the denial of sexuality in love so evident in the past, but rather to attempting to confine love and sex to marriage. What was radical 70 years ago has become the 17. Ibid., p. 9. 18. Hugh Hefner, “The Playboy Philosophy,” Playboy 10 (February 1963), p. 48. 19. Willard Gaylin, Rediscovering Love (New York: Viking, 1986), p. 11.

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conservative norms of today and many religious groups offer seminars in marriage renewal that emphasize the importance of sex in bringing back romantic love. To them love, sex, and marriage are the same thing. As one commentator said: We are beginning to realize, in fact, that sexual liberation divorced from love and creation is not a revolution at all but . . . leads to a depersonalization and devaluation of relationships and thus of life itself, which leads to . . . despair and anomie. . . . It is even possible to see the recent . . . tolerance of loveless sex as one of those desperate attempts at adaptation that have often marked the death throes of any line of cultural, biological, or artistic development.20

But are sex, love, and marriage a natural amalgam? They have not been throughout much of Western history, and though they were for a brief time in the twentieth century, the very changes that made the three come together, the development of oral contraceptives and other effective contraceptives, the legalization of abortion, the increased opportunities for work for women, the easing of restrictions against divorce, also made sex for pleasure possible, and this concept seems here to stay regardless of AIDS. It was humanist-oriented reformers who led the battle to incorporate sex into the concept of love and emphasized the importance of sexuality in marriage. Some of us were also the leaders or spokesmen for sex as pleasure, although many of us also emphasized responsibility for the outcomes as well. Though we cannot speak for others, we believe that the reality of the situation is that love is more than sexual compatibility or sexual ability. We also hold that sexual urges and satisfaction can take place outside of a love relationship, and that both love and sexuality can occur not only between a man and a woman but between two men or two women 20. George Leonard, The End of Sex: Erotic Love After the Sexual Revolution (New York: Bantam Books, 1984). See also “The End of Sex,” Esquire, December 1982, pp. 74–75.

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and in other ways as well. Sexuality is both an aspect of love and a pleasurable activity. Similarly, love is part of a marriage but can exist independently of it. Sex, contrary to Marie Stopes, is not enough to hold a love relationship together, and love has many meanings, not all of which include sexuality. For some, sex and love are an integral part of their marriage, and they might be called the lucky ones. For others, one of the ingredients is lost along the way but other factors hold the marriage together. Even the best of sexual companions might also decide to separate because they are not compatible in other ways. In short, as humanists we need to emphasize that sex is not the cure-all for all bad relationships. Sex has finally been recognized as part of love, but as a pleasurable intimate activity it need not be confined to the love relationship. We do not deny love because Sappho jumped off a cliff and we should not deny our sexuality because it fails to continually fortify love or because two people grow apart. Love and sex and marriage have usually been separate in the past and, for many in today’s world, they remain separate. Sometimes they are only separate temporarily, a passion of the moment so to speak, and it is then up to the couple to solve their own disagreements if they can. For better or worse, love and sex have become more strongly connected in this century than ever before, but perhaps this coming together of the two, especially when they are institutionalized in marriage, makes us believe we cannot have one without the other. We can and do.

Love in Humanist Perspective, Four Decades Ago and Now Morton Hunt

In 1961, at the invitation of Sir Julian Huxley, I contributed my idea of a humanist view of love to a collection of essays he was putting together. Tim Madigan suggested that I review and update my article for the present volume; I agreed to do so, but with some trepidation, fearing the analysis I had made so long ago might, in the light of subsequent developments, look myopic or even purblind. To my surprise, my overview holds up fairly well, though I suspect this is due less to brilliant thinking on my part than to the validity of the humanist perspective. I restate here the main ideas of that piece, adding to them to take into account later historical processes, particularly the sexual revolution, the women’s movement, and recent investigations of behavioral and social scientists. I What did, and do, I mean by love in humanist perspective? Many authors in this volume address that question, but I’d like a turn at bat. By humanism I mean, of course, the scientific-rationalist view of the cosmos and all its objects and processes. The humanist view of love seeks to explain it not in terms of poetry, drama, or classic love stories but in terms of the sciences that deal with human emotion and behavior, primarily psychology, sociology, anthropology, and behavior genetics. Some stubborn physical scientists still maintain that the first three of these are not real sciences, but the preponderance of informed 157

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opinion at the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and most major foundations and universities is that they are indeed sciences, even though they deal with causal interactions so complex that researchers can rarely establish cause-and-effect correlations higher than .30. Such a correlation means that condition A is only 30 percent likely to be followed by condition B, or that a quantitative change in A is likely to be followed by a change in B only 30 percent as large. In contrast, correlations of 1.0 are common in the physical sciences: It is true not 30 percent of the time but always that raising the temperature of pure water at sea-level barometric pressure to 100 C. will cause it to boil. What the behavioral and social sciences tell us about love is therefore a miscellany of probabilistic hypotheses, not a body of empirical certainties. Still, they are vastly preferable to the selfindulgent ignorance of those who fear that scientific understanding will rob love of its glory, even as Keats, long ago, thought that Newton’s account of the optics of rainbows would rob them of beauty: Philosophy1 will clip an Angel’s wings, Conquer all the mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine— Unweave a rainbow . . . . Lamia, 11, 234–237

Keats wrote that in 1820, but many people today, including quite a few of the intelligentsia, still believe that scientific understanding is the enemy of feeling and beauty. An egregious instance of such obscurantism was Senator William Proxmire’s 1975 ridicule of the work of two sociologists with a small grant of $84,000 from the National Science Foundation to study passionate and companionate love. Proxmire’s know-nothing declaration:

1. By which Keats meant science.

Promethean Love 159 I object to this . . . not only because I’m sure that even if they spend $84 million or $84 billion they wouldn’t get an answer that anyone would believe. I’m also against it because I don’t want the answer. I believe that 200 million other Americans want to leave some things in life a mystery, and right at the top of things we don’t want to know is why a man falls in love with a woman and vice versa.

But such primitivistic bombast is belied by everyday experience. Who does not thrill to the sight of a rainbow, even if he or she had physics courses in college? Who, having studied nutrition and the processes of digestion, no longer enjoys delicious food? Who, even if aware of current knowledge of the size and structure of the universe, finds a starry sky any less wonderful than did the poets of old? It seems to me, indeed, that the more we know about rainbows, food, and the cosmos, the more wonderful they seem. So, too, with love. If it were dispelled by being understood, it would be only a foolish fantasy, as unreal as angel’s wings and underground gnomes. But only imaginary and pathological forms of love are at risk of being evaporated by the hot light of science; real love—or, rather, the many forms of it—are as rapturous or inspiring, as sustaining or comforting, as ever when understood. Or better than ever: While scientific understanding can help us recognize and avoid unrealistic kinds of love, it can enable us to appreciate real love, deepen it, and keep it in repair. II A scientific approach to any subject must first define the phenomenon it is about to consider. But how to define a phenomenon that takes as many varied and almost unrelated forms as love? Let me say, first, what I do not mean by it in this essay: namely, parental love, filial love, the love of God, country, money, adventure, music, one’s dog, chocolates, and so on. What I do mean is the love of man for woman and woman for man, or the comparable love between

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people of the same sex, in its many variations, among them the “puppy love” of adolescents, the wild infatuations and romantic passions of young (and not-so-young) adults, the various forms and stages of conjugal love, and the love of aged marital partners. But even within these limits, the forms of love do not tidily fit within any conventional definition. A standard dictionary calls love “a strong, complex, outgoing emotion between persons of opposite sex, based on or affected by sexual attachment,” but in phlegmatic persons love is not strong, in the inhibited it is not outgoing, in homosexuals and lesbians it exists between persons of the same sex, and in most elderly couples it has little to do with sexual desire. Instead of trying to fashion an all-purpose definition, therefore, it is more practicable to employ the methods of the naturalist, namely, description and taxonomy; the humanist approach to understanding love, as I see it, gathers examples, sorts them into categories, and arranges these in a kind of family tree. Here are a few of the major varieties one can extract from the historical and scientific literature of love: x

the emotions and fantasies contingent upon and aroused by sexual desire and pursuit;

x

the elevated and idealized feelings of romantic love for an unattainable other;

x

the chaste, asexual love of many early Christian couples (“spiritual marriage”) and, in our own time, of some couples with sexual dysfunction or lack of desire and the devout of various faiths who refrain from sex until marriage;

x

the complex of connected, but often conflicting, desires for companionship, support, warmth, sex, and much more, typical of good or satisfactory marriages;

x

the pathological and constricted love of the battered woman for the abuser and his for her;

x

the chilly dalliances of the stereotypical fashionable and the aristocratic.

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But I refrain from continuing the list, lest my taxonomy become taxing. Similarly, no one theory of love adequately explains all the forms the taxonomist can gather. Freud’s notion that love is “aim-inhibited sexuality” cannot account for the love that develops between young couples today after they have been having sex for some time. The anthropological theory that love is an evolutionary development powering mate selection and providing enough family stability to ensure the survival of progeny does not apply to the extra-marital affairs of many husbands and wives who make no move to get divorced and turn their affairs into marriages. Some sociologists theorize that love is largely due to “cultural expectation”—that while biological needs provide the impetus, culture shapes what we do with it; this fits much of the data, yet cannot explain why people with essentially similar biological machinery and living in the same culture experience love in many different fashions. Nor would these theories or any other I know of account for the contradictions within many a culture’s beliefs about and practices of love. Consider, for instance, the upper-class Athenian men of Greece’s Golden Age: They had leisure, refined æsthetic sensibilities, and virtually no guilt feelings about sex, and their marriage customs made for stable family life but allowed them freedom to love outside it, all of which sounds as if love must have been a pure delight for them, free of the ambivalence and inner conflicts known to so many lovers in later Christian ages. Yet as often as the Greeks rhapsodized about the joys of love, they also complained that it was a folly and a god-sent affliction. They fell in love either with hetairas (courtesans), whom they found to be avaricious and unfaithful, or adolescent boys, whom they knew to be frivolous and impermanent. Wanting merely to enjoy love, they were frequently exasperated by it; no wonder they considered it a trick played upon them by a capricious and mischievous god. Yet we can, after all, understand their experiences of love if we add to our armamentarium of theories some social and economic

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analysis. Traditionally, the Greek wife, though subservient to her husband and little more than a piece of property, had been useful and important to him, but by the time of Solon the well-to-do Athenian had servants to perform the wife’s useful functions. She became a cloistered housekeeper, untutored, uninteresting, and essentially unimportant except for her childbearing function. But this coincided with social changes that made individual relationships newly and particularly important to Greek men, for as the city-state replaced the clan, men were no longer enmeshed in and comforted by an intimate social web of loyalty and affection. Love was the answer, but whom should they love, and what did love have to do with sex? As far as Greek men could see, the two could be experienced in combination, or separately (though not in marriage); as Demosthenes once put it, “Courtesans we keep for pleasure, concubines for daily [sexual] attendance upon our persons, and wives to bear us legitimate children and be our housekeepers.” But since even the best-trained courtesan was neither as welleducated as the Athenian man nor a companion to him in daily life and in war, men were drawn toward each other and toward teenage boys. Not biological or emotional deviance underlay Greek homosexuality but something far more complex and emotional: Although Athenian men often praised pæderastia in sensual terms, they justified it on the grounds of true friendship, honor, and character-improvement. They even interpreted Homeric warriors retrospectively as homosexual lovers, attributing their courage in battle to the sustaining force of that form of love. The humanist is similarly able to understand love in other times and places in terms of the interactions of biology, psychology, family life, culture, and socioeconomics. Christianity sundered love from sex—a man could adore woman in her virginal, pure, Mary-like mode, or lust for her in her sensual, sinful, Eve-like mode—but that religious bifurcation, powerful as it was, leaves unexplained the many forms of love that have flourished at one time or another throughout the Christian era. Only a holistic, interactionist

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approach—untidy, difficult, and far less appealing than any simplistic theory—can account for the asexual marriages mentioned above of many early Christians, the keeping of sexual mistresses by pious clergymen of the early centuries, the “pure” love advocated by troubadours of the twelfth century, the lusty peccadilloes of Elizabethan courtiers, the mannered “gallantry” of eighteenthcentury aristocrats and gentry, the strangled sexuality of many Victorian marriages and the concurrent resort of husbands to “houses of ill fame,” and the kaleidoscopic array of varieties of love and sexual behavior in this country during the twentieth century and especially the past four decades. III The holistic approach of the humanist thus views love as the product of an interacting complex of forces ranging from the effect of the individual’s output of sex hormones to the ethos of the society he or she lives in. Though it is not yet possible to express the interactions among these forces in equations yielding quantitative data, I can at least offer a brief suggestive paradigm of them patterned upon the one I presented in 1961 but here including a number of subsequent developments and research findings: (1) Biology (aside from the sexual drive) influences the shape and meaning of love. Studies of the digestive and other processes in newborn laboratory animals, and observations of human infants, particularly those in orphanages, have shown that warmth and gentle tactile stimuli promote the physical health and development of the young. The gestures and deeds of love, and the need for physical affection, are deeply rooted in the human autonomic nervous system, not only in the psyche; the experiences of affection not only promote overall health (infants who get little or no affection suffer from “failure to thrive”) but, since the human brain develops billions of connections during the first year, those experiences construct cognitive-emotive connections that last a lifetime.

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But in contrast to such experiential molding, genetic influences make for innate temperamental differences (including emotional responsiveness) visible in the newborn even before differences in the experience of parenting style have had any effect. Moreover, studies of identical twins reared apart show that certain traits of adult personality, including the capacity to form loving relationships, develop in both members of such pairs even when they are reared in very different homes; likewise, some adoption studies have found that by the teens, children’s personalities resemble those of their biological parents more than those of their adoptive parents. All such data strongly suggest that how we love is in part—perhaps considerable part—influenced by genetic factors. (2) Sexual desire is a major source of the power behind love, but the relation between them is neither inevitable nor coterminous. Sometimes sexual relationships do not involve the emotion of love (the sexual radicals of the 1960s and 1970s made strenuous and successful efforts to exclude love from “recreational sex”), and sometimes love does not involve sexual desire. Recent studies of the changing nature of love in the course of decades of marriage indicate that sexual desire is a major part of it in the early marital years, a lesser part later on, and often no part in the later years; in many good marriages, passion and romantic intensity wane, being largely replaced by affection, friendship, companionship, and the need to nurture and/or be nurtured. (3) Family structure and childhood experiences mold love. Despite what was just said about genetic influences on love, the biological, sexual, and emotional drives powered by the genes do not, of themselves, result in specific behaviors in human beings; the drives are shaped by cultural and experiential influences as a growing vine is directed in espaliered shape by a gardener or as a stream is dammed and diverted into trenches running throughout an orchard by a farmer. In the heyday of psychoanalytic psychology, it was thought that childhood experiences in the family were largely responsible for the

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way each individual sought and expressed love; recent and current research has, however, made it clear that these influences can modify but not remake innate temperamental and genetic tendencies. Yet family structure does have certain major effects: In the small nuclear family, the forbidden and repressed desire of the child for union with the opposite-sex parent tends to yield a “one person” pattern of love in which a one-and-only lover (the permissible replacement of the unobtainable parent) is sought; in contrast, among primitive peoples who spread their filial and parental feelings out over a wide array of relatives, the one-and-only ideal of love is incomprehensible. Still, the small nuclear family does not always produce the romantic oneperson result: Witness the typical Gallic attitude toward love, or, in many of the American communes of recent decades, the group marriages of people, almost all of whom were raised in conventional homes; culture and group norms can overcome the nuclear family’s influence. (4) Technology, productivity, or the acquisition of surplus income, plays a significant role in the development of love. A society or class that lives on the brink of starvation has little time or energy for the elaboration of love. In Western civilization love first became culturally important with the appearance of leisure in Greece of the Golden Age, waned during the impoverished Dark Ages, and reappeared in force in medieval times (though with built-in Christian conflicts) with the elaboration of commerce, urban life, and leisure (especially among the courtly classes). But idle time, though a predisposing factor, is neither sufficient nor essential. Love has flourished among hard-working accumulators of wealth with little leisure, such as the Victorians and modern career-driven men and women, for even more conducive to love than leisure is creature comfort and an æsthetic way of life. In our own era, most people living at the poverty level have neither the time, energy, nor the cultural background for love; their sexual liaisons often involve powerful feelings of belonging or connection but lack idealistic or romantic coloration. Contemporary sex-survey data

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show that at higher socioeconomic and educational levels, people are less sexually active than those at lower levels, yet it is at the higher levels that love flourishes and, in attitude surveys, is rated as very important. Yes, important even today, despite our light-years of cultural distance from the sentimentality of the Victorian era, the dating-andmating games of the 1930s and 1940s, the syrupy “togetherness” of ideal marriage in the postwar years, the conflicts of love and lust in the years of “open marriage” experiments. Despite, too, the total repudiation of love by sexual revolutionaries in the 1960s and 1970s, and by those radical feminists who regarded it as a stratagem by which men concealed and justified their dominance over, and sadomasochistic treatment of, women. For paradoxically, as women increasingly entered the world of work, sought careers, and became financially independent of men, the radical attacks on love lost their bite, allowing it to regain its former importance, except that many women now economically independent of their husbands, redefined love: It had to be a give-and-take between equals, a satisfying sexualemotional relationship, or they would want out, and get out—yet capable of independence, they would seek love again. For even though in recent years the divorce rate rose to and leveled off at an unprecedented rate of one out of every two marriages, two-thirds of the divorcing remarry and many others establish living-together relationships, a modem nonlegal form of marriage. (5) Various social institutions, values, and mores influence, hinder, promote, or color love, according to how it serves or disserves the social milieu they form. Among them: x

the laws of marriage and divorce, the prevalence of monogamy or polygamy, and the presence or absence of dowries, prenuptial agreements, and other economic inducements and constraints on marriage;

x

prevailing concepts of beauty, taste, friendship;

manners, and

Promethean Love 167 x

the status of women, their education, their influence in and share of political governance, their freedom to control their own fertility, and so on;

x

religious or social attitudes toward concubinage, prostitution, and the social mingling of the sexes (when, for instance, marriage was the only socially acceptable milieu for sexuality, love was the impetus toward marriage, but in our own time, as it became acceptable for people to have sex outside of marriage, it also became acceptable to enter into loving sexual partnerships without intent to many, even though in fact most adults do eventually marry people they love);

x

last but not least, the general cultural expectation, based on word of mouth, the media, film, TV, and books, of what love feels like or should feel like. What we learn that we should feel is what we set out to feel and usually succeed in feeling; as La Rochefoucauld said—his comment is as true today as in the seventeenth century—“There are people who would never fall in love if they had not heard love talked about.”

IV The foregoing rudimentary set of directions bears about the same relationship to a definitive explanation of love as does that typical piece of advice of the native to the bewildered traveler—“You can’t miss it.” Still, even with so imperfect a guide one can begin to see that the nature of love in men and in women, in any particular era and at various levels of society, is the end result of an intricate network of interacting forces. For that reason, all present theories about love seem to me to explain some varieties or aspects of it but not the whole gallimaufry of related phenomena. The current theories are “theories of the middle range” but there is no sustainable meta-theory, no inclusive, overarching explanation. Recent research studies of love all support (or sometimes undermine) these partial theories; space does not

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permit me to do justice to them, but here, by way of example, are three, in brief: x

For several decades, psychologists have used tests of personality traits to explore whether people fall in love with their opposites—whether like seeks like or opposites attract. Early studies supported the opposites theory, later and more refined studies bolstered the like-seeks-like theory; and a few years ago a fine-grained analysis by Robert Sternberg and Susan Grajek of Yale finds that both are right: Couples are similar in some respects, complementary in others. But the pull of traits, whether similar or complementary, is only one factor in love; it accounts for love only when all other factors—the economic, the religious, the sexual, and many others—are held constant; that is, it explains attraction, assuming we are looking only at couples in whom all the other forces are operating alike.

x

The psychologists Philip Shaver and Cindy Hazan recently reported that the way people feel and behave in love is related to how they interacted with their mothers when they were infants; the three kinds of attachment to the mother, “secure,” “anxious avoidant,” and “anxious-resistant,” are directly related to three comparable types of adult attachment. It is a valuable finding, but hardly a comprehensive explanation of love; rather, it is an explanation of how love is channeled into different kinds of attachment but not of the multiple forces that generate it in the first place or determine its many distinctive customs, words, gestures, uses, and misuses.

x

Michael Liebowitz, a psychiatrist at the New York Psychiatric Institute, analyzed blood and urine samples of people with different styles of loving. Those addicted to wild romantic passion, he found, have an abnormal craving for the high produced by phenylethylamine (PEA), a brain neurotransmitter, but when the craving is controlled by drugs, the addiction wanes. In normal people, in whom the PEA high is too stressful to be sustained continuously, PEApowered infatuation is of limited duration, supplanted by long-lasting attachment love, which is associated with endorphin production yielding a calmer, steadier good

Promethean Love 169 feeling. Yet this explains only the biological raw material of two kinds of love, not the multiple shapes into which that raw material is molded by culture, family, and circumstance.

V The lack of an integrated grand theory of love is no reason to adopt the Keats-Proxmire know-nothing attitude. The humanist view of love holds that we do know a good deal, though our knowledge consists only of fragments; we posses many pieces of the jigsaw puzzle but cannot yet fit them together. This is typical of the adolescence of a science or an area within a science. First, in the absence of good data, come the sweeping all-embracing speculative theories of philosophers and proto-scientists; next, experimentalists and other empiricists gather data about subsections of the field that enable them to generate viable sub-theories; still later, researchers study ever-more-minute areas and produce mini- or micro-theories; and only as these tiny bits fill in the blanks in knowledge do any Big Thinkers begin to perceive and suggest inclusive grand theories based on accumulated and integrated knowledge. That time, I believe, will come for love, though when I cannot guess. Now we humanists see love through a glass darkly, but then will see it face to face. A Note on Sources A list of primary sources drawn upon for this essay would be unduly long; in any case, many are not easily available. But most of the materials are summarized in a few secondary sources, some of them my own, all relatively easy to find in major and university libraries, and all containing extensive reference lists of the primary sources. My original essay, “Love in a Humanist Frame,” was published in The Humanist Frame, edited by Sir Julian Huxley (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961). For historical. and anthropological materials prior to 1959, see my book The Natural History of Love

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(New York: Knopf, 1959). For social changes, research findings, and theories of the past four decades, see the last chapter of the revised and enlarged edition of that work (New York: Anchor, 1994). The relative influences on personality and emotional patterns of genetics, parenting styles, culture, and socioeconomic factors are reviewed in chapters 2 and 3 of my latest book, The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the Scientific Study of Human Nature (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1998). I also drew on a useful, though somewhat dated, sociopsychological study, A New Look at Love, by the sociologists Elaine Walster and G. William Walster (Reading, Mass.: AddisonWesley Publishing Co.); an excellent and recent multidisciplinary inquiry, Anatomy of Love, by the anthropologist Helen E. Fisher (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992); a collection of articles presenting different theories of love, The Psychology of Love, edited by the psychologists Robert J. Sternberg and Michael L. Barnes (New Haven: Yale University Press); and a number of recent studies and articles in professional journals that space limitations forbid me to add to this list, which is already longer than I meant it to be.

Part Five SELF-INTEREST AND ALTRUISM

The Humanistic Welcome Kurtz, Singer, Levinas David M. Goicoechea

Paul Kurtz’s life-long work has to do with humanism, ethics, and love. Perhaps ethics is the guiding concern that directs his thinking so that even his pragmatic humanism and his Promethean love are lead by his quest for a justice that is honest, humorous, healthy and humble. Throughout the past year, as I have thought about these issues in Paul’s thought, the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and of Irving Singer have also been fermenting in my mind and bringing me to Kurtz from a certain angle. Irving Singer, with his focus on love, has a unique understanding of humanism, for he sees it as arising out of the courtly love of the Middle Ages and as developing especially throughout the English tradition. Emmanuel Levinas has developed a unique idea of ethics, for he thinks that the attempts to found ethics on metaphysics and ontology undermine justice and seduce ethics off into totalitarian directions. At first Singer’s humanism and Levinas’s ethics may seem to have little to do with the way Paul Kurtz conceives of humanism, ethics, and love, and yet I would like to argue that in their deep structures they agree, clarify one another, and bring out something very important about ethics. In order to proceed, we might first question humanism in these thinkers, then we can consider their ethics, and finally explore their notion of love. To further concentrate our thinking we will be asking if there is not a new understanding of the golden rule that is haunting these three thinkers. It has been said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It has been thought that this is the insight that is common to the great religions. But are not our three thinkers implying in a significantly new sense a new rule, “Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.” And is not this more ethical 173

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approach rooted in what we might call the humanistic or perhaps even the womanly welcome? Humanism In order to consider the humanism of Paul Kurtz in a fresh way we might begin from the perspective of Irving Singer’s view of love. Scholars have traced the origins of humanism to various moments. That it began in the Prometheus cult or with the sophists or with the Romans or in the Italian Renaissance are familiar views. To link humanism with the Middle Ages is usually a matter of liberal education: the trivium, quadrivium, and men like John of Salisbury. But Irving Singer sees humanistic love as coming to birth in the courtly love of the Middle Ages with its special kind of amour.1 As Singer studies the idealizations of eros, philia, agape, and caritas, he is not inclined to see any of them as humanistic for they each use the human person as a means toward loving a higher ideal. Eros loved human persons as a step up the ladder toward beauty itself. Aristotelian friends loved each other for the sake of a higher virtue. Christian agape made love of neighbor secondary to the love of God. Medieval caritas saw God alone as to be only enjoyed and never used. Singer thinks that in the history of love’s idealizations the first instance of making the ideal of love to be the love for another human person took place in the twelfth century as amour became the ideal. Singer thinks that the love of Eloise for Abelard was humanistic and that the love of Abelard for Eloise failed to become so transformed. Eloise loved Abelard directly and not because of any higher ideal. She was moved by him in his needs as well as his talents. She welcomed him in his otherness and not because she loved herself in him. Singer is very clear in his mind that Abelard did not love humanistically and that Eloise did, which means that her love was ethically correct. 1. Irving Singer, The Nature of Love, vol. 2, Courtly and Romantic (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1987) pp. 19–129.

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Just as Singer is always distinguishing loving from nonloving love, so Kurtz is always distinguishing humanistic from nonhumanistic humanism. Is Kurtz’s distinction made according to criteria that are similar to Singer’s? In The Humanist Alternative Paul asks if there is anything all humanists share and his answer is “a set of moral ideals which are committed to saving and enhancing the qualities of human experience, but primarily a commitment to the use of critical intelligence . . . which emphasizes the use of toleration, dialogue, and negotiation as the chief method of solving problems.”2 He further writes that “the development of civilization is a slow and uphill battle in which intelligence—fused with compassion—comes to prevail.”3 According to Paul, this double core, which we might call philanthropy and paideia, constitutes the essence of humanism. To the extent that compassion and critical intelligence are lacking, then humanism as Paul would define it is also lacking. With this double criterion in mind Paul is well known for his criticism of those ideals that he thinks obstruct humanism. Just as Irving Singer saw the theology and philosophy of Abelard as standing in the way of a humanistic attitude toward Eloise, so Paul thinks that a compassionate and intelligent attitude is not in need of a transcendental signified but can have significance in its own context. A transcendental ideal is not only unnecessary, it can be obstructive. Paul Kurtz and Irving Singer have it in common to think that unless idealization directly aims at humanization then it will be dehumanizing. The philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas confirms this understanding of humanism. As the title of his book, Humanisme de L’Autre Homme, indicates, Levinas is very concerned that we do not reduce the other within our own egotistical and totalitarian world view or totality. Levinas thinks that Western philosophy from Parmenides to 2. Paul Kurtz, The Humanist Alternative (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1973), p. 183. 3. Ibid.

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Heidegger has been humanistic in an egotistic sense and that it is not the just humanism that began with a sense of being claimed by the other. Thus Levinas could agree with Singer that Eloise is justly humanistic because she moulds her philosophy and theology according to her love for Abelard rather than relating to Abelard primarily from the viewpoint of her ideals. Levinas would also agree with Kurtz that a great task of the humanist is to be critical of those ideals that pretend to be humanistic but which in practice subsume individual humans into abstract totalities. Levinas’s book Totality and Infinity is a clearing away of ontology in order to make way for the humanism of the infinite face of the other, just as Kurtz’s writings are a critical clearing of antihumanistic ideals to make way for the ethics of the other that lies on the far side of exuberance. Paul’s humanism of compassion and critical intelligence could seem dour and so could the calamities of Eloise as she is claimed by the other. But the erasure of the transcendental signified need not only make us mourn. Paul has always stressed that humanists can and should be exuberant and Irving Singer often notes how courtly lovers were possessed by La Gaya Scienza. And Levinas describes in detail how we must in enjoyment live from “good soup, air, light, spectacles, work, ideas, sleep etc.” to become ego.4 An abiding abundance of exuberance permeates the humanism of the three and this joy has not a little to do with the death of the old God. Levinas can write that, “The atheism of the metaphysician means, positively, that our relation with the metaphysical is an ethical behavior and not theology, not a thematization, be it a knowledge of analogy of the attributes of God.”5 God herself is the first atheist and thus the atheistic assistance at the death of God and his attendant pretending idealizations can be the playful labor of exuberant humanists made possible because a joyful god, named perhaps Dionysus, dances with Prometheus. 4. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 110. 5. Ibid., p. 78.

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And yet humanism only begins but does not end with the joyful exuberance. In his book Exuberance, when Paul comes to the part on ethics, which as we have seen is at the heart of his humanism, he writes that as humanists we must go beyond the exuberance of the ego to the ethics of the other.6 Levinas’s procedure in Totality and Infinity makes exactly the same move. Once the ego grows into its totality through enjoyment it needs to be claimed by the infinity of the face of the other if it is ever to become fully humanistic. Singer’s philosophy of love also argues that bestowal’s acceptance of the other must be grafted onto the root of appraisal if there is to be true love. But if in this humanism the motive to move to the other is not ontotheological, that is, if we are not directed by a foundational arche or telos to become ethical, then how do we get moved to go beyond our joyful egoism to care for others? If both the foundational god and the foundational reason as cornerstones of certitude have crumbled what is it that will move the egoist to a loving sense of justice? What is it in the attitude of Eloise that lets her be humanistic? Is it something more than critical intelligence that moves Paul to compassion? Ethics Levinas thinks that our openness to others has to do with the welcome. He writes that, “To welcome the other is to put into question my freedom.”7 As long as we are only exuberant egoists of autonomous freedom we are ethically obtuse, for freedom is determination of the other by the same. Eloise would apparently have a gift or talent for welcoming Abelard, but perhaps it would not occur to him to be 6. Paul Kurtz, Exuberance (Hollywood, California: Wilshire Book Company, 1978), p. 119. 7. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 85.

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limited in freedom by her. Levinas writes that “morality begins when freedom, instead of being justified by itself, feels itself to be arbitrary and violent.”8 Paul Kurtz, like Nietzsche, has a keen sense of freedom’s excesses. That is why so much of his project is a denouncing of traditional power. Religions and states and popular movements in the name of faith and reason have very often imposed their will in arbitrary and exploitative ways. Paul and Nietzsche are both great no-sayers and that arises out of their moral sense that first brought them to question their own. Paul and Nietzsche did not justify Jewish or Lutheran foundationalism, but they have been critical of it because it was not open enough in welcoming. Perhaps if Abelard had been married to Eloise and if he had taken to heart the criticism of Kurtz and Nietzsche, he would have been forced to mature beyond the confines of his egoism into a truly welcoming humanism. And after all, is that not the way grace comes to us, namely, through the impositions of others that we welcome to aid us in becoming more welcoming? But in any case, let us reflect on this welcome by asking ourselves if Eloise and Abelard came to its spirit in the same way or if it was more natural to Eloise and perhaps had to be acquired by Abelard. Levinas has written of welcoming as if its spirit must be acquired and as if I must grow into an attitude of questioning my arbitrary freedom. But as he develops his phenomenology of the welcome he seems to connect it especially with the feminine and to think that the masculine has to struggle into a more gentle and compassionate habit. Is there some mystery of the feminine and masculine that must be touched upon if we are to fathom an ethics that is humanistic and not totalitarian? Irving Singer, without focusing upon it directly makes it apparent that the courtly love of the Middle Ages was very much a feminine phenomenon. The name of Eloise is closely associated with that of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Marie de Champagne and Marie de France are at the center of this secularized Mary cult that sought to ennoble and to educate young men that they might learn of sweetness, truth, 8. Ibid., p. 84.

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measure, and loyalty. The Song of Songs was reverberating never far in the background, that book of which it has been surmised that it was influenced by the Tamil tradition of southern India, which is the only body of literature that purportedly has been written from the woman’s point of view. With such an amalgam of background, welcoming was already well practiced. For what room was there for prejudice and the enforcing of territorial purity when relations were guided by songs that still sounded of India and of Israel, Arabia, Spain, and Provence, even while the Celts, English, French, and Germans were learning then by heart to form their heart? Perhaps Singer’s thesis that humanistic love first flowered in the Middle Ages when courtly love under the feminine leadership of so many women first began to really practice the humanistic welcome has a great deal to recommend it. Levinas seeks to explore the relation between the welcome and the woman. In Totality and Infinity, in a chapter entitled “Habitation and the Feminine,” he writes that: “The other whose presence is discreetly an absence, with which is accomplished the primary hospitable welcome which describes the field of intimacy, is the woman. The woman is the condition for recollection, the interiority of the home and inhabitation.”9 Paul Kurtz’s humanism makes the move of secularization and then of welcoming. He erases the transcendental idealizations in order to stand face to face with others in a compassion that fully respects their otherness. With his paideia he built up a realm of exuberance and of freedom. The liberal arts let him become free of dependencies and autonomous. But then, after the freeing phase of his humanism, he is willing in the ethical phase of his humanism to let his freedom be questioned. He begins to welcome to the extent that his freedom feels arbitrary and violent. He is proud of America and its democracy and science and technology. But none of these ideals is so sacred that it is beyond his questioning. Even humanism itself looks arbitrary and violent to him if it lacks compassion. And compassion itself as an ideal can easily become 9. Ibid., p. 155.

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questionable. For the idea is not the practice, and the idea could often hinder practice. In his book Forbidden Fruit, in the chapter entitled “Responsibilities,” he argues that we have responsibilities to ourselves and then to others, even to the extent that we should be responsible beyond ethnicity and to the world community. He asks, “Why ought I to be moral?” and his answer lies in between10 the religious answer and the skeptical answer, for they both think that we need extramoral foundations that give us certainty. Paul thinks that the venerable religions have helped immensely in promoting the familyhood of humans and in proclaiming the good news of social justice. But fundamentalistic religions are easily intolerant and antihumanistic. Skeptics too have played a great role in questioning dogmatic power blocks and thus in securing justice for concrete individuals who have been abused. But Paul has found by experience that the skeptics turn the same guns on the ethical naturalist and humanist in claiming no ought can be derived. Paul finds the attempt to derive “an ought from an is” to be confused. He thinks that: “To seek to bolster more obligations by referring it to a still more fundamental nonmoral ground is to betray our deepest moral sensibilities.” And in this he agrees completely with Levinas.11 This moral sense, which Levinas understands as the spirit of welcoming and which Paul thinks is hindered by theological and philosophical groundings, does need to be developed, according to Paul, by a moral nurturing through the various stages of a person’s life, which Paul refers to as: (1) infantile amorality, (2) obedience to rules, (3) moral feelings for others, (4) the ethics of self-interest, (5) union of moral feeling and rational self-interest, and (6) humanistic ethics that goes beyond egoistic consideration.12 Respecting others in thought, word, and deed, according to Paul, has to do with the concrete persons of our everyday world and not just 10. Paul Kurtz, Forbidden Fruit (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1988), p. 149. 11. Ibid., p. 150. 12. Ibid., pp. 155–156.

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ideas and ideals. If a person cannot be humane with his most significant others joyfully on a day-by-day basis, then what sort of humanist is he? To do this, the art of welcoming, or of a genuine give and take is in need of being cultivated and Paul’s pedagogy aims at this. Humanism traditionally stressed paideia for the sake of philanthropy, but Kurtz, Singer, and Levinas are saying that more than traditional paideia is necessary if the likes of Abelard are to learn to be humanistic. Eloise and the other ladies of the courtly-love connection seem to have reached the humanistic ethic that goes beyond egoistic considerations. When Rebecca met Abraham’s servant, Eliezer, at the well and welcomed him by caring for him and his animals, she was admired because she gave proof of her responsibility for the other who was a stranger. If one can welcome the other as a god then one is hospitable. But is this humanistic sense a matter of nature or of nurture? It is a bit of both, but our feminine nature seems more humanistic and our masculine nature a bit more in need of humanistic nurture. Perhaps Paul’s pedagogy of the heart is akin to that education offered by the ladies of the court in opposition to the feudal paideia. Perhaps when men go off into the world of Abelard or Captain Hook they will become bad old men if they do not have a mother or at least an Eloise or Rebecca to help them with their humanity. What does Levinas mean when he writes that, “The woman is the condition for recollection, the interiority of the home and inhabitation”? What does he mean when he writes that, “The woman is the other whose presence is discreetly an absence with which is accomplished the primary hospitable welcome”?13 It seems that no one these days is ready to agree concerning this question of whether the woman is by nature more welcoming and nourishing or whether it is because of social conditioning that philosophers like Levinas see the feminine as the condition for recollection and hospitality. Some women are much more nurturing and welcoming than others and some men seem more naturally welcoming than some women. So in 13. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 155.

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order to proceed with some degree of mutual understanding, perhaps we can refer to what Levinas calls the feminine as the welcomer and thus explore in what way Levinas’s analysis of the welcome might further reflection about the nature of the ethical in Kurtz’s humanism. So far we have observed that Singer sees humanism as beginning in the Middle Ages with persons like Eloise and not Abelard. We have seen that Kurtz thinks what humanism needs is an ethical component that goes beyond the exuberance of the ego and even altruistic egoism. We have begun to wonder with Kurtz “Why I ought to be ethical?” even in such a way that my concerns for the other can call for sacrifice. Kurtz thinks we can go beyond egoism because we have a moral sense that can be nurtured and developed through various stages until it reaches the transformation from egoism to non-egoism. Levinas seems concerned with such moral growth also and suggests that welcoming is the key to the transformation beyond enjoyment. I begin to welcome when I am so claimed by the other that I gladly restrict my own freedom in a recollection that is gentle and intimate. Perhaps Levinas would think that Abelard came before the presence of Eloise and was so claimed by a certain discreet absence within her that he gladly restricted his freedom in order to commune with her in intimacy. Levinas writes that, “The other who welcomes in intimacy is not the you (vous)14 of the face that reveals itself in a dimension of height, but precisely the thou (tu) of familiarity,” so that his key distinction is between the I-thou experience of welcoming and the me claimed by you of ethics. Büber’s I-thou experience, which Levinas sees as a welcoming, has to do with approaching the other as a whole and not as this or that part as in a presence and not from a distance, as from within and not unsympathetically and as an exclusive being upon whom I focus without divided attention. If Abelard approached Eloise in the welcoming of the I-thou experience, then he would be going through an important part of the moral growth process that Paul Kurtz has 14. Ibid.

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described and which is on the way to a humanistic ethics. But his interpersonal relations with Eloise were thwarted by his calamity and he does not seem to have continued maturing into full concern for the other, which Eloise with her natural gifts and education manifested so clearly. Abelard did not seem to feel his own will to put Eloise into a convent to be in any way arbitrary or violent and thus he indicates a lack of welcoming. The spirit of welcoming or the I-thou attitude first provides a person with an awareness of and a motive for an ethical approach to the other. The discreet presence of the welcoming other teaches me how to give what I possess. By being taught by the discreet presence of the other how to welcome I am then open “to encounter the indiscreet face of the other that calls me into question.”15 Levinas thinks that, “No face can be approached with empty hands and closed home.”16 Once I begin to live in the welcoming I-thou attitude then I am ready to be claimed by the indiscreet face of “widow, orphan, alien, and poor.” By being welcomed by the discreet other I learn to welcome the indiscreet other. By being welcomed by the thou who treats me as I, I learn to welcome the I who treats me as me: the accused and guilty me, the me who is a means to the other I’s ends, the me by whom the other is to be welcomed. The truly humanistic and ethical I is not only the exuberant ego that is welcomed and is on top of the world as was the triumphant Abelard. But the Promethean ego from out of its titanic heights of paideia and philanthropy is mature enough to also be a me that stands accused of its guilt and yet joyfully becomes a suffering servant of others in their demands. The Promethean lover begins with an exuberance of welcoming freedom, but as he or she matures it becomes the task to also be joyful as an accusative me, as a dative me, and as an ablative me. It is not easy for Prometheus at the moment of his sentence or for Abelard at the moment of his calamity to remain exuberant and triumphant. But if their triumph is curtailed and their idealistic bubble is burst then in 15. Ibid., p. 171. 16. Ibid., p. 172.

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their meeting with “widow, orphan, alien, and poor” they will have the opportunity in tumbling down from their titanic heights, to stand face to face and side by side not only with Les Miserables who lack fire and foreknowing but also with all the in/outlaws like Fulbert and the other kinsmen of Eloise who must be welcomed if she is welcome. For this ethics of the me that is claimed by the indiscreet you implies not only a new love but also a new philosophy of love. Love Paul Kurtz, Irving Singer, and Emmanuel Levinas have it in common that they do not begin with an ontological or metaphysical foundation for ethics. In fact, Kurtz and Levinas begin with a very thorough erasure of the transcendental signified and any theologies that in their privileging of any hierarchical archeologies or dialectical teleologies obstruct ethics. They are not antimetaphysical. They just want a naturalistic and pragmatic metaphysics that emerges empirically out of humane ethical practice as a defense and clarification of its love. Paul’s book, Forbidden Fruit: The Ethics of Humanism, begins with an introduction that he entitles “Living Outside of Eden,” and in which he clarifies how once we desist from following ethical commands because they are from God and once we stop hungering for certitudes that will give us inflexible rules, then we will be able to develop as mature individuals capable of ethical deliberation.17 Our maturity develops in our face-to-face relations with one another, in which I see that often I have been guilty of causing another suffering, that the other is imposing demands upon me to which I must respond, and that I am called upon not to be a philosopher-king but a suffering servant. In order to focus upon the essence of Promethean love perhaps we can say that it goes beyond the golden rule of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. Are not Kurtz, Levinas, and Singer arguing rather that we should love so as to do unto others 17. Kurtz, Forbidden Fruit, p. 21.

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as they would have us do unto them? Prometheus did not do unto mortals what he would like done unto him. He had a sense of their needs and he sacrificed himself in service to them. Abelard would have continued to mature if he would have asked Eloise what she wanted and not have at once commanded: “Get thee to a nunnery.” He would have been more humanistic if his bestowal would have been such that he would have been more open to the needs and thoughts of Eloise. Singer is critical of Aristotelian friendship insofar as it is still a loving of self in the other, which is not bestowing enough for Singer. Levinas too is arguing for a loving of the radical other as other, which it seems is not adequately formulated in the golden rule. In order now to metaphysically clarify the Promethean love of Kurtz, Singer, and Levinas, we might follow the lead of Levinas in thinking about the face of the other in terms of infinity and transcendence. Levinas’s notion of the radical other has to do with the face of the other that claims me. When I look at the other looking at me the situation could be like that of Sartre. I could feel the ego of the other as challenging my ego and there could be conflict. But if I welcome the look of the other with an I-thou attitude I can become me. It is for me: the accusative me as guilty, the dative me as the one to whom it is given to give, and as the ablative me by whom the other is served that the other is not derived and does not operate within my totality. The other is known radically as other by me insofar as he makes me me. When I welcome the very freedom that objectifies me and limits my freedom, then I do not have as the given of my philosophy a derived but a radical other. This notion of the radical other runs counter to the entire Greek tradition from Father Parmenides through medieval and modern times down to Heidegger. Levinas sees this entire tradition as totalitarian because it always see the other from the viewpoint of the same and understands the many in terms of arche or telos. At bottom it is for similar reasons that Kurtz and Singer are critical of the tradition of transcendence and of any epistemology but a nominalism. This philosophy of the radical other is a philosophy of

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pluralism that does not derive the many from the one or see the many as merging in one. Above all, this philosophy of alterity or of difference takes joy in the other and in saying, “Long live the difference.” It says, “Yes and amen!” even to the Greek other to whom it says No and to whom it gives the opportunity thereby to stand as an accused me before the other. Levinas is like an Eloise who would say No to Abelard and thus give him the occasion to be claimed by her not only as a discreet but indiscreet other. The trick to this No- and Yes-saying at the same time is prepared for by the mature I-thou of Büber who argues that there is a primitive I-thou that welcomes the other in a precritical and sympathetic wholeness. But it is our melancholic fate that every I-thou must become and I-it. However, it is then possible after the disenchantment of such individuation to recover the I-thou again and yet retain all the critical possibilities. We can see this distinction in two experiences of being criticized by another. One might use only negative criticism and only reduce us to a such and such. But the other might use constructive criticism and relate to us as a whole while pointing out our faults with a respect and sympathy that reassures. Perhaps this is the same idea that Hemingway had when he wrote that he liked a bull fighter who had the reverence of an altar boy. But he liked even better the one who had come to face death with the disdain of a cynic. But he liked most of all a cynic who had been wounded and thereby recovered the original reverence without, however, losing the daring of the cynic. Perhaps the Prometheus of Paul Kurtz is like the third bull fighter of Hemingway. Perhaps that Prometheus started out with a reverent and innocent love for all. But then, maybe, he went into a knock-down, drag-out battle with transcendentalists and fundamentalists to whom he said No with a full and unchecked exuberance. But then, perhaps, after the excesses of that Prometheus were checked by stake and vulture, he continued an ironical No-saying that for each person is a heartfelt Yes. The irony of the postmodern humanist has to do with the infinity of the face. What Kierkegaard called the paradox and Nietzsche the

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perspectival and Derrida the excess of the text, Levinas has revealed as the infinity of the other’s face. As pragmatists and naturalists, Kurtz and Singer will accept about a person only what they experience, and they refuse the projection of obstructive metaphysical attributes. But what is it that they experience when they look at the other with the humanistic welcome? They experience the look of the other that will always be more than they can fathom. The other I in his or her freedom that curtails my freedom if I let it is an unlimited that always surpasses and exceeds any certitude of mine. Both Paul and Irving embrace uncertainty insofar as they are pluralists. At this point they may seem to be nihilists who have forfeited all criteria. They do not argue from a foundation with either a hierarchy or a dialectic. But they do claim a moral sense that knows the sorrow of the other because they have welcomed themselves as claimed by that other. The other is a mysterious enigma known only in his or her varieties. But that is the very stuff that is loved by the postmodern Prometheus. For this Prometheus will have brought the many-fuelled fire of Heraclitus. And all those individuals in the Heraclitean flow are not just passers-by in a chaotic flux into which we can never twice step for such a belief is again a type of certainty that the ethical reality of commitment denies and can even make of it an eternal return. But does the commitment of a humanistic ethic transcend the temporal? That is not necessary and not healthy, as Nietzsche, Kurtz, Levinas, and so many other humanists have argued against the long Parmenidean tradition. The secular humanist closes the front door to a well-defined transcendental signified in order to welcome an infinity of transcendence through the back door. The difference between Abelard and Eloise is a difference of transcendence. In welcoming Abelard, even in his egoism that made of her a claimed me, Eloise honored the unlimited that is the transcendence of Abelard. The infinity in the face of the other transcends my grasp and my expectation. In welcoming existence and saying Yes and Amen to it, the humanist is different in her very desire from the one who

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desires only the definite. The desire of Eloise was for the fullness of Abelard and thus increased the more it was fed. The desire for the definite can be satisfied and thus diminishes when it is fed. In his great sympathy for the humanistic tradition in literature, Singer quotes from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: “Other women cloy / the appetites they feed, but she makes me hungry / where she most satisfies.”18 Singer writes: “In the case of Cleopatra, we are instantly informed that her ability to awaken appetites despite satiety, comparable to restoring life to what has died, takes on religious import: ‘For vilest things / Become themselves in her, that the holy priests / Bless her when she is riggish.”19 In most civilized societies, the genitals, male as well as female, have been considered the “vilest things.” In the mentality, and in the body, of Cleopatra they become holy, that is why even priests bless her lechery.” Eloise in her welcome is like Cleopatra in the transcendence of her infinity. She could give rise to a metaphysical desire different from everyday desire. Perhaps if Abelard had not suffered his calamity he could have been better schooled in the humanistic mysteries of infinity and transcendence that he found in Eloise. Paul Kurtz has shown that doctrines of immortality that are rooted in a fear of death can be an undermining of ethics in leading us to forsake full moral responsibility in building up a world and a community in the here and now. But if we genuinely become open to the other, as he advocates in Exuberance, we will get beyond a loving of humanity in its universal form that makes us unable to bear it in particular human persons, and will not our welcoming be a calling, as it were, to a humanistic saying that is almost like praying? May there be exuberance in the ten thousand places lovely in limbs and unlimited in eyes stretching out forever through the features of our faces per omnia sæcula sæculorum

18. Singer, The Nature of Love, vol. 2, p. 224. 19. Ibid.

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Promethean Altruistic Humanism A Reply to Paul Johnson Marvin Kohl

Copyright © 1992, Marvin Kohl

I. Introduction Paul Johnson’s “Idols of Destruction” is a timely critique of what he calls “Promethean humanism.” Johnson maintains that all secular humanist efforts “have ended in fearsome or pathetic failure.”1 He claims that no one can devise a successful Promethean alternative to the central theistic notion of God and that “no one could now conceivably believe that humanism is the spiritual force of the future, or indeed anything at all except a faint impress in the minds of a tiny and diminishing minority.”2 Perhaps a more interesting objection is his argument that “if . . . belief in God were ever to fade completely from the human mind, we would not, Promethean-like, become master of our fate; on the contrary, we would descend to the status of very clever animals and our ultimate destiny would be too horrible to contemplate.”3 Johnson’s essay, unfortunately, not only mixes historical analysis with the fallacy of special pleading but eloquence with some sophistry. This, I believe, is a mistake, for his rhetoric may obscure his more telling points. The first is that Promethean humanism cannot be a successful spiritual force unless it can shed its more rampant forms of egoism. Many humanists—largely because 1. Paul Johnson, “Idols of Destruction,” Crisis, June 1991, p. 24. 2. Ibid., p. 26. 3. Ibid., p. 28. 191

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they worship the god of extreme evidentialism and cannot share the large-mindedness of a Dewey who talks about religiosity and common faith or of a Russell who often describes the immense value of impersonal self-enlargement—may miss or dismiss this point. What cannot be so easily dismissed is a second point. It is the charge that, for many humanists, defiance and audacity override the supportive values; that egoism—if not megalomania, and not the principal sentiments of empathy, sympathy, and caring—becomes morally supreme. If Prometheus is taken to be a model primarily for independence and defiance, if his chief moral virtue is his willingness to challenge and do battle with the gods, then he may be a great model for audacity but he is not much of a moral model. On these points I agree with Johnson. Where I differ is that there are forms of Promethean humanism that escape these pitfalls, the writings of John Dewey and Bertrand Russell perhaps being the bestknown examples. Moral good is essentially common good for myself, Dewey, and Russell. Thus we are not arguing for the promotion of the good for others as in benevolent tyranny. Nor are we suggesting that it is unimportant to distinguish between the good of self and the good of others or that we should not distinguish between the good of those we know and those we do not know. However, we are suggesting that self-preservation, when combined with the supportive values and crystallized intelligence, can lead to self-enlargement and away from psychological and ethical egoism. We are suggesting that from a moral perspective, as opposed to a mere prudential perspective, the well-being and happiness of others is an overriding feature of morality. Even though there are many forms of altruism and the rudimentary virtues of each differ, there is still a rough and imprecise consensus that impersonal self-enlargement, benevolent love for humankind and dedication toward achieving the well-being and happiness of people and society is the proper end of morality and politics.

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I do not wish to belabor this point. But it is intellectually irresponsible and dangerous to talk about humanism as if it were a monolithic movement or philosophy of life. It is irresponsible because it is untrue. It is dangerous because, when Johnson and humanist zealots practice this self-serving form of reductionism, they trade off truth for converts. In our own times, Promethean humanism is a term that serves to designate a wide range of diverse views, depending largely on how humanism is defined and on how the myth of Prometheus is interpreted. Much of the same can be said for altruism and the diversity of theories designated by that term. There is also considerable diversity concerning epistemic responsibility and the justification of belief.4 I only claim to be outlining a theory, not the theory, of Promethean altruistic humanism. I say that I am only outlining a theory, not because I expect critics to be fair-minded or charitable, but, because many of the harder questions—questions about the operational nature of welfare, the balance between a caring society and one that sufficiently respects autonomy, and the extent to which a democratic society can, at present, reasonably expect its citizens to be Promethean—remain to be more adequately addressed. II. Humanism Let us begin with a central characterization of humanism. Humanism is a system of thought and action that makes human welfare the measure and end of all moral and political endeavors. The use of the definite article is, here, all-important. To retreat and simply say humanism makes human welfare a measure and end of moral and political endeavors is tantamount to making almost everyone one a humanist. Since ethics by definition and tradition involves an 4. For a discussion of certain aspects of this problem, see: Marvin Kohl, “Skepticism and Happiness,” Free Inquiry 10, no. 3 (Summer 1990), pp. 40–42, and “Humanism and the Justification of Belief,” Free Inquiry 12, no. 2 (Winter 1992), pp. 56–57.

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investigation of the constituents and conditions of the good, wellbeing, or welfare of at least human beings, all ethical theories are humanistic in this wishy-washy sort of way. In this sense of the term, even those who consider their own welfare the supreme and overriding good may be considered humanists. The same may be said of Paul Johnson and other classic theists who, while they hold human welfare to be a measure of the good, make the eternal vision of God the overriding good. Despite their protests, they appear to be locked into a theology that makes love of God and eternal happiness, not only different from love of humanity and earthly happiness, but much more important. Contrary to what Johnson suggests, both mainline Catholic theology and history indicate that, while we have the glorious example and tradition of St. Francis and other impersonally loving Christians, there has been a relative failure to stop or at least diffuse the full force of what I shall call “soul-saving” egoism. It is difficult, if not impossible, to define welfare successfully. We can say, in a preliminary way when speaking of individuals, that the welfare of X somehow involves the well-being and happiness of X. Perhaps a better way of characterizing what is meant by welfare is to say that it is the more-than-minimal satisfaction and protection of the means of satisfying basic individual needs and correlate interests as well as the other fundamental interests a society would want to protect if it were fully rational and inspired by love. Happiness and well-being are not necessarily synonymous. Whether a person is happy or not depends, in part, upon his/her attitude to the circumstances of life, especially to those interests, whether they be idiosyncratic or not, that gives his/her life its central meaning. Whether a person is doing well or is in a state of well-being depends, in part, upon his/her success at satisfying biogenic, sociogenic, and spiritual needs. Except perhaps when we come to face death, well-being also seems to require the having of unsatisfied desires and challenging goals. To paraphrase James Griffin, wellbeing, at least that conception of it to be used as the interpersonal

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measure for moral judgment, is the level to which basic needs are met so long as they retain importance, and one way they retain teleological importance is if they are not completely satisfied.5 Expressed differently, I suggest that humanists adopt neither a subjective nor objective analysis of welfare but some combination of both ingredients. Welfare is a comprehensive term that is best used to cover the whole of that which we also call the good of man and of which happiness and well-being are aspects or components or parts.6 Although I believe this to be the preferable way of talking about welfare, I do not think it necessary that humanists adopt this stance. What, I think, is necessary is that—whether they adopt a subjective or an objective analysis of welfare, or a combination of both— humanists understand that their target is the whole of humanity. Despite the conceptual, normative, and enormous epistemic difficulties, I am suggesting, although there may be lesser targets along the way, that the welfare of humanity be taken to be the overriding and general good. If we reject this suggestion, and pursue an egoism because we blindly choose (or are incapable of controlling) the self-interested affection, we may achieve some good for ourselves, but we are not humanists, at least not in the strict sense of the term. Except for those who have evidence and, because of it, earnestly believe that egoism is the best way of promoting the good of humanity, an egoist is not a humanist. III. Altruism I have already mentioned that altruism may be broadly conceived as impersonal self-enlargement, benevolent love for humankind, and dedication toward achieving the well-being and happiness of people

5. James Griffin, Well-Being (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 52. 6. I owe this point to Von Wright. See Georg Henrik Von Wright, The Varieties of Goodness (London: Kegan Paul, 1963).

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and society—and that there are several varieties of altruism. It remains to ask what variety is here being advocated. This question requires an answer to what is meant by selfenlargement and the extent of devotion this morality would require, questions which cannot be answered here. For an excellent, but scattered, discussion of the ethic of self-enlargement I suggest Kenneth Blackwell’s The Spinozistic Ethics of Bertrand Russell.7 Here I will be content to briefly explain how benevolent love differs from caring love and why the practice of caring love should be added to certain dimensions of the moral enterprise. I am not suggesting that we can or should love each and every human being. Nor is what I am suggesting open to Rawls’s argument that universal altruism would result in a stand-off because everyone would be thinking of everyone else.8 By love I mean the kind of relationship between persons or things, in which the object of this emotion is a delight to contemplate and in which, if the object is a living being, there is a strong disposition to protect or promote the welfare of that individual. In other words, I wish to distinguish between benevolent love and what I have called caring love.9 Both kinds of affection involve a direct concern for the good—that is, the happiness and well-being of a person or the welfare of a beloved object. The essential difference between benevolent love and caring love is that the former is often limited to inert concern while the latter involves, by its very nature, active concern. Formally, the difference is as follows: If X benevolently loves Y, X must cherish the well-being and happiness of Y, but X need do no more than wish Y well. However, if X caringly loves Y, X is deeply 7. Kenneth Blackwell, The Spinozistic Ethics of Bertrand Russell (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985). 8. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 189. 9. For a fuller discussion, see Marvin Kohl, “Caring Love and Liberty: Some Questions,” Free Inquiry 12, no. 2 (Spring 1992), pp. 49–51, 54.

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concerned about the welfare of Y (that is, more actively disposed, or more committed, to help Y); largely—but not only—because of this X will intervene in Y’s life if that action, in the context of Vs life, is necessary to protect an important good or prevent a serious harm. Altruistic humanism maintains that inert concern, merely feeling love and benevolence is not enough. What counts is whether there is active concern, whether a feeling of love and benevolence is implemented. Thus the heart of the matter lies not in the degree to which we feel a supportive affection, but in the degree to which we can connect it with other lives and act beneficently. Important as the dispositions of love and benevolence are, the practice of beneficence and caring love is more important. For the altruistic humanist, the end-in-view is the welfare of humanity; the necessary means are cultivation of unselfish feelings and the nurturing of love, conceived as the sum total of kindly emotions and actions. Such a morality takes benevolence and caring love as its operational focus. It nurtures and extends the scope of the kindly impulses. It fosters the kindly emotions because it understands that, while life and knowledge are the respective primary material and methodological goods, love is the primary emotional good. Humanistic theories are sometimes criticized because “they have preferred to allow the basic concepts of morality to remain vague.”10 That this criticism is to some extent justifiable I would not deny. But I would insist, first, that there is a difference being vague because the nature of the subject matter generates that looseness and being vague because an author prefers looseness as a way of defeating falsification. Second, the term humanity is ambiguous in at least three different ways. It can refer to humankind as a whole, to each and every human being, or a combination of both. Agapic Christianity, at least in its extreme and most powerful form, urges the last, namely, that we love humankind and each and every human being. Since I believe that benevolent love is indefinitely extensible 10. Thomas English Hill, Contemporary Ethical Theories (New York: Macmillan, 1950), p. 187.

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but can not “save the world” and that caring love can but is not indefinitely extensible, I cannot share the agapist position. As we shall shortly see, there is a sense in which (like Prometheus) we can care about or caringly love humankind. There is also evidence that, given reasonable limits, we can extend the parameters of those we individually care about. I hasten to add that what may be difficult for an individual to do is often easier for a society or government to accomplish. Let me add a further word or two about Christianity. Altruistic humanism differs significantly from a central Christian view. In Christianity, especially main-line Catholicism, extreme forms of egoism are rejected as false, or at least as incomplete. On the other hand, while both disinterested love and benevolence, as well as the outward expression of this love, beneficence, are desirable, to argue that there is a duty of beneficence is to confuse the perfection of moral goodness with moral obligation. Moral perfection may counsel one to love others more than oneself. But what Christianity requires of the saintly is not required for general morality. Strictly speaking, therefore, there is no duty called beneficence. At best, we can say that beneficence, or the sacrifice of self for the good of others, may sometimes be a duty and sometimes an act of virtue. Whether a particular act is a duty, or is supererogatory, is determined by the relative needs of self and others. The circumstances under which a Christian is duty bound to help another person are far from clear. But if there is a consensus—or at least a dictum from Thomas Aquinas—it is that one is morally required to help when a neighbor is in imminent deadly peril of deadly evil to soul or body and is unable to help himself, that is, when the helping act is neither a venial sin nor an exposure to the proximate occasion of sin, and when by helping, one would not be similarly imperiled.11 11. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 9, Q. XXXI, “Of Beneficence” (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourn); (no author), Exposition of Christian Doctrine (Philadelphia: John Joseph McVey 1921), pp. 145–151; and Joseph S. J. Rickaby, Moral Philosophy (London: Longmans Green, 1929), pp. 243–244.

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The ethics of our form of altruistic humanism differs from this Christian perspective. We are not content to say that one is only morally required to help when someone is in imminent deadly peril and is unable to help himself. Rather we hold that there is a prima facie obligation to act kindly, an obligation that may become more stringent when faced with imminent deadly peril to others, but which is not limited to such dire need of help. Here, however, it may seem that we are transgressing the limits of what can and cannot be morally legislated. It is obvious, at least to some of us, that we cannot legislate that individuals must always be helpful to other individuals. It is less obvious that we can only maintain the practical force of this obligation by not limiting this duty to individuals. We can recognize another dimension to this obligation and, as we have in welfare-rights theory, we can begin to talk about those circumstances in which a society, or its designates, have an actual duty to aid others. Among other things, this means that there may be a “societal” obligation to protect human beings against the basic vicissitudes of life and, more generally, that a society may have an obligation to be actively concerned about protecting and enhancing the welfare of its citizens on levels higher than that of subsistence and protection against unjust assault. IV. Prometheanism In his book Exuberance: A Philosophy of Happiness, Paul Kurtz describes a way of life and draws upon the Promethean myth as the model to emulate.12 I shall not concern myself with his theory of happiness but with his use of “Promethean virtues” as a role model.13 Kurtz makes Prometheus out to be a rebel, one who resists authority, especially the authority of the gods. Prometheus is clever, resourceful, and above all else, he is audacious. He wants to help 12. Paul Kurtz, Exuberance: A Philosophy of Happiness (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1978). 13. Ibid., p. 12.

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humans control their own destiny. Prometheus exercises his independence from the gods whenever it is important to do so, and seems to take special pleasure in taunting Zeus. Now I hesitate to argue about what a myth should or must mean. I also wish to admit to making a mistake. In a paper that may have touched off a controversy between Kurtz and myself, I said that “Promethean humanism must be universalistic and altruistic.”14 I should have said that, given Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound,15 the Promethean myth best exemplifies an important form of altruism. Kurtz, in a gentle and generous reply, takes me to task for this overstatement. Thus he writes It is not clear to me that Promethean Humanism must be universalistic and altruistic. Although Prometheus gave the gift of fire and the arts of civilization to humanity, it is not apparent that this was done solely or primarily out of a motive of sympathy and compassion. Kohl seems to be drawing the model of Christ rather than that of Prometheus. In a fundamental sense, Prometheus expresses the quality of audacity to do battle with the gods. Granted that Prometheus has a philanthropic concern for humanity; yet, he expresses independence as a chief virtue insofar as he was willing to challenge the gods. The value he represents is moral courage, a virtue especially appreciated by freethinkers and humanists.16

14. My differences with Professor Kurtz concerning the Promethean myth first surfaced, I believe, with the publication of my paper “On Suffering,” which was followed by a brief interchange between Kurtz and myself, see Morris Storer, ed., Humanistic Ethics (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1980), pp. 173–178. I am also indebted to David Paul Winston for his assistance and much of the historical analysis of interpretations of the myth. 15. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, tr. Gilbert Murray (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1931). 16. “Comment by Paul Kurtz on Kohl Article,” Storer op. cit., p. 177. The emphasis is my own.

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First of all, Kurtz’s denial of Prometheus’s altruism is not convincing. Perhaps Kurtz would argue that Byron also confused Prometheus with Christ, when he wrote: Thy Godlike crime was to be kind, To render with thy precepts less The sum of human wretchedness . . . . 17

But to suggest that Aeschylus, who lived 528–456 B.C., made the same mistake is to suggest that Aeschylus was not only a great dramatist but an even greater psychic! In Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, the first soliloquy is revealing: Clearly I foreknow Each pang that cometh . . . To man that in his torment I am bound. Hid in a rush’s heart I sought, I found The Fount of fire, to man a shining seed Of every art a great help in need.18

Again, Prometheus says: I would not see mankind By him stamped out and cast to nothingness. For that he hath laid on me this better stress, This pain which maketh weep those that pass by. Mercy I had for man; and therefore I Must meet no mercy, but hang crucified In witness of God’s cruelty and pride.19

Or his statement about love of mankind where Prometheus calls out:

17. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, ed., The Works of Lord Byron: Poetry, Vol. IV, (New York: Octagon Books, 1966), p. 50. 18. Aeschylus, op. cit., p. 25. 19. Ibid., p. 31.

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Kohl: Promethean Altruistic Humanism Regard me in chains, the suffering god, The foe of Him who Reigns, foe fore-designed Of all by whom the floor of Zeus is trod: So greatly have I loved mankind.20

Contra Kurtz, it is more than plausible to maintain that the motivating force behind Prometheus’s transcendence was an emotion akin to sympathy and compassion. Second, it is a mistake to assume that I am modeling my philosophy on the life of Christ, although I do believe that parts of the Sermon on the Mount and the Franciscan interpretation of caring for others come closer to the moral mark than much that passes for secular humanism. But the models of Christ and Prometheus are contraries, not contradictories. And here again, there is a venerable philosophical tradition that holds that, as rational beings, we are manifestly bound to aim at good generally, not merely at this or that part of it. To the extent that I do not maintain that the duty of beneficence requires one to be morally bound to regard the good of any other individual as such, I am not following what Shelly Kagan has described as a version of extreme consequentialism.21 I am, however, sharing the intuition that one is morally bound to seriously regard the good of other human beings, and that to deny that the good of humankind overrides individual good—except insofar as it is clearly less knowable, known in a strict sense to be unattainable, or is not the best way of promoting the good of humanity because it contravenes needed rules of distributive justice—evades a central problem of morality and ethical theory. I have tried to show that in order for Prometheus to actually do great good to and for others, it was necessary for him to violate the prevailing rules of sovereignty and do battle with Zeus. According to this interpretation, his end was that of doing good for humankind and his means was that of having an unusual amount of courage and even greater fortitude. If this interpretation is mistaken, and if 20. Ibid., p. 26. 21. Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

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Prometheus’s defiance is not a means but the primary end (as Kurtz suggests), then Johnson’s criticism has its proper mark. Johnson, of course, worries about humanity descending to the status of very clever animals and our having a destiny too horrible to contemplate. He also correctly and wisely worries about megalomania. I share his concern. For if Kurtz is right, then Prometheus is something of a megalomaniac, and I fail to see the moral worth of loving power for its own sake or of emulating those who do. The reason why Prometheanism is a viable outlook is that, when properly understood, it tells us that we are relatively free to create our own values and generally have the power to create a better world. This end is best achieved when we are inspired by love of humankind, guided by knowledge, and have the audacity and fortitude to act, even though there is always risk and we know that pain and loss is often the necessary price. This, I believe, is the spiritual force of the future, a force that carries so much of what both Johnson and I cherish that, if it must end in fearsome or pathetic failure, so must the best of the Judaic-Christian tradition.

Love and Self-Interest Jan Narveson

Preface This brief inquiry started out as a set of comments on Marvin Kohl’s “Love and Liberty.” I have borrowed perhaps too many of those comments for the present context, which owe their stimulation partly to him and partly to the intrinsic fascination of the subject, with which I have been as practically concerned as most people over many years—and surely to no better effect, so far as making my own peace with it goes. Perhaps this is an area where if you have the right theory, you have to have the right practice, too—though I hope not. Whether that is so or not, I am very sure, at any rate, that those lucky people with “the right practice” rarely do have a theory, and even if they do are probably better to keep quiet about it. But being an academic and a philosopher, I am constitutionally unable to take such advice. So here goes! As my title indicates, I am concerned here about the relation between love and self-interest. When we love, we are certainly interested in someone else, the beloved. It does not follow, however, that in doing so we set aside or lose interest in ourselves. And it seems to me that we not only need not and do not do that, but also that we really cannot. Just the contrary, in fact. It seems to me that one who has lost all sense of self and all interest in himself would be unable to love, or at least to do so in a recognizable way. That last sentence implicitly recognizes something that I should perhaps point up right now, which is the enormous difficulty of separating neutral analyses of the concept of love and normative inferences or proposals about it. Being old-fashioned in this regard, I guess, I am still inclined to think that we should make such 205

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distinctions. I am not quite ready to admit that it is impossible, but I am quite ready to admit that, in this case, it really is awfully tricky. So I’ll try, without much confidence in success. Introduction My topic, in effect, is this: what should we do about love in our personal lives? What policies, as we may call them, should we adopt? And I am going to suggest that we both do and should adopt a general attitude of self-interest. This is quite vague, so let me try to be a bit less so. In order to have anything as fancy as a “policy” we have to have some control— we have to be able to make some decisions about it. One of the rather important features of love is that when we are in love, we are unlikely to bother our heads about “policies” and such, and it might even be reasonably argued that the true lover is quite incapable of deciding anything on its overall merits; for only one thing matters to him; all else is simply shunted aside. If this sort of thing happens, as I suppose we should admit it does, we still should not be too cavalier about it. That one was in love excuses one from some things some times, but certainly not from everything all the time. And anyway, love of the head-overheels type is fairly rare. Whether it is avoidable is an interesting question, and another is whether one should try to avoid it even if one can, in view of the aforementioned penchant for irresponsible action on the part of lovers of the h-o-h type. Somewhat anticipating the main concern of this paper, I shall just remark here that what we should really do, if we can, is by all means to fall in love, but not to let this overwhelm our other interests in life, and in particular not those that generate moral considerations. We may understand why Othello strangled Desdemona, but we should not forgive or even excuse him for doing so.

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Some Familiar Distinctions It is customary to distinguish among three or so species of love, under such terms as “eros, philios, and agape.” Erotic love includes sexual love, and is the one that causes all the trouble; Philios, or friendship, on the other hand, is generally applauded by all; and Agape, the supposed impartial love of humankind as such, is held up as an ideal in many quarters. It gets all the good press—and very little of the action, a fact which is widely deplored; and also very little criticism—which condition I shall try to rectify somewhat. Whatever we think of them, these seem to be quite different. So, which am I talking about? The answer is: all of them, but especially the first. My prototypical sort of love in this paper is erotic. It is prototypical in that I wish to argue that it provides the right sort of template for the rest; and that to go in reverse, as Socrates and Christ and Immanuel Kant and some other people seem to want to, is misguided and a perversion. Erotic love is the real thing, and agape is (to put it rather over-baldly), a fraud and a delusion. I shall begin by saying a bit more about the latter two. Agape Should everybody love everybody, even if they could? No. I take Friedrich Nietzsche to have said the definitive word on this when he speaks of “universal love of man” as: an agonizing and ridiculous state of affairs, the like of which was never seen on earth: Everyone would be gushed over, pestered and sighed for, not as at present by one lover, but by thousands, indeed by everybody, by dint of an irresistible drive, which would then be as much reviled and cursed as selfishness has been by men of past ages” (Morgenrote, sect. 147; Schlechta ed., I, 1116).

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No doubt some will say that Nietzsche doesn’t have the right kind of love in mind. But I think he has. Note that it would do nearly as ill to have all humans for friends, or to have to regard them all as one does one’s own children. What we need for all mankind are certain very general rules, defining in effect the virtue of respect for one’s fellows. Perhaps some would want to claim that this is actually another, but subtle, species of love; but I don’t think we should go along with that. The foundation of those rules is not sentiment, but self-interest. And a good thing too; for we can’t, as so many philosophers have pointed out, rely on sentiment. Perhaps we can’t rely on self-interest either, as I shall also be noting a little later; but we can certainly rely on it a lot more than anything else, and when it fails we can expect everything else to fail too. Charity might be a candidate, but it too may or may not be a matter of feeling; and in any case it is not a strict duty. If it is something to be generally commended, as I would be inclined to agree, it is so, again, on broad grounds of self-interest. To be disposed to help those in need when one can readily do so is a very good idea. If all of us have such a disposition—as, happily, most do—then we could rely on others to help us when we are in a jam as well, and we should, and would, be plenty grateful for that. Agape is supposed to be a sentiment that regards everyone as equal. But equally what? Not, I hope, equally deserving of our love, nor of our good offices. For in no reasonable view is this true. They differ enormously in those respects. The best we can do, I think, is this: that we can have a general, settled disposition to regard another’s well-being as, so far as it goes, a good thing. If x would benefit someone, then no matter who that someone is, we should regard that as prima facie a point in favor of x. But “prima facie” is very important here. Plenty of things could make us reverse the view in a particular case. Moreover, there is the exceedingly important matter that we may differ about well-being. My view of what is good for you may be

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different from yours. And if they should come to conflict, then which is to guide us? The short answer is: yours, and not mine. That is to say, that my view of what is good for you simply has no authority when it comes to your case. If I can persuade you of my view, then fine; but that also removes the conflict. If I can’t, though, then what? Here it seems to me we must say that we must let you do it your way, and may not inflict our own view. Note that the dictum here is only that we must let you do it your way, not that we jolly well have to help you. Suppose you are a drug addict, and that I think your habit is ruining you. Am I committed to helping you procure your next fix? No. On the other hand, I do not think it is my business to stop you forcibly, either. (Nor that of the police; but that is a subject we won’t pursue further here.) Yet a disposition merely to let you do as you like is not love, nor even friendship. Indeed, both love and friendship will dispose us toward meddling, in a way that my general principle does not. And that is another reason we should reject the doctrine of agape. Friendship Aristotle has said, I think, most of what there is to say on this noble and venerable topic, and I have essentially nothing to add. I think it is fair to classify friendship as nonsexual love; which is not to say that sexual lovers cannot be friends, but rather that insofar as one’s love is a case of friendship, sex isn’t what it’s about. What it is about is enjoyment of the friend’s company, appreciation of what he does, especially what he does for you; and concern that things go well with him, together with a disposition to take action to help out when they do not. What friendship is not, though, is the application of agape to a particular case. Friendship is erotic in being particular, directed at other individuals on account of their own specific qualities. Indeed, I am inclined to say that if there really is such a thing as agape, then it is a very mild, watered-down sort of eros.

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Friendship is a somewhat demanding attitude, then—which is why we cannot, and should not try to, have everyone for a friend. We have only 24 hours a day, and must deduct a lot from that anyway for certain necessities. Devoting ten minutes per year to someone is scarcely enough to qualify as friendship. An hour a week is perhaps somewhere around the threshold of closeness. If we have, say, three hours a day available for catering to friendship, then we can manage less than three a day, or about twenty altogether. That’s a lot, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to all of humankind, or the whole town, even it’s a pretty small town. Why have friends? Because they make one’s life more interesting, enjoyable, perhaps profitable; they stave off boredom, provide consolation in time of trouble, take care of your kids in a pinch, and so on. These are all, I take it, obvious benefits of friendship. To list them is to provide a complete and adequate answer to the question. Friendship doesn’t need to be and should not be a compulsion, a duty, a losing proposition. And one who went into a friendship relation determined that it should be like that would surely be an unpleasant person to have in such a relationship. Indeed, it surely would not be such a relationship: not really friendship, but some slightly sick variant of it. Love: What Which brings us to our central subject. While it seems to me plausible to regard friendship as a mildish species of love, it is not necessarily true that we are friends of those we love, exactly. What is necessarily true regarding the relation of love, though? I discern three main components in this notion. Let’s assemble them first. 1. If Alan loves Barbara, Alan desires Barbara. But desires what concerning or about Barbara? Desiring x makes no sense where x simply denotes an object of some sort. We may desire to own x, of course. But where x is a person, I should be extremely disinclined to take the desire to own x as all or even part of what it is to love x. (It

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may have something to do with sexual desire, perhaps. Anyway, that people have such desires now and again is a sad but real fact.) We could perhaps make more progress by considering the class of relating activities, R, involving x that one could engage in, and propose that to love x is to desire to engage in those. If x is chocolate cake, R’s being the desire to eat x makes eminent sense. In the case of Barbara, one prominent and typical case of a sort of relation the lover would like to have is a sexual one. But that is notoriously neither necessary nor sufficient for A’s loving B. On the one hand, it seems that there can be a wholly nonsexual love. And on the other, even if B is the only individual in the whole world with whom A desires to engage in sexual activities, it does not follow that A loves B; it might be pure sexual desire, devoid of love. What else, then? A perhaps more plausible candidate is desiring the presence of the beloved. It would surely seem anomalous for A to claim to love B, yet always prefer that B be somewhere else. The reasons matter, of course. If A prefers B’s presence because there’s a funny chemical in B’s composition that neutralizes something in the prevailing air to which A is allergic, then we have dependence, maybe, but not love. Desiring presence for its own sake seems more like it. But not quite enough. Suppose that A simply likes the way B appears, and would like to have B around as a sort of work of art? That doesn’t seem quite it either. Another thought is that instead of trying to identify some activities, as such, which A would like to engage in with B, we instead look at the purposes A would be pursuing in engaging in them. I would take it as necessary to R’s being a case of love that A desire B’s welfare, well-being, happiness, or good. That isn’t sufficient either, of course, although it becomes a delicate point after a while. If I am in favor of your well-being, I am just a nice guy, not your lover. But if I am willing to walk a quartermile across burning coals in order to enhance your well-being, the possibility that I love you begins to suggest itself rather strongly. At

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the least, desire for well-being should be accounted as a sort of love in its way. But not robust enough, yet. 2. Undoubtedly a further component is this. If Alan loves Barbara, then Alan not only wants Barbara to be happy, but also wants to be instrumental in bringing that happy state of affairs about. To love is in part to desire to be the (or at least part of the) cause of one’s beloved’s happiness. And here we come to an interesting and distressingly realistically possible conflict. Suppose that A knows that C could make B happier than A could. Insofar as A desires B’s happiness, A’s best move is to hook B up with C. But insofar as A himself loves B, his interest is to get C off the scene as far as possible, leaving B undistracted by this competitor. This is a most unhappy thing, for after all, A’s desire for B’s happiness may be perfectly genuine, and very strong. Moreover—at the risk of resting one’s case on the shifting sands of ordinary usage—it does seem plausible to say that if one’s desire for the other’s happiness is not perfectly genuine, then one does not love that person. The desire has to be sincere, else we have not love but only one of those power trips that mar the landscape around these matters. 3. One more exceedingly important component: the lover desires that his love be reciprocated. To love is to desire to be loved in return. This desire may, notoriously, be unrequited. But if one literally didn’t have it—it just didn’t matter a bit whether the other person responded, showed any interest whatever—then it seems to me we don’t, again, really have a case of love, but something else. An odd hobby, perhaps, or slavery; but not love. Note that the desire for reciprocation requires specification before it can contribute to our analysis. For if we don’t know what love is, then knowing that it wants reciprocating is of no help, for we don’t know what it is that is to be reciprocated. However, we have the two preceding components to help us out. If Alan desires Barbara’s welfare, desires to be the cause of Barbara’s welfare, and desires that Barbara in turn desires and desires to be the cause of

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Alan’s welfare, then we have got somewhere. For it would be possible to have the first two components without the third. Self and Love Which brings us into the heart of the present inquiry. Now, we do hear from time to time about “selfless love.” What are we to make of this? Presumably the selfless lover would exemplify the first component of our analysis—desire for the other’s good, and possibly also the second—desire to be the cause of that good; but not the third. Unrequitedness doesn’t worry him at all. We then have two questions: (1) is it really a lover or is it something else that we have here? And (2), would you want to be one of those? Should we hold such a being up for general admiration? I think the answer to both of these questions is negative. What Alan has about Barbara if he cares not at all about reciprocation is some kind of fixation or mania, and not love. If he loved her, then her indifference would bother him. Lacking that feature, he is not believable. Indeed, he is not trustworthy. A person who has no discernible personal interest in another—whose happiness depends not at all on how the other person responds—is one that Barbara would do exceedingly well to avoid. As to the second, there is an interesting question here: shouldn’t the rule of de gustibus non est disputandum apply here? Some people fall in love, while others develop fetishes, fixations, dreamworlds. Why dump on the latter at the expense of the former? Maybe the answer is this. Someone who will devote any amount of effort to bringing about the happiness of another being, with literally no concern or thought of his own in the process, has turned himself into a machine, a device for bringing about a result in which he (it) has no personal interest. It is said that this is the relation which males have attempted to induce in females over the past few millennia, the “objectification” of Woman. Now, I am not especially concerned here to discuss the truth of this allegation, though I frankly

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don’t find it very believable. And it should be agreed, I think, that if this is something at which it would be possible to succeed, and something that some people have actually attempted to bring about, then those people are awful people and deserve all of the badmouthing we can afford. But as a matter of fact, I don’t think it is something that it is rational to suppose one could succeed at, and if it were, that one would have to have one’s head examined if one were to attempt it. The trouble is not just that humans don’t make very good robots. It’s still more that robots make perfectly terrible humans. They have no values, so of course they don’t have your values, they don’t share anything with you, and in doing something like this you would have missed, quite utterly, the point. Self, Self-Sacrifice, and The Value of Love Real love involves the readiness to make sacrifices, certainly. But of what? Lots of time, money, stress, and perhaps various other potential or actual friendships or relationships that would have been valuable had they not conflicted with this one, which one now rates as too important to give up. But it is not self-sacrificing in the more important sense that one is really prepared to accept a worse life on the whole for the sake of the beloved. No way! Your beloved doesn’t want a klutz: she wants a competent, useful, and happy human around. Whatever else is sacrificed, your lover must (you suppose) make you happier than you would have been with somebody else or nobody else. Love has to be better for you, else it isn’t even love, let alone something that a sensible beloved would want. Love no doubt requires some accommodation. Here we have the question of acceptance of the other. Can I love Angela without thinking that Angela’s ends are good ends? Or can I love her even though I reject some of them strongly? Actually, there is also the question whether I can be said to love her if what I really love is only her ends, her goals, what she is dedicated to. If I just regard her as

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dedicated to the right goals, that doesn’t seem like love at all—I may even just be using her to forward those very ends, although it is a use which, they being her ends as well, she is very willing to be put to. Still, it doesn’t seem like love, somehow. The solution to that is unstatable in one sense, for each makes her own accommodation. Clearly, for example, one can admire the way another pursues a goal she has even when one doesn’t share it and perhaps can’t share it. In all this, though, one doesn’t sacrifice one’s overall interests; they merely evolve. A Parallel: Egoism Consider the opposite possibility, as it were: pure egotism. I want to distinguish here between the philosophical theory known as “egoism” and the personality trait known as egotism. One sort of egoist might well hold that everybody should be an egotist. If so, that theorist is a nit, and can be ignored here. But in fact, it isn’t what egoists have had in mind. An egotist is somebody who thinks only of himself, cares for no one else, is ready to use others as pawns in his various games without a shred of feeling; and in consequence others will shun him like the plague, which indeed he is. An egotist talks only of himself, and in consequence is normally a complete bore. An egotist is a self-made solipsist, eliminating all others from his universe. Such a person is reasonably ignored as well as avoided. And such a person is very likely to be miserable. What I’m saying here is that egotism is bad for you. You should watch out for this vice, because it is a vice, a quality for whose possession you will be the worse. Egotists are to be pitied, in between rounds at avoiding or frustrating them. People interested in themselves will, in short, not be egotists. So why will they go so far as to love other people? Because it’s more interesting than remaining a sort of emotional solipsist, or for that matter a narcissist, that’s why!

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Love is a self-enhancing interest in other selves. Not (just) other bodies, and not just other minds, but other selves, with their own concerns, feelings, problems, charms. To love is to be in an elevated state by virtue of one’s appreciation and contact with those personal things. Sexual Love A word about sex is in order here, perhaps. What I have been talking about all along is eros, not sex. It is perhaps true that people’s typically most erotic experiences are also sexual. Yet I would count the love of children, for example, as an example of eros, and one that is quite incompatible with outright sexual relations with them. The desire to embrace and fondle a child is not sexual, though it is sensual; but it is erotic, and anything but a mere instance of the “impartial and universal love of all humankind.” However, sexual love certainly has its place in the good life, and a prominent one. It is easy to fail to appreciate what is good about it. Were the object of sexual activity just the production of certain specific sensations, say orgasmic ones, then one would have to regard masturbation as the only really rational sexual activity. But when one knows what it’s like to engage in sex in a way that deserves the description “making love,” that view is just absurd. I am not at all claiming that only certain very rare sexual experiences have the properties I have in mind here. On the contrary: I hazard the guess that even the client of the prostitute, and the partners in a one-night stand, are enjoying, however briefly and perhaps unprofoundly, contact with another human personality, and not just contact with her sexual organs. Love is rightly thought of as common property of all, rather than the special province of romantic poets. They indeed have a glimpse of it, but happen to spend the rest of their time writing words about it, unlike ordinary people who, as they say, just do it.

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Self-Interest and Love When I insist that love is self-interested, and especially so in the best cases, I of course do not confine my view of interests to self-directed, egotist’s interests—self-interest in the usual and narrow acceptation of that term. I am solidly with Bishop Butler on this matter. The interests we pursue are, of course, ours, but many of them are focused elsewhere than ourselves, and love, obviously, is one of the main forms of such other-directed interests. So, of course, is hatred. An individual’s good is the optimal balance of satisfactions of all of his interests, other- and self-directed. But individuals will, again, differ widely in their assessments of the optimal balance. Now, if we say that love and interest are or are not “compatible,” we may either be referring to the specific character of love and of other, specifically self-directed interests we may have, in which case they are necessarily incompatible; or we refer to the relation between love and our overall good, in which case, as Butler and many others observe, we can say a priori only that they are, of course, logically compatible, but whether they are really compatible in your or my case is a matter of experience. When we recommend to a typical human being that he cater to and perhaps nourish his capacity for love, we suppose that it will do him good: that he will on the whole live a better life, a more satisfying one, if while he’s at it he loves some people and loves them well. What is the basis of this recommendation? It is, I think, both that love is an intrinsically satisfying affection in some respects, and also that if it is reciprocated, then it is both intrinsically satisfying in more respects, and also extrinsically good—people who love you do good things for you, and you enjoy doing good things for them. Now I certainly do not want to say that whether we should love or not is merely a matter of interests in Butler’s larger sense, in which one can have an interest in absolutely anything. The right question, and the only fundamental question for this purpose, is

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whether you, the agent, will do better on the whole to engage in an affection-centered relation with, say, this woman or that one. Some people will no doubt insist that the question is also whether she will do better. And of course that is a question, but it is not my question in the same way that the other one is. If I love her, I desire her welfare, her good. If I claim that I love her and yet don’t care what happens to her, then there is a question about the intelligibility of my description. There is also, of course, a moral question: I will surely be deceiving her if I pursue an interest in this way, and of course we have no right to do that to anyone, generally speaking, at least about things that matter. But I still would insist that the fact (if it is one) that it would be very good for her if she had me as a lover proves nothing directly for me. In any sense in which I could make a superb lover of her but be miserable because of it, I should certainly avoid that one by a country mile, if I have any sense. (Realistically, of course, that can hardly happen. If I am miserable, I cannot make her happy. These things just don’t work like that.) Costs When one person gets really involved with another, he will develop a disposition to defer, to some degree, to the other person’s view of what is good for him. But again, there is the old Aristotelian/Butlerian question of How Much? And what controls one’s assessment of this? Aristotle, of course, left us with no help at all here, in telling us to “aim at the Mean.” For the Mean was merely that which was neither too much nor too little, and how much was that, and how does one tell? But the Butlerian view suggests something of an answer: we are trying, always, to maximize our utility, as the economists put it—to arrive at the most satisfactory overall condition of life—most satisfactory to us (that is, to me, in my case, to you in yours, to A in A’s). Factor F is excessive when the marginal contribution of F to one’s overall satisfaction becomes negative; the same for too little.

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Our commonsense thesis that you do well to have a love life may be expressed as a belief that if the amount of love in your life is zero, then you will be worse off. Returning to the issue of paternalism: I suggest that the degree to which I will defer to my lover’s views about what is good for me, and she to mine about what is good for her, is measured by the marginal utility of such deference. Suppose I find that in general her assessments of what is good for me lead me to do things I generally find uncomfortable, boring, and unhelpful. Surely I should then reduce my deference level to the point where it begins to get difficult relating to her. Some of us may prosper with what have come to be identified as “Jewish Mothers,” and others not. But few of us, I think, genuinely prosper with out-and-out JM types, just as few of us, I think, would with women who do not assert themselves at all. What I would insist on, then, is that A’s love of B, taken in and of itself, gives A no right at all to foist his view of what’s good for B on B. In order to be able to do anything like that, B must reciprocate, accept one’s love; and then along with it goes, I agree, some acceptance of intervention, some tendency to defer. Love, to be morally acceptable, requires reciprocity. And that is an indication that what’s going on here is our respective interests in doing as well as we can. I should add that I am only here speaking of love between adults. Parental love has different asymmetries, and subtler symmetries. Parents must act on their views about what is good for their children, for the children themselves aren’t really up to having such views, in the main. But of course they grow up, and as they do so we must accommodate. Again, I hold that it will be bad for us if we do not, and not merely bad for the child—depending on the child! Payoffs The love that seizes the lover by the collar and passeth all understanding while it’s at it will seem such a good thing to the lover that everything else will be as nothing by comparison. Such a person

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is busy having his intrinsic utility maximized, and is a very lucky person—for the moment, anyway. But for the rest of us, love is one component among others in a good life, needing to be balanced against other things, and will be found to outweigh a lot but not all of those other things. Nevertheless, this love too is true—and a good deal more enduring. What we want when we love is a certain sort of satisfaction, emotional and, usually, sexual. But we also want the pleasures and rewards of friendship, and the advantages of partnership. In favorable cases, love will bring all that, and make one happy, or at least contribute notably to one’s happiness. My conclusion, then, is that with luck, love pays—and that that’s what it’s all about. This may sound unromantic, and in a way is. But it does not exclude the romantic, for that is in fact one of the payoffs. The poet is quite right in noting that this is risky business; and probably right in thinking that it is better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all. Good luck!

Aristotle’s Analysis of Love and Friendship Philia vs. Agape Richard Taylor Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics is probably the most widely used treatise on ethics in the English language, and yet you find something very surprising about that book. He nowhere discusses right, wrong, and duty. The Oxford edition of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics has a very lengthy table of contents, which alludes to every subject Aristotle treats of, but you will search in vain for the words “right,” “wrong,” “duty,” “obligation,” and so on. Now, this surprised me. It took me decades to appreciate Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. I had read it, and I had taught it, but I thought it was a dull book. I didn’t see anything very exciting about it. And then after about twenty years of this, I read it, really for the first time, and I wondered why I had never understood it before. The explanation is really that I, like everyone else in this room, was raised in a Judæo-Christian culture. And the categories of the Judæo-Christian tradition still dominate all our thinking about ethics. It was obvious as I sat here last evening, and obvious as I sat here today, that when we talk about human goodness, we’re always thinking in terms of goodness to other people. We think of ethics as having to do with interpersonal relationships. But Aristotle did not. I’m going to say something about Aristotle’s general approach to ethics, and then I’m going to address myself to the subject that occupies more space in the Nichomachean Ethics than any other subject he treats of, and that is the subject of love and friendship. That too is a bit surprising, that he should have devoted so much space to this, but in fact every classical moralist did. There is no moralist of antiquity who did not discuss friendship at length. I think 221

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no one surpassed Aristotle’s discussion of it, but we will come to that shortly and you can judge for yourself. Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics has two central themes. One is happiness, and the other is virtue, though I hesitate to use that word because we have a better expression for it. Virtue, to the modern person, means something very different from what it meant to Aristotle. We think of a virtuous person as someone who’s kind. Aristotle, however, meant personal excellence, individual superiority. We speak much of happiness, and yet no one seems to know what it is. Aristotle, I think, did, and this was another eye-opener for me. We think of happiness as a certain feeling, a certain sort of satisfaction. We think each individual is his own ultimate judge of what happiness is. If a person declares himself to be happy, then that’s supposed to be incontestable. It doesn’t occur to us that a person might think himself happy and be dead wrong. And yet in Aristotle’s philosophy it is quite possible for people to deem themselves happy even when they have missed it by a mile. Aristotle has a very clear conception of what happiness is. He defines it, discusses it at great length, and comes back to it repeatedly. And in one place he raises seriously the question whether it’s possible to declare a man happy before he is dead. Now, of course, by that he didn’t mean that the dead are happier than the living. What he meant was that happiness is the achievement of a lifetime, and you do not know, until the life is over, until it’s been completely lived, whether that goal was achieved. Philosophers today tend to think of happiness as a feeling. They think of it as something akin to a glow, but I don’t know what that feeling is. I am a happy person, I’ve been happy today, I was happy yesterday and the day before, but I don’t at any point remember having any feeling of happiness. I have a kind of happiness, I think, which is the kind that Aristotle speaks of. Before I get to the subject of philia, or love and friendship, I want to give you a bit of the flavor of Aristotle’s Ethics by reading from

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the passage that is probably the most reviled in his entire book, but which is one of those that I most admire. This is the passage in which he describes the proud person. He speaks of pride in glowing terms, and contrasts it both with humility and with vanity. Aristotle said, “a person is thought to be proud who thinks himself worthy of great things, and who is worthy of them.” Now, that qualification is important. A lot of people think themselves worthy of great things, but they’re really not. And it’s also possible for a person to be worthy of great things and be too humble to say so. So there are two vices here. If you think yourself worthy of great things when you’re not, then you’re not proud, but a fool. And if you are worthy of great things and you don’t realize it, then you’re simply humble, and that is not a virtue. There is no spirit of the Sermon on the Mount in Aristotle’s Ethics. Jesus said that the meek, the humble, and the poor are blessed, but you will not find anything remotely like that in Aristotle. Let’s see what Aristotle says about pride. I can’t read the entire passage, because it’s very long. I’ll read just bits. It is a mark of a proud man to ask for nothing, or scarcely anything, but to give help readily, and to be dignified toward people who enjoy high position and good fortune, but unassuming toward those of the middle class. For it is a difficult and lofty thing to be superior to the former, but easy to be so with respect to the latter. And the lofty bearing over the former is no mark of ill breeding, but among humble people it is vulgar and a display of strength against the weak.

So why is a proud person decent to other people? Because he’s that kind of person. It is not because they deserve it, not because you love them, but simply because you are that kind of person. A proud person is open in his hate and in his love . . . . He speaks and acts openly, for he is free of speech because he is contemptuous, and he is given to telling the truth, except when he speaks in irony to the vulgar. He must be unable to make his life revolve around another, unless it be a friend, for this is

224 Taylor: Aristotle’s Analysis of Love and Friendship slavish, and for this reason, all flatterers are servile. And people lacking in self respect are flatterers.

Now, I’m going to find a passage to wind this up. It is characteristic of a proud man not to aim at things commonly held in honor, or at things in which others excel, to be sluggish and to hold back except where great honor or great work is at stake, and to be a man of few deeds, but of great and notable ones. A proud person is not mindful of wrongs, for it is not part of a proud man to have a long memory with respect to these, especially for wrongs, but rather to overlook them. He is not a gossip. He will speak neither about himself nor about another, since he cares not to be praised, nor for others to be blamed, nor again is he given to praise, and for the same reason he is not an evil speaker. With regard to necessary or small matters he is least of all given to lamentation and asking for favors, for it is a part of one who takes such matters seriously to behave so with respect to them. He is one who will possess beautiful and profitless things, rather than profitable and useful things . . . . Such then is the proud man. The man who falls short is unduly humble; the man who goes beyond him is vain.1

Bertrand Russell, having cited these passages in his History of Western Philosophy, commented, “One shudders to think what a vain man would be like.” You don’t, as I noted at the outset, find the words “right” and “wrong” in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. I have searched for them and in only one place did I find either, and that’s in the passage I just read, where Aristotle says a proud person would never wrong a friend. By wrong, he meant simply to injure. Now, it might be worth asking, why do we not find this? Why, if this is a book on ethics, don’t we find any rules for conduct? We just find descriptions of what you should aspire to be, a list of the things which it is desirable for a human being to achieve. No discussion of right and wrong; no guide to conduct. The reason for this is that 1. Book IV, Sec. 3.

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Aristotle thought that the guide of conduct is already at hand. Convention determines this. Rules of convention have been built up, and from these any educated person can draw the distinction between right and wrong, and act accordingly. Justice is something of human origin, and necessary for getting on, but it doesn’t have a great deal to do with ethics as Aristotle understood it. Now, I’m going to just take a moment and ask this question. If this is the way the Greeks thought of ethics, if Plato, the Stoics, all of them, were concerned with the way to achieve human happiness and human excellence, why, the minute we start talking about ethics, do we begin talking about our obligations to others? Why do we talk about such things as altruism and the like, as if all ethics is oriented toward our relationship toward others? The answer to that question is this, I think: We were raised in a certain tradition, a religious tradition, and even if we no longer accept the theistic foundations of that tradition, we nevertheless have retained the ethical outlook. Aristotle said that distinctions of right and wrong are distinctions of convention. The church declared: No, there is a higher obligation, obligations we have that transcend our obligations to man, to humankind, transcend our obligations to kings and lawgivers, and these are obligations to the supreme lawgiver. These are our ultimate obligations. This is how right and wrong are ultimately defined, in the commandments of God. And the most basic of these commandments is, in effect, to do unto others as we would have them do, as Jesus put it. This is the golden rule with respect to how we treat others. Now, of course, most philosophers have abandoned the theistic foundation of that rule, but we’ve kept the rule. So even a moralist like John Stuart Mill, when he addresses himself to the question of ethics, doesn’t base it on religion, but what he does amounts to the same thing, for he assumes that ethics has to do with rules, that is, with commands. His command is to act in such a way as to promote the happiness of mankind. Well, where did he get that? And Kant, too, was a perfect example of this. He said all ethics is derived from

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commands, and the supreme ethical command will be a categorical one, a categorical imperative. And he formulated that, but if you ask Kant where he got that command, he doesn’t say he got it from God. Where else would you get such a command? He says, No, I got it from human reason. Not his reason, just human reason. Well, maybe. I don’t think that very many in this room think that law of Kant’s is derived from human reason. But Kant simply could not escape the idea that morality has to do with rules, and these rules have to do with how we get on with our fellow human beings. It was not so for Aristotle. Now then, I’m going to describe Aristotle’s theory of love and friendship. It seems very pedestrian. And yet, the more you think about it, the more you realize Aristotle had it exactly right. The more I’ve thought about it, the more it has seemed so to me. The subtitle of my talk alludes to the agape, or caritas, of the Christian religion. I’m not going to say much about that, because I’m not a scholar with respect to Christian origins. I think the word agape is not a term of classical Greek, but of New Testament Greek, and I don’t claim to have any scholar’s knowledge of its meaning and ramifications. But some things are obvious, I think. Agape is self-sacrificial, I believe, and it has to do with love for others, interpersonal love. So the contrast between this and the pagan conception of love as embodied in Aristotle is really very great. The Latin caritas, of course, comes down in English as charity. Well, it’s impossible to think of charity without thinking of treatment of others. Let us, by contrast, consider Aristotle’s discussion of philia. He distinguishes three kinds, three levels really. The first two are very commonsensical, and if you think about your experience in your friendly relationships with other people, I think you’ll find that he’s got it right. The first he calls friendships of pleasure. And this is just what it implies. Friendships of pleasure are friendships that arise from the mutual pleasure that some people give each other. I have an example of that which I think Aristotle would endorse. Imagine, if you will, a

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couple of men who have gone on vacations from business or whatever. They’ve gone off to some lodge, perhaps up in the Canadian wilds, to go fishing. Now, these two men, who have never seen each other before, meet, and each discovers that the other is an avid fisherman. They design their own lures. They have fished in various fishing holes all over the world. They know deep-sea fishing. They know freshwater fishing. They love fishing. They’re businessmen, but while doing business, in the back of their minds is always the thought of going fishing. They’re both like this. They have never met, and now they meet at this lodge. They soon discover that each loves the same thing, fishing. They show each other their lures. They get each other’s names and addresses. They ask, Where are you going next year? They will write to each other, they will keep in touch, they will probably meet next summer, arrange their vacations to coincide, and so forth. And they’re good friends. Why? Because they enjoy each other. It is as simple as that. This is the type of friendship that children have, and the only kind they’re really capable of, to any significant extent. And we have a perfect expression for this, “playmates.” Kids go off to school, and they count their friends, and it’s obvious, their friends are the ones they enjoy playing with. They put the blocks together, they ride their bicycles together, and they do the same things. They play cowboy and Indians, whatever. Playmates, a perfect expression. Friendships of pleasure. Now, there are two things to be said about this. One is, that they’re good, they certainly do no harm, and they add zest to life. Adults are capable of it, as my example of fishermen implies. One shouldn’t get the notion that this is a childish kind of friendship. It’s just that children are capable of no other. But adults are capable of it too. All of you can think of people who you look forward to seeing because you enjoy them. You like the same jokes; you like the same songs; you like the same beer; you have similar politics, maybe, and admire the same women, or the same men, and share pleasures.

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Aristotle is thus not saying there is something wrong with these. Furthermore, when we get to his third or highest kind of friendship, I think you’ll see that the most complete friendship includes all three. So even in the most precious friendships, this element is likely to be there. I’m going to come back to that point. The second point is this, that they are ephemeral. As Aristotle notes, since these friendships are based upon pleasure, they cease the moment pleasure ceases. Go back to our fishermen, for example. Suppose one of them totally loses interest in fishing. He’s taken up flying airplanes instead, and that’s all he wants to think about. He’s sold all his fishing tackle, and he doesn’t read the fishing magazines any more, doesn’t read fishing books. He doesn’t care a thing about it any more. These two men meet, and one of them, who’s still crazy about fishing, is so happy to see him. Now, he thinks, we’re going to talk about fishing, and what he’s done lately. And he finds he’s not interested, he’s just interested in airplanes. Well, pretty soon they’ve got nothing to talk about, and they don’t even bother to have breakfast together. They’ve lost interest in each other. And that is exactly the way it is. An example occurs to me from real life, and I’m sure you’ll all be able to think of examples too. A friend of mine once described to me his best college friendship, the friend he always drank with, the one he went out on dates with, the one he told stories with, the one he always looked forward to being with. After college his friend got a job, got married, and started raising children and settled down. The person who told me this said that, not having seen his friend for so long, he was eager to see him, so he looked him up, and went. But it soon became obvious that this friend whom he had yearned to see and to revive the old times, had changed. He really wasn’t terribly welcoming. He treated him decently, but it was obvious that the friendship was dead. The pleasure had ceased, and with it the friendship. So much for the first kind of friendship. The second kind Aristotle describes is what he calls friendships of utility. These are, again, what the name implies. Friends, in addition to giving us

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pleasure, are sometimes also useful. And when there is someone who is extremely useful to you, in advancing your career or whatever, you are likely to have warm feelings toward that person. A contemporary example would be business partners. Each has his role in the business, each does something well. One’s good at selling, the other’s good at accounting perhaps. And together they make the business work. Neither one could do it by himself; together they thrive. They are friends. They will do things for each other unconnected with business. They will stand up for each other; they will help each other willingly. They like each other. They are good friends. Their families get together often for dinners and so forth. Now, I think all of you can think of examples of this. It’s very obvious in collegial relations. Take a university faculty, or some division of it, such as the department of history or whatever, and suppose it’s a happy one. It’s one where colleagues get on well. They are useful to each other. They write letters for each other; they recommend each other; they push each other. There is nothing insincere about this, nothing wrong with it. It is a sincere kind of friendship. I say of my colleague, he is first-rate in such and such, and I mean it. And he is promoted. The dean perhaps asks me what I think of him, and I rave, and I mean it. He gets promoted, I’m happy. Why? He’s my friend. Why is he my friend? He does the same thing for me. He likes me; I like him; we like what we each do; we are very useful to each other. These are friendships of utility. Now of course these two friendships need not be at all exclusive. People who are useful to each other are likely to enjoy each other’s company. Again, collegial relationships, say in a university faculty, come to mind. It is not a calculated kind of friendship. I’ve had many such friends. I don’t stop and think, hey look, if I scratch his back maybe he’ll scratch mine. That would be base. But I do genuinely admire such a friend, and I think he genuinely admires me and our work. We stick up for each other, we push each other, and we enjoy each other. We get together at parties, social evenings, tell jokes to each other, share some of our innermost secrets, perhaps, and we like

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each other. But it’s still limited, because it has the same shortcoming that friendships of pleasure do, and that is, that since it’s based on utility, then if the usefulness ceases, so does the friendship. Someone upon whom you’ve depended, and to whom perhaps you owe a great deal, no longer can do a thing for you. The amount that he’s on your mind takes a great decline. You don’t think nearly as much of him. And again, there’s nothing insincere or base about this; it’s just a fact. Now, what has Aristotle said so far? He’s actually looked at experience. He’s looked at friends—and this is the way Aristotle did everything; he looked. What is it, he asked, that these friends are doing here? What is it that makes them friends? And what he saw was the exchange of pleasure or usefulness. There is, however, a third kind of friendship, and this is what Aristotle calls friendships of the good. This is where it becomes most difficult for a modern Western person, raised in a Judæo-Christian culture, to make head or tail of Aristotle. He speaks of a good man, of a good person. And if you and I think of a good person, we’re apt to think of someone like Mother Teresa, perhaps. What comes to mind is the generous, the self-effacing, the one who embodies the ideal of the New Testament, of love for others, the neighbor of the good-Samaritan story, etc. But Aristotle never means that. And why would he? He had never heard of the Christian religion. So by good, he means superior, someone who is better than others. This is a notion that goes against the grain of modern people. More and more, it seems, we are taught that no one is better than anybody else. I noticed that Dr. Kurtz, last evening, said that everyone is capable of being a Prometheus. It would never occur to Aristotle that this could possibly even be plausible. And I must say, it doesn’t seem plausible to me either. What is this superior being that Aristotle is speaking of? To answer this we must consider the virtues. Aristotle describes them at length, dividing them into two kinds, the ordinary virtues, and the intellectual virtues. And at the basis of Aristotle’s ethics is a certain

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theory of human nature, also not much heard about these days, but one I am convinced is true, and one which I think no Greek moralist, with the possible exception of the Hedonists, ever doubted. I’m going to say a bit about this, and then, in the light of these remarks, you’ll understand Aristotle’s third kind of friendships, the friendships of the good. Let us begin with Aristotle’s idea of happiness, eudaimonia, as he called it. We should not translate this as happiness, because happiness for us is such a wishy-washy term. We think of it as a kind of feeling good. We should instead use the term fulfillment. That is a far better translation of eudaimonia than happiness, fulfillment. Well, the fulfillment of what? A happy man, a happy person, is one who is fulfilled. But the only thing that can be fulfilled is a function. An athlete is fulfilled when he has achieved the victory that he has worked for. A physician is fulfilled when, perhaps after struggle, he has restored a very sick person to health. A woman who has aspired to motherhood is fulfilled when she becomes a mother, and a successful mother. These are examples of fulfillment. But Aristotle raises the profound question: Apart from the soldier, the artisan, the athlete, the physician, the this or the that, is there such a thing as just being fulfilled as a human being? And to answer this he says, well, it depends on what the function of a human being is. The function of a physician is to heal, the function of a mother to bear and raise children, the function of an athlete to achieve victory on the playing field. Is there, then, such a thing as the function of a person as such? And Aristotle answers by first asking: What is the unique excellence of human nature? What is it in human beings that other creatures do not share, and which is human excellence? The excellence of a hawk is swift flight and sharp eyesight. The excellence of a horse is strength and swiftness. And as noted, the excellence of a physician, to heal, etc. What, then, is the excellence of a human being? And Aristotle says that by nature a

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human being desires to know. Human beings, and only they, are rational, or gifted with the power to think and to know. Now, rational doesn’t mean just good at logic. Rational means capable of purposeful thought. Your function as a human being is not merely to feed yourself; all creatures do that. Your function is not merely to have health and a strong body; anything can do that. Your function is not merely to procreate. It’s nothing to have offspring; animals can do that. But we are the only beings capable of creative thought. Now, that’s what Aristotle meant by reason. To think, plan, and execute creatively, to do something no one else has done, and which is worth doing. That qualification is important. No one, I suppose, has ever gathered a ball of string five feet in diameter. Maybe somebody will. Maybe somebody will make it his life work. Well, that would be quite an achievement, but it wouldn’t be worth doing. But to write Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, or to write the Nocturnes of Chopin, or to paint some of the canvases of a Picasso, that is worth doing. Rationality, then, consists of exercising your thought and intellect to a high degree, and to a valuable end, and to succeed at it. That, then, is what Aristotle meant by human goodness. Human goodness is standing out above the herd, the mob, the ordinary, by having virtue, or personal excellence. What then, in the light of this, is the third kind of friendship? It is the friendship of the good, as thus defined. In other words, it is friendship between persons whose character is such, that is, who are good or noble of character. And by character he doesn’t mean decency; nor does he mean mere honesty. He means persons who have developed their uniquely human capacities to a high degree. He means the kind of person alluded to in the passage I read describing the proud person. He is one who is disdainful of ordinary and worthless things, whose interest is in good and worthwhile things, and above all in the achievement of these.

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Two such people are drawn to each other, not merely by the pleasure they give each other, not merely by their usefulness, although those things may be present, but by something they share, which is their personal excellence. The best way to see this is to imagine an example. Think, that is, of someone you like, someone whom you love, largely because of your profound admiration for what that person is, because of what he has achieved in himself, what he has accomplished in the way of doing something really well. He is a person who stands out, he is above the rest as being better. This is the person who is, in Aristotle’s sense, good, and two such persons can form a friendship based upon that goodness that they share. Notice how I’m using the word goodness. Aristotle raised such questions as whether you can be a friend of your slave. Can you be friends with any of your slaves? Well, clearly not. Your slaves are not persons of goodness. There might be slaves you enjoy; they might be useful to you and you to them even. But you can’t have this kind of friendship because, after all, they’re illiterate; they haven’t developed any of the qualities of human excellence that we’re talking about. He even referred to slaves as living tools. Now, this doesn’t set well with moderns because again, we think, no one should set himself above others as being superior. Of course, Aristotle owned slaves, and most of the population of Athens were slaves. And it is true that they were neither gifted nor trained in any of the human excellences. They were not creative people. They were slaves. Aristotle also raised such questions as whether this kind of friendship can exist between a man and a woman. Well, now when we read those passages today we have to smile, because the attitude that the Greeks, such as Aristotle, had toward woman was of course rather appalling. It is in the light of this that I would like to suggest the following example of this third kind of friendship, the friendships of the good. We should note here, incidentally, that these friendships are rare. If in your lifetime you have one or two friends who meet this

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standard of friendship, friendships of the good, you should count yourself blessed. You will in you lifetime have many friendships of pleasure, quite a few of utility perhaps, and I think most people never have any other kinds of friendships. I mean, there are always friendships of pleasure and utility, even sometimes in the case of those who are so close as husband and wife. But it is nevertheless possible for a husband and wife to have this third kind of friendship of the good. The reason I have chosen this example is that it’s a perfect example of a friendship that can combine all three kinds. Let’s start with the third kind, the friendships of the good. Consider a husband and wife, neither of whom is controlling of the other, both of whom are persons of excellence, each in his own right. Each is very good at something, at writing, at thinking, at creating music, poetry, something. And incidentally, this creativity doesn’t have to be some grand thing. It can be something quite familiar, such as raising a beautiful family. I think this is an extremely creative and difficult art. It is a good example of creativity, I think, even though it’s nothing that the world applauds particularly. You get no medals for it. But a husband and wife can have this kind of friendship where each does genuinely admire the other. Each looks at the other as a cut above the rest, as really quite different, quite better, than the ordinary run, better in terms of intelligence, perceptivity, wit, judgment, originality, creative power. Each excels in his or her own way, but each in a way that is obvious to the other. Given that, there is the basis for what Aristotle calls the third kind of friendship, friendships of the good. I don’t think there can be such a thing as a good marriage that doesn’t have this rather rare third kind of friendship, but it includes the other two kinds. Those that have achieved this kind of friendship of the good, also have friendship of pleasure; that is, they do give pleasure to each other. They do enjoy dining together, going places together, vacationing together, and so on. And there is, of course, the friendship of utility. Each is likely to have a role in the relationship with respect to the

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raising of children and so forth. So there is the pleasure, the utility, and the goodness. And this strikes me as an excellent example of what Aristotle is talking about, although he, I think, would not say so, because his view of women was characteristic of his time, and I think not a very enlightened one. All right, the three kinds of friendship, there they are. Let us now contrast this concept of perfect love with the agape of Christianity. St. Paul spoke of faith, hope, and love, and the word that appears in that passage is agape. Of these, St. Paul said, love is the greatest. If I have not love I am but a tinkling cymbal, etc. St. Paul is speaking here about nothing that Aristotle talked about. He is talking about love for another person which is self-sacrificing, being willing to give to somebody. When Jesus is asked, What does it mean to love your neighbor? Who is your neighbor? he described an act of compassion. The Samaritan comes to the Pharisee in the ditch, bleeding. He despises that man. He is of a different ethnic group altogether. But he binds up his wounds, and takes him to where he can rest and recover, and we read this story and we think, Ah! how wonderful, how touching. This is the love of the Christian. It’s not what Aristotle is talking about. Not that Aristotle would disdain this, but it is characteristic of the Greek spirit that he exemplified. Epictetus, in his Enchiridion, tells a similar story, and it is interesting to compare the two. What a difference we find! You recall the story of the Samaritan as Jesus gives it, in answer to the question, Who is my neighbor? The gist of it is, your neighbor is anybody. You should love your neighbor, and that turns out to be, absolutely anybody. Neighbor doesn’t mean the person that lives in proximity to you, it is anybody, even a despised person, even some Communist, or black man. He’s your neighbor, is what Jesus is saying. And we think, Ah! warm and touching. Now, here’s the Greek way of telling the story of the Samaritan. Epictetus, the Roman exponent of Greek Stoicism, says: Suppose you come upon a man sitting in the ditch sobbing and crying,

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because perhaps his son has fallen onto bad ways. Today we’d say, perhaps, that his son has gotten into drugs and things. The man sits there weeping. What do you do? And Epictetus says, you don’t just walk away from him. You know that he’s a fool. You know that the only reason he’s weeping is that he’s taking this view of things. Nothing has really hurt him. Now, notice that. Nothing has hurt him. What does that mean? It means, nothing has compromised his goodness. Nothing has compromised his inner strength, his personal excellence. He’s the same person he was, or he should be, if he weren’t weeping there like a slob. So what you do is, you remind yourself that he’s not really injured. Nothing’s happened to his mind. It’s just his son, an external thing. So you think, well, he’s a benighted poor slob, but you don’t just walk by him, no. You sit down and comfort him, Epictetus says. Well, why? Sit down and comfort him, and, Epictetus goes on to say, even groan with him if necessary. But don’t groan inwardly too. In other words, don’t let yourself be overcome by this. It’s really a denial of the compassion that Jesus and Christians generally hold to be so precious. What is of interest to the Stoic is himself, and his own soul, and his own goodness. That is the primary thing. And for the Christian, and for those of us reared in a Christian culture, the primary thing, alas, seems always to be not what we are, but what we can do for this, that, and the other person.

Part Six EUPRAXSOPHY

Love, God, Morality, and Money

Eupraxsophy in Kant and Hegel James Lawler

Introduction: Paul Kurtz’s conception of “eupraxsophy” Eupraxsophy is the term Paul Kurtz proposes for a general worldview that attempts to bring knowledge or wisdom to bear on the practices of life so that life is lived well and happily. The elements of eupraxsophical life include personal pleasures, creative labor, loving relationships and morally responsible social behavior. The need for eupraxsophy is a need for a practical outlook on life that can provide an alternative to religious approaches. By religion is meant primarily a system of belief based on authority rather than knowledge, and one in which in a transcendent God, and an afterlife, play a major role. Knowledge is reduced to the role of handmaiden, while the happiness of human beings in this life is of secondary importance. Eupraxsophy is a trend in the history of philosophy. Kurtz cites Epicureanism, Stoicism, and skepticism as eupraxsophies in the ancient Greek and Roman world; and also utilitarianism, Marxism, existentialism, pragmatism, perhaps even Confucianism and some forms of Buddhism. (Kurtz 1989, 23) Two groups of philosophical outlooks are omitted: religious philosophies, and purely contemplative or analytical philosophies. Contemplative philosophies are omitted because they fail to provide a practical guide to life. Analytical philosophies, with their piecemeal concentration on particular philosophical issues, are omitted because they fail to provide an overarching worldview. 239

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Kurtz also omits the two philosophers mentioned in the title of this paper. The main reason for this is not that Kant and Hegel were ivory-tower or contemplative philosophers, unconcerned about the larger meaning of life or unwilling to say anything about it. The reason for their omission has to do with the perceived religious character of their philosophies. Kurtz does mention Marxism among the eupraxsophies. He distinguishes authentic Marxism from the dogmatic reinterpretation that occurred under the influence of Stalin’s nihilistic socialism. (Stalin’s socialism is “nihilistic” because of its purely negative stance toward capitalism, unlike the “dialectical” socialism of Marx, which presupposes and builds on capitalism.) But to understand Marxism it is necessary to understand Hegel, and to understand Hegel, it is necessary to understand Kant. Marxism is the outcome of a trend in classical German philosophy that begins with Kant. If the philosophies of Kant and Hegel are not eupraxsophies, but the philosophy of Marx is one, then, in the hindsight of the historical outcome, the work of Kant and Hegel might be considered a philosophical quest for eupraxsophy. This quest has contemporary relevance because of the way in which it came to grips with problems caused by basic features of modern economic life. Kant Let us begin then with Kant. It is clear that the Kantian philosophy is close to the main tenets of eupraxsophy. Kurtz writes that Kant has provided probing criticisms of the main principles of transcendent religion in his Critique of Pure Reason. And in his practical philosophy, too, there is a clear penchant for a eupraxsophical doctrine. Kant is described as providing a “phenomenology of the ethical life” (Kurtz 1989, 74). Humanist eupraxsophy requires moral principles. Kant’s theory of the autonomous moral will, and of the central importance of respect for the free human person, is a paradigm of this crucial dimension of humanist eupraxsophy.

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At the heart of the Kantian moral philosophy is Kant’s deduction of the humanist implications of practical reason—that each human being should be treated as a purposeful being, as an end in her and himself. Moral consciousness, described in Kant’s phenomenology, requires subordination of individual desires and interests to this objective. But Kant does not reject personal happiness in favor of moral truth, as he claims was the case for the Stoics. The culmination of his investigation of the implications of human practical rationality is the elucidation of the principle of justice. The term justice is used variously in Kant, but here I mean Kant’s theory of the summum bonum, the total or complete good intended by moral conscience. Justice is a principle of the distribution of the good things in life on the basis of moral worth. The justice Kant describes is the justice of the Biblical book of Job: the good person should have his or her human needs satisfied in this life, while those who violate moral norms should be suffer for this. The relation between morality and human happiness is a complex and paradoxical one. The ultimate goal of moral concern, according to Kant, is the this-worldly happiness of human persons. Happiness is the regular fulfillment of human needs—biological needs, needs for creative activity, needs for loving relationships. But the realization of such an objective confronts major obstacles. In the first place, moral responsibility sometimes requires that we contradict our own desires and interests. It also requires that the desires and interests of others too sometimes be opposed—when these are undeserved or achieved by anti-human means. However, there are more substantial barriers to the accomplishment of justice, to which we will return. In his work, Exuberance: A Philosophy of Happiness (1977), Kurtz suggests such complexity by dividing his text into sections on activity, enjoyment, and morality. Emphasis on creative and pleasurable activities must be balanced with moral responsibility. Loving relationships provide a springboard for concern for others, but as long as these are limited to the concern for the beloved, the

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family or the friend, the distinctively moral dimension is missing. Implicit contradictions are suggested in this formulation. Love itself, it seems, can be immoral. Kant, like Hegel after him, emphasized the potential oppositions, antinomies, contradictions that are concealed in the simple enumeration of human experiences that constitute a full human life. Contrary to traditional ethical theories based on happiness, Kant stressed the potential opposition between moral duty and the personal desire for happiness, including the desire for love. But Kant also acknowledged that both morality and personal happiness are necessary to make up the total good for human beings. Love is a fundamental human experience—but love, like desire and selfinterest, cannot be the basis of morality. Kant had great respect for Rousseau, whose importance in moral science he compared with Newton’s in natural science. But Rousseau mistakenly took something like love to be the foundation of healthy human relations. Rousseau believed that unspoiled human beings have a natural sympathy for one another. Natural bonds of mutual affection hold fast early communities of individuals whose needs are regularly met because they are so limited. But this is just the trouble, Kant argued. Rousseau’s Acadian shepherd’s idyll means the stultification of human talents, the suppression of the emergence of the full human being. It is selfishness that drives humanity forward, not love. It is our “unsocial sociability,” the competitive struggle, that is responsible for the achievements of civilization. Love does not rule out war, as Hobbes makes clear. The war of all against all is a struggle of primitive kinship groups, of families and extended families bound together by basic acts of love. Perhaps Rousseau was right, that such struggles were not inevitable, that it took the development of private property to create the conflict between the haves and the have-nots. But Adam Smith too was right in pointing out that such competition, which is only war tamed by the

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might of the political Leviathan, has been the well-spring of human progress. But therein lies another contradiction. The self-interested human individual, no matter how sophisticated intellectually and culturally, fails to act authentically as a human being. Animals too aim at satisfying their individual needs. The human “rational animal” merely adds the inventiveness and power of reason to this animal quest, and consequently magnifies its destructive as well as creative possibilities. And so Rousseau was right in condemning the heartlessness and injustices of modern civilization. Rousseau’s criticism of modern society is indeed the expression of morality, Kant reasoned, but incorrectly understood. It is not the peculiarities of human nature, not natural sentiment, not love, that grounds such condemnation. It is human reason that poses moral demands. It is human reason that correctly identifies the primacy of the human person beyond all those natural sympathies and attractions, but also antipathies and repugnancies, that are prompted by subterranean impulses and desires. Left to itself, an ethics of love can lead to the worst fanaticism. Love one another, said Jesus. But Kant replied: only God can love on command. We human beings can only aspire to such an ideal. But in the meanwhile we must complement the lush vagaries of natural sentiment with the austere clarities of moral reason. And yet, if such reason is often at odds with our desires, interest, and loves, it compellingly insists that those who are faithful to its norms have a right to the realization of those desires and interests, and that need for love. The main reason why Kant is not listed as a eupraxsopher is that in his ethical theory religion, although rejected on several philosophical levels, reemerges in the postulates of morality. Despite Kant’s defense of the autonomy of moral reason, he concludes that morality requires belief in God and immortality. But such a position, Kurtz argues, contradicts Kant’s own theory of the autonomy of the moral will, and the moral primacy of the human person which seemed to have been otherwise affirmed.

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Kurtz’s criticism of Kant’s moral theory was made earlier by Hegel, in his chapter on “Verstellung” in the Phenomenology of Spirit. (Hegel 1977, 374) Verstellung is variously translated as dissemblance or duplicity, but also displacement, or shifting, perhaps vacillation. Hegel accuses Kant of such shifting in the course of his argument on the nature of morality. In his presentation of morality Kant displaces his initial emphasis on human autonomy, replacing this with the standpoint of religious heteronomy. No doubt a game of mirrors is initiated in the fluctuations of Kantian theory, for the God to which morality refers is after all but a tool of moral construction. Why does Kant fail to develop a fully consistent eupraxsophy? Why does he shift from a this-worldly affirmation of human autonomy (and this-worldly happiness), to an other-worldly appeal to divine power (and personal immortality)? Kurtz clearly connects this anti-eupraxsophical outcome of Kant’s philosophy with Kant’s theory of justice. Kurtz (1989, 74–75) writes: Examining the phenomenology of the ethical life, [Kant] discovered that we have moral duties and responsibilities. Kant noted, however, that there is an antinomy between moral duty and personal happiness and that fulfilling the dictates of the former may mean a sacrifice of the latter. He attempted to reconcile this disparity by postulating God, freedom, and immortality on purely ethical grounds.

Kurtz replies to Kant that the notion that moral responsibility requires belief in God is mistaken, “for it is clear that individuals can and do have a keen sense of their moral obligations and duties without necessarily believing in God.” It is in connection with the ultimate requirement of the moral consciousness, the demand for a just satisfaction of human needs, that Kant saw the need to turn to belief in a transcendent God. But instead of further following Kant’s reasoning here, Kurtz takes a short-cut by appealing to an empirical fact: there have been many people and philosophers (Aristotle, Confucius, and Buddha are mentioned) who were committed to moral principles and justice in

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this world and who have not needed to rely on a transcendent God or personal immortality. This response to Kant is insufficient. It is by exploring the problem of justice and what Kant called the antinomy of practical reason that we will come to a deeper understanding of eupraxsophy, and of fundamental difficulties contained in a certain formulation of humanistic morality. Kant’s attempt to lay the foundations of humanistic ethics, and his failure to carry out this project consistently, has important implications for the development of eupraxsophy. Kant himself offers important reasons for his failure or inconsistency, for his shifting or verstellung between humanism and theologism. Several points must be emphasized to understand Kant’s reply to the empirical argument that there have in fact been atheists who were morally committed individuals. First it is clear that Kant does not deny that atheists can be deeply moral individuals. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant (1952, p. 596) describes Spinoza as just such a person: Let us then, as we may, take the case of a righteous man, such, say, as Spinoza, who considers himself firmly persuaded that there is no God and—since in respect of the object of morality a similar result ensues—no future life either. How will he estimate his individual intrinsic finality that is derived from the moral law which he reveres in practice? He does not require that its pursuit should bring him any personal benefit either in this or any other world. On the contrary, his will is disinterestedly to establish only that good to which the holy law directs all his energies. But he is circumscribed in his endeavour. He may, it is true, expect to find a chance concurrence now and again, but he can never expect to find in nature a uniform agreement—a consistent agreement according to fixed rules, answering to what his maxims are and must be subjectively, with that end which yet he feels himself obliged and urged to realize. Deceit, violence, and envy will always be rife around him, although he himself is honest, peaceable, and benevolent; and the other righteous men that he meets in the world, no matter how deserving they may be of happiness, will be subjected by nature, which takes no heed of such deserts, to all the evils of want, disease, and untimely death,

246 Lawler: Love, God, Morality, and Money just as are the other animals on the earth. And so it will continue to be until one wide grave engulfs them all—just and unjust, there is no distinction in the grave—and hurls them back into the abyss of the aimless chaos of matter from which they were taken—they that were able to believe themselves the final end of creation. Thus the end which this right-minded man would have, and ought to have, in view in his pursuit of the moral law, would certainly have to be abandoned by him as impossible. But perhaps he resolves to remain faithful to the call of his inner moral vocation and would fain not let the respect with which he is immediately inspired to obedience by the moral law be weakened owing to the nullity of the one ideal final end that answers to its high demand—which could not happen without doing injury to moral sentiment. If so, he must assume the existence of a moral author of the world, that is, of a God. As this assumption at least involves nothing intrinsically selfcontradictory he may quite readily make it from a practical point of view, that is to say, at least for the purpose of framing a conception of the possibility of the final end morally prescribed to him.

On Kant’s authority, perhaps, we should add Spinoza’s doctrine to the list of eupraxsophies, for Spinoza’s “God” was no other than nature, understood as a totality of dynamic potentialities containing the human spirit as well as the cosmic environment. In fact, Kant admires the atheist all the more for his or her commitment to moral duty without the motivation of any eternal reward. Kant was explicit that traditional religion, with its promises and threats, undermines authentic moral motivation. Secondly, we should recognize that morality does not consist merely of a plurality of precepts and obligations. Morality involves principles that cohere in some kind of order. The linchpin or cornerstone of the implicit system of moral beliefs—which Kant calls “the one ideal final end that answers to its high demand”—is the goal of moral reason that people be happy in proportion to their moral worth. But in the empirical world of experience, this moral imperative is frequently violated. This is the third point. The good person will

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always be assailed by two evils that appear to render this central demand of morality seemingly unrealizable. On the one hand there are the frequently fatal assaults of nature—“the evils of want, disease, and untimely death”—sublimely indifferent to the fate of the human individual. On the other hand, we see the persistent assaults on human happiness stemming from the “deceit, violence and envy” of other human beings. Fourthly, it should be recognized that a moral command that is impossible to realize ceases to be morally obligatory. So if it is impossible to realize the key command of morality, its highest requirement—that people who lead good lives be happy, while the deceitful and violent suffer the consequences of their betrayal of humanity—then the entire structure of morality itself appears to be just a futile fantasy of the imagination. So instead of remarking that Spinoza was both an atheist and a morally committed person, we should ask ourselves whether Spinoza’s position is both theoretically and morally consistent. Against an empirical objection to Kant’s vacillation between humanistic morality and theologically grounded hope, Kant replies that it is necessary to examine more closely the crucial requirements of moral consciousness. And then we should compare these with a larger set of empirical facts connected with the prevalence of injustice in the world. Kant reverses the traditional argument from the nonexistence of justice to the nonexistence of God. He argues from the existence of the inner moral demand for justice, through empirical counterevidence that makes us question the possibility of realizing that demand, to the conclusion that only belief in God can keep the moral individual, who is ultimately committed to justice in the world, from despairing of its possibility. Elsewhere Kant makes it clear that the main empirical argument against the possibility of realizing moral demands is not “the evils of want, disease, and untimely death.” Significantly, Kant’s list of natural evils mentions “untimely death,” not death itself. The evils of

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nature mentioned are partially or progressively remediable thanks to the progress of human science and technology. Were the causes of undeserved unhappiness to stem only from natural limitations, this would not constitute such an affront to morality. But when one recognizes that it is man’s inhumanity to man that is the primary cause of human suffering, that it is the very human person, the alleged subject of moral obligation, who is the main reason for injustices, then cynicism about the realizability, and hence reality, of moral obligation seems inevitable—unless we arm ourselves with the faith that there exists a power greater than ourselves who is capable of bringing about a just order. If Kant’s philosophy contains a phenomenology of morality, it also contains, in his portrayal of the contradiction between justice and experience, a phenomenology of the genesis of religious belief. In bolstering his argument, Kant does not merely appeal to haphazard experiences of injustice. He develops a theory of society that offers systematic grounds for such observations. For if nature and its laws are indifferent to the commands of morality, this is true just as much of human nature and its laws—above all the laws of economics. In developing his theory of human nature and its laws, Kant draws primarily on the tradition of English empiricism from Hobbes to Adam Smith. It is the “unsocial sociability” of human beings that has been the main motor of history. It is self-interested competitive activity that drives human society. Amazingly, such social individualism does not result in a war of all against all, a state of anarchy and universal bloodshedding. Out of the apparent chaos of conflicting personal motivations arises an order of things whose laws have been uncovered by the latest social scientists—just as Newton and other natural scientists have discerned the lawfulness hidden beneath the seeming randomness of natural phenomena. The main contemporary social scientist at the time of Kant was Adam Smith, whose ideas about the economic goals of human life seem to be reflected in Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of

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Morals. There Kant holds that a “kingdom of ends” ought to be erected, in which the relative ends of economic life and cultivated taste ought to be subordinated to the only end that has intrinsic worth, the human person. (See Kant 1952, pp. 274–75.) But such an ideal involves a reversal of the perspective proposed by the social scientist, for whom the prime motive force of social life is individual self-interest. Smith argued systematically and convincingly that human society can function quite well without the interference of morally motivated individuals. Of course the selfish individual of economic life has natural affections and sympathies in the domain of private life and the family. Adam Smith too developed an ethics of natural sympathy or love. When he thinks of his own interests, homo economicus thinks also of his family and friends, and wishes to be successful in their eyes and for their benefit as well as his own. But this natural sympathy for concrete individuals involves no respect for the human being as such. Smith argued relentlessly that morality in this larger sense has nothing to do with the springs of social life. Well-meaning interferences with the freedom of the individual to seek his or her self-interest inhibits the causes that alone produce wealth and happiness. Here the path to hell is paved with good intentions. Just as no business is founded on the attempt to do good to society at large, so governments should not attempt to frustrate individual economic motives in order to achieve some allegedly praiseworthy goal proposed by moralists—such as programs aimed at as saving the lives of starving poor children. Supply and demand not only regulates the price of goods and so the quantity of goods, but also the price of labor, and so the quantity of laborers. An oversupply of either should provoke the necessary market response—in the case of labor, income declining in many cases to the point of starvation. Let us take some moral comfort in this, since such a system will produce more wealth, and so more possible satisfaction of human needs, than

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any other. As if guided by an Invisible Hand, the system of selfinterested activities results in the best of all possible worlds. It is essential to recognize that it is this general theory of society that underlies Kant’s antinomy of practical reason. The main reason why moral demands appear unrealizable is this picture of social life drawn by economic science—that dismal science about self-seeking individuals (with their perhaps loving private lives) that is once again back in vogue with the death of communism and the globalization of economic life. According to this picture, successful life springs from the non-moral desires of individuals, mediated by rational calculations regarding the best ways of satisfying those desires. Morality, Kant insisted, reverses this order of desire and reason, demanding the subordination of the feelings and desires of individuals to inherent rational principles. This is Kant’s “kingdom of ends,” in which the ends of economic life and æsthetic taste ought to be subordinated to the only end that has intrinsic worth, the human person. Kant’s antinomy of practical reason, and the adoption of the postulates of God and immortality, rests on a collision between the requirements of morality and the Smithian socio-economic view of empirical life. Kantian theory remains important because Kant formulated a real contradiction that continues to be relevant today. It is important to recognize, moreover, that Kant did not stop with this appeal to an other-worldly God. He also looked to this world to see whether any evidence of a divine purpose of moral redemption can be discerned. Like Adam Smith, Kant saw something like an Invisible Hand at work in human history, forcing human beings to behave in ways corresponding to morality, if they do not do so for moral reasons. Hence he rejected the one-sided moralism of Rousseau, who failed to see any positive, humanistic purpose in the competitive struggle of humanity and the technological and cultural achievements it has produced. But he also rejected Smith, for whom such unconscious, morally comforting tendencies are all that can be expected.

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In the intensified world market place of the end of the twentieth century, whole cities are abandoned to unemployment, poverty, and despair by their major employers. Following the indifferent imperatives of economic nature, the marketplace seems increasingly to ignore the aspirations of morality. The promises of a morally acceptable outcome, like those of trickle-down economic theory, seem increasingly hollow. The response to this growing despair, moreover, has followed the complex course of Kantian phenomenology. The cry for justice swells and reechoes in the churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples of the world. Hegel For Hegel, it is the ethical state that is the God of the world capable of realizing that just society of which the moral reason of individuals only dreams. No other-worldly deity is needed to actualize the demands of morality. Hence, Sören Kierkegaard “charged that Hegel masquerades as a Christian apologist while actually defending a philosophy of rationalist humanism which is wholly at odds with the spirit of Christian faith” (Wood, 13). If we can take Kant’s word for it that Spinoza’s philosophy was a eupraxsophy, should we not also acknowledge Kierkegaard’s credentials for detecting the odor of eupraxsophy in Hegel? No doubt this would involve an extended argument, and we should have to refute Marx’s judgment that in the Hegelian idealism we can still decipher the cryptic presence of other-worldly religion. In any case, Hegelian philosophy has taken a major step beyond the antinomies of Kant’s moral religion. And he has done so without ignoring the theoretical and existential problems on which a possible Kantian eupraxsophy has foundered. Hegel’s major contribution to the progress of philosophy consisted in his theoretical recasting of the antinomies of the Kantian philosophy in social-historical terms. Hegel argued that the opposition of morality and economic life in Kant’s thought reflects an internal division within modern society. It is not the result of an

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eternal conflict between theoretical reason and practical reason, between noumenon and phenomenon, between reason and desire, between the individual and society. Kant cast a real historical problem in absolute or metaphysical terms, and therefore formulated the problem in a way that allowed no solution. And yet at bottom, the problem was a real one, not an artificial invention of a philosopher. Morality does indeed contradict the practical demands of economic life, but not as two fundamentally different realms of being. Kant reflected a real opposition within modern social life. In his earliest writings, as a theology student in Tübingen and Berne, Hegel attempted to solve the Kantian antinomy of morality and economic life by showing its specific historical nature. Shortly after the publication of Kant’s Religion Within the Bounds of Unaided Reason (1794), Hegel interpreted Kantian morality as a continuation of Christianity, which he understood as a reaction of the alienated individual of ancient times to the “positive religion” of the Jews. Behind these historical figures, Hegel aimed at the battle between the Kantian morality, understood as the protest of the Enlightenment individual, and the heartlessness of the modern world. (This theme is elaborated later in the Phenomenology of Spirit.) Hegel contrasted the modern conflictual situation to the free pagan folk religion of the ancient Greeks, whose individuality was in harmony with social life, whose sense of civic duty involved the realization of individual desires and interests, not their suppression. Hegel at first followed Kant in regarding love to be a sensuous principle, without intrinsic moral worth, but nevertheless facilitating the subordination of spontaneous inclinations to morality. But in his Frankfort essay, “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate” (1798–99), Hegel developed a detailed account of Christian love. Here he joined, rather than opposed, the Hebrew religion and Kantian morality. The positive religion of the Judaism subjects the individual to an external master, while Kantian morality, with its notion of subordination of the empirical subject to moral consciousness, internalizes this

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tyranny. The Kantian subject “carries his lord in himself, yet at the same time is his own slave” (Hegel 1948, 211). By contrast, the religion of love preached by Jesus promises the “fulfillment of the law” (214), whether positive or moral. The spirit of Jesus is the “extinction of law and duty in love” (223). Hegel here rejects Kant’s subordination of love to the instrumental position of training inclination to morality. Love is a state that transcends and abolishes this opposition. Kant’s assertion that love cannot be commanded betrays a confusion between the language of Jesus and the language of positive law that Kant has internalized. Kant’s argument “falls to the ground by its own weight, because in love all thought of duties vanishes” (213). But Jesus’s message of love undergoes perhaps an even worse fall. The spirit of love was at odds with a Jewish-Roman world centered on the law, which is above all the law of property. “Love is indignant,” Hegel writes, “if part of the individual is severed and held back as private property” (306). Property implies exclusive individuality and opposition, which prevents love from completion. The frustrated lover feels the rage of shame when his beloved presents such an obstacle. Rebuffed in his lover’s heart by Jerusalem, Jesus too raged. He came to see that his mission was not to bring peace to the world, but the sword; not to bring about reconciliation, but to set son against father, daughter against mother. A terrible dialectic was initiated, for in condemning the impurity of the world, Jesus gave to it a consciousness of its own corruption. And in the battle between the pure spirit of love and the corrupt world, even the pure, whose very existence depends on the world they condemn, become corrupted. “The struggle of the pure against the impure is a sublime sight, but it soon changes into a horrible one when holiness itself is impaired by unholiness, and when an amalgamation of the two, with the pretension of being pure, rages against fate, because in these circumstances holiness itself is caught in the fate and subject to it” (286).

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Thus the Christian spirit of love, which attempted to escape the harsh fate of this world, became caught up in the “toils of fate.” Jesus preserved his purity and escaped that fate only by dying. But the community that continued in a world it despised underwent profound, contradictory metamorphoses. While at first ostensibly engaging in a polemic with Kant over the moral significance of love, Hegel in fact draws a similar conclusion to Kant’s when he writes of this Christian spirit that “The dreaming which despises life may very readily pass over into fanaticism, since, in order to maintain itself in its relationlessness, it must destroy that by which it is destroyed, that (be it purity itself) which for it is impure . . . ” (288). Hegel here elaborates Kant’s critique of the morality of love. To maintain itself without despair against the indifference and injustices of the world, such a morality postulates the other world, and attempts to dwell in it. The morality of love confuses the implicit demands of morality and sensuous, worldly desire. It therefore attempts to create a world apart from the world. For Kant, however, sensuous thisworldly desire was maintained in opposition to morality. Indeed, rational morality demands the realization of such desire. But then, because no practical means of realizing this demand is apparent, Kantian verstellung “shifts” to the picture of the realization of both morality and desire in another world. The Kantian religious morality of reason, with its appeal to the postulates of God and immortality, failed to overcome the otherworldliness of the Christian morality of love. But perhaps it is even more important to see that Hegel elaborated Kant’s second attempt to solve the antinomy of practical reason. Kant turned to human history to see evidence there of the “Invisible Hand” that turns self-seeking desires and loves to a morally justifiable outcome. Hegel continued this indication of Kantian philosophy, arguing that the very attempt to go beyond this world led to a worldly development of profound moral-rational import.

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In the end, Jesus turned all his thoughts beyond the world to his Father. But the community he founded could only withdraw from the world of others, of non-Christians, as much as possible. “The citizens of the Kingdom of God become set over against a hostile state, become private persons excluding themselves from it” (284). Christianity created a private world for a self-involved community, set off from a public life that had become formalistic and oppressive. The love they preached, based on this withdrawal from the world, was not a love of living individualities, rooted in this world, but a love in God, beyond the world. Retaining the form or feeling of love, this Christian love did not express itself in the specific forms of life. “ . . . [T]heir love was to remain love, and not to become life . . . ” (294). Christian love became instead a dread of all the forms of life in this mundane, objectified world that the Jewish spirit had come to accept in its very mundaneness as a gift of God. The two religions therefore reflected opposite sides of the same relationship, in which God, all that is meaningful, is held to be outside of this world. For Hegel, it was “the God of the world” (289) that is the secret core of every religion. This true God is concealed in that very mundaneness that has been condemned by the Christian. But in that very condemnation Christianity has contributed to the recognition of this mundane divinity in the most contrary and paradoxical forms. The ascetic who lashes himself pitilessly concentrates his whole attention on this miserable flesh and so paradoxically magnifies its importance. At the other extreme, “great hypocrites of nature,” turning from such renunciation, ingeniously link the “lifeless unity” of formal Christian love with the finite multiplicity of the world, the world of external property. They “devised for every civil action or for every expression of desire and passion a hiding place in the unity in order by this fraud to retain possession and enjoyment of every restriction [i.e., every restricted, mundane reality] and yet at one and the same time to renounce it” (288). The Christian community of private individuals sought to renounce the world but did so as a part of this world. The Christian

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renounces and despises property, even while eventually learning how to amass great quantities of it. At the same time, property or wealth undergoes fantastic development, as if spurred on by the Christian’s scorn for it. Thus by a perverse irony, the morality that withdraws into the other world hypocritically shifts back to this world again. Its exaltation of privacy, counterpoised to ancient public-spiritedness, animated a world of tremendous material power and productivity. Withdrawal from worldly or public life develops into fantastic proportions in the modern world. Hegel noted that Adam Smith described this world as one in which the contact between private individuals and the larger world has shrunk to the narrowest conceivable point. In the industrial activity of the modern laborer the whole of one’s worldly energies can be limited to a fraction of the activity needed to produce a pin. But while the attention of the individual is focused on an infinitesimal part of the world, the combined activity of many such seemingly powerless, fractionated individuals constitutes a gigantic, potent force of production. Infinite division of labor produces a totality of interrelated individualities and fragmented personalities. “By elevating need and work to this level of generality a vast system of common interest and mutual dependence is formed among a great people, a self-propelling life of the dead, which moves hither and thither, blind and elemental and, like a wild animal, it stands in constant need of being tamed and kept under control” (Lukacs, 333; also Hegel, 1979, 249). The God of the world, metamorphosed into the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith, takes the glittering yellow form of what Shakespeare once saluted as “Thou visible God” (Timon of Athens, Act 4, Scene 3). It is against this blind movement of the world, with its frequently destructive oscillations, that the command of morality, like the spirit of love, rages helplessly. But Hegel does not appeal once again to outside divine intervention. He has argued that this very appeal is an integral part of the conflictual situation itself. It is the other-worldly religion of Christianity that corresponds to the situation of private individuals, cut off from their living relations

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with one another. On the one hand, in theory they are united in an unliving other-worldly love, but in practice, in this world, their only bond of connection are the dead things outside of them. These things, their property, their commodities, find general expression in the universal representative of value, money. The dead thing takes on the appearance of life only by borrowing life from human individuals whose living activities, having been withdrawn as much as possible into an inward, private realm, have been reduced to narrow, spiritless mechanical repetitiveness. Morality condemns this heartlessness, but it is itself a product of the same principle. Morality is the criticism made by the isolated, separate, or abstract individual, of a world whose immoral nature is merely the totality of such separated, abstracted individuals. And yet it is here in this world, and not in another one, that Hegel sees the possibility of a new community, analogous to that of ancient Greece, but freer and more self-conscious because it must be the product of reflective individuals. For this alienated world of fragmented personalities is still a community, it still has a spirit, even if it is only the community of individuals who have renounced community, the spirit of those who live for dead matter. The hidden, underlying spirit of this world requires manifestation and realization. Hegel argues that modern alienation makes necessary the emergence of an “ethical state” that should consciously intervene in the course of economic life, reestablish a community or communities of individuals, and compensate for the destructive effects of indifferent economic oscillations. Intervention in economic life does not mean total regulation—the suppression of economic spontaneity. Just as Kant rejected the one-sided moralism of Rousseau, and acknowledged the civilizing virtues of immoral individualism and competition, so Hegel renounced the one-sided moralism of Fichte’s idea that the state should actualize moral imperatives. This he says would require the “perfect police.” “The moral principle could . . . intrude into the system of absolute ethical life and propose to put itself at the head of public and private law, and international law too.

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That would be both the greatest weakness and the profoundest despotism . . . ” (Hegel 1975, 478). The allegedly moral state, suppressing the spontaneity and individuality of worldly desires, evolves into the dead mechanism of the bureaucratic police state. The Hegelian ethical state on the other hand preserves the domain of spontaneity, of independent individuals, while giving to the implicit community of civil society an explicit, conscious character. In his proto-Keynesian conception of the ethical state, Hegel has not forgotten about love. Love, Hegel wrote, is contradicted by property and individuality, which are the principles of the modern world. Hence, when Jesus exclaimed, “How hard it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven,” Hegel replied that this is for us today “a litany pardonable only in sermons and rhymes” (Hegel 1948, 221). The attempt to overcome “this world” through a morality of love is only the fantasy of this world itself, when its representatives, confronted with the worldly hard-heartedness their own individualism creates, inevitably take to dreaming. But another, apparently less-ambitious perspective remains for love. Modern life is not exclusively modern. History negates the past, but also preserves it in complex and often concealed ways. Love cannot conquer the world. Jesus tried this and died. In modern times, Faust tries it, and kills. Gretchen dies because Faust’s individualistic nature was blind to her embeddedness in a concrete peasant community of men and women and children. Love needs to create its own living community, one in which individuality takes second place or scarcely emerges, as each member only finds himself and herself in the other, without the interference of individuating property. If love cannot conquer the modern world, its organic expression in the family recalls antique worlds that have not entirely disappeared. At the same time it reminds us that the individualistic world is not an absolute, that it too is a community, if a concealed and cryptic one. It is out of this contrast between the family based on love, and civil society based on property, that the idea of a postmodern ethical

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state is born. The ethical state is the synthesis of loving family and exclusive individuality, the civic family of a caring community of independent individuals. What we are seeing at the turn of the millennium is the ebb-tide of the moral and ethical states, which has been the twentieth-century answer of humanist morality to the ravages of nineteenth-century capitalism. Both the welfare state and, more radically, the Sovietcommunist state, promised to realize the moral imperative of the Kantian philosophy. The communist state collapsed in large part because of its palpable inability to compete with the dynamic, individualistic West. But the welfare state, in the absence of the system-competition once provided by the Soviet Union and subject to intensification of global economic warfare, is now becoming a victim of that same dynamism, as is the state itself as an independent agent of action. Today we see that the individual state can no longer provide the framework for such an ideal. Hegel’s idealism, Marx thought, was expressed in his naive belief that the state, armed only with the imperatives of Reason with a capital “R,” could indeed tame the wild forces of economic life. Such a state would instead be subjected to those forces, Marx argued. But the same argument applies to any attempt by the state to suppress spontaneous economic forces altogether. Communism, Marx thought, must be their “fulfillment,” in the way that love, Jesus said, fulfills the law—not by suppressing it but by going beyond it. The collapse of the Stalinist “moral state” proved that any attempt to turn the state into a direct instrument of morality will, as Hegel argued against Fichte, stifle the dynamism of individuality and degenerate into a bureaucratic police state. Morality of course survives the collapse of the moral state that had long destroyed the moral spirit in which it was born. Hence, the conflict between morality and economic life remains. The problem posed by Kant has not been solved. The complex course which the quest for eupraxsophy in Kant and Hegel has taken teaches us to take this problem seriously.

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Bibliography Kant, Immanuel. Kant. Great Books of the Western World, vol. 42. Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1952. Hegel, G. W. F. On Christianity: Early Theological Writings. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1948. Hegel, G. W. F. Natural Law. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975. Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel’s System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979. Kurtz, Paul. Exuberance; A Philosophy of Happiness. Buffalo: Prometheus Press, 1977. Kurtz, Paul. Eupraxsophy; Living Without Religion. Buffalo: Prometheus Press, 1989. Lukacs, Georg. The Young Hegel. Cambridge, Mass.:, MIT Press, 1966. Wood, Allen. Hegel’s Ethical Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Part Seven

From Philosophy to Eupraxsophy A Response to Critics and Commentators Paul Kurtz

I welcome the opportunity to reply to the commentaries on my work, both friendly and critical. This volume grew out of a conference held more than a decade ago at Brock University. I am grateful to David Goicoechea and Tim Madigan in seeing that the proceedings of that conference are finally published. Since that time I have published several new books,1 which I will refer to from time to time. Unfortunately, the commentators did not have these works available when they wrote their papers. Nevertheless, the main theme of this volume, on Prometheus and Promethean Love, is a key component of my thought and runs throughout my writings. I have never focused on Prometheus Love per se, and this juxtaposition is due to the series of conferences initiated by David Goicoechea that have dealt with love in its diverse philosophical expressions. I have always considered the capacity to love in its various dimensions (the love of parents for children, filial devotion, love within the family, affection between friends, sexual love culminating in orgasm, the beloved cause, philanthropy, etc.) as an essential part of human health and 1. The New Skepticism: Inquiry and Reliable Knowledge (Prometheus, 1992), Toward a New Enlightenment: The Philosophy of Paul Kurtz, ed. by Vern L. Bullough and Timothy J. Madigan (Transaction, 1993); Challenges to the Enlightenment, ed. by Paul Kurtz and Timothy J. Madigan (Prometheus, 1994); The Courage to Become (Greenwood/Praeger, 1997); Humanist Manifesto 2000 (Prometheus, 1999) (also translated into 16 languages); Embracing the Power of Humanism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); Skepticism and Humanism: The New Paradigm (Transaction, 2001); Skeptical Odysseys, ed., (Prometheus, 2001). 263

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exuberance; indeed, I have suggested that there is some evidence that there is a bio-sociogenic need for love in the human species. In any case, the focus during my career has been on normative ethics. Although many of my writings have been on epistemological and ontological questions, these emerge primarily because of their relevance to my basic normative interests. An Autobiographical Prolegomenon In one sense, one normative prescriptive principle has preceded all other philosophical premises—especially in methodology and the philosophy of science, where we deal with the criteria for judging truth claims. My views in political and social philosophy are likewise dependent on a similar methodological rule. I trust that the reader will bear with me as I offer a Prolegomenon to the main theme of this volume, showing how a normative principle is pivotal in my general philosophical outlook. I will refer in detail later in this essay to the critical commentaries. The basic epistemological presupposition that has ethical import is my commitment to “the methods of science.” I am using the term “methods of science” rather broadly to include empirical, experimental, and rational criteria. I am here referring primarily to the criteria for evaluating claims to reliable knowledge, not the process by which we discover truth. And the term “method of science” that is used is plural, not singular. I am not talking about “the scientific method.” I am leaving the door open to a wide range of research tools and strategies of inquiry, but am interested primarily in the standards of validation, confirmation, verification, corroboration, and justification that are used in the sciences—the natural, biological, behavioral, historical, social, and applied-policy sciences—and ordinary life. These methods include the use of mathematics and statistics, technological instruments from telescopes and microscopes to computer simulations, and the drawing upon multi-layered coductive explanations from many specialties and fields. The methods of scientific inquiry entail various forms of

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rationality. That is why I have used, along with others, the terms “critical thinking,” “rationalism,” and “the method of intelligence” to characterize the quest for objective methods of justification. I reiterate that I have focused in this regard on the question of method rather than classical epistemological issues per se about the nature of truth and ultimate reality. I have been most directly influenced in this approach by the American Pragmatists—Charles Peirce, William James, but especially John Dewey and his students Sidney Hook and Ernest Nagel. The central question for me has always been: What methods have been most efficacious in developing, testing, and advancing our understanding of nature, the biosphere, human behavior and culture, and more precisely our ability to solve problems encountered within the natural and social environment? This question has intrigued me ever since the first course that I taught at Queens College (The City University of New York) in 1950 as a graduate student at Columbia University, and it has been the bedrock of my entire philosophical career. The focus on method(s) is rejected by many philosophers, such as Richard Rorty, who claims to be a Deweyan (though many would deny this because of his anti-Deweyan position on method), and the postmodernists who are skeptical of science and any claims to objective knowledge, and also by those who held a spiritualparanormal world view and likewise seek to reject or modify science which they label as “materialistic.” I was influenced early in my philosophical development by the logical positivists, most notably by Nagel (I took almost every course that he taught at Columbia), but also a course that I took with A. J. Ayer, a visiting professor at NYU, and Carl Hempel (of Princeton), who taught a joint course with Nagel at Columbia on the nature of scientific explanations. I was attracted by the efforts of the positivists to use scientific inquiry as a model, especially as a critique of metaphysical (and theological) speculation that had no foundation in experimental verification or experience (following Hume). Clearly the principle of verifiability was too restrictive as a criterion of

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meaning; yet it was a normative rule that could be useful, particularly in disposing of much metaphysical bombast, because of a lack of clearly definable meaning. I hasten to add that I rejected the positivist critique of ethics from the start, for I thought that moral and political judgments were not simply reducible to expressive or imperative language and lacked any objectivity. I remember arguing one afternoon with A. J. Ayer (“Freddie” as he was called), as an impudent undergraduate on a park bench at Washington Square Park in New York City, that there is a level of ethical discourse that does have cognitive meaning, and indeed had its own logic of justification. Time magazine had a story about the time of Ayer’s visit to the United States, accusing him and the emotivists of a failure to provide a basis for criticizing Nazi moral imperatives—if ethical judgments were simply a matter of subjective taste, then anything goes. Ayer was offended by this critique, but it was clear to me that the emotive theory was profoundly mistaken. Ayer had modified this somewhat in a new preface to his influential doctoral dissertation, Language, Truth & Logic, but not enough in my view. Ayer said that you could argue with proponents of an ethical doctrine, pointing out logical inconsistencies or errors in empirical facts or the consequences drawn from them, but he still insisted that a person’s basic values were emotive in essence and may not be open to modification. I was greatly influenced in my philosophical outlook by another great teacher at NYU, the indefatigable Sidney Hook, who at that time was almost alone in taking philosophical inquiry to the public square, arguing for normative propositions that he was prepared to defend contextually, especially his defense of democracy on empirical grounds against totalitarianism. He had of course been influenced by Dewey, his own teacher. When I enrolled at Columbia I tried to read anything and everything that I could by or about Dewey. My overriding interest was in showing that prescriptive and evaluative judgments were similar to descriptive and theoretical

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discourse encountered in the hard sciences; and that in any case the latter presupposed a set of methodological prescriptive rules that were normative in character. It was also the thesis of my doctoral dissertation, The Problems of Value Theory (Eagle, 1952), where I maintained that there were general normative standards that were commonly recognized by the community of scientific inquirers. For example, concepts had to be clearly defined (operational definitions), theories should be noncontradictory, scientists depended on peer review of publications, plagiarism was inadmissible, hypotheses should be tested experimentally, predictions are confirmatory, laboratory experiments should be replicable, theories should be modified in the light of new evidence and/or more comprehensive theories, etc. I also defended naturalistic ethics. I argued that although ethical judgments cannot be deduced from descriptive ones, the valuational base should include references to scientific inquiry in appraising their adequacy. My first philosophical paper published in The Journal of Philosophy was critical of G. E. Moore’s thesis on “The Naturalistic Fallacy” (“Naturalistic Ethics and the Open Question.” The Journal of Philosophy 52, no. 5 [March 3, 1955], pp. 113–128). I maintained that the sciences presupposed ethical assumptions, as did Moore himself in his theory of definition. Broadly conceived, by the methods of science, or critical thinking when used in cognate fields, I meant: rational criteria (logical consistency), empirical tests (observation and evidence), and experimental tests (under controlled conditions and in terms of predictive consequences that are reproducible). But it included other aspects: hypotheses should be taken as tentative and fallible (following Peirce), skepticism was a key rule of inquiry (unless we can justify beliefs objectively we should suspend judgment), there was a requirement of intersubjective corroboration (within the community of investigators), and the grounds for the hypothesis or theory should be reproducible (by other scientific inquirers). This

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methodology is comparative, self-corrective, and its rules of inquiry are not ultimate, fixed, or final. By way of contrast, other methods of knowing—intuition, revelation, mysticism, faith, emotion, custom, authority—have been much less effective in advancing the frontiers of knowledge. These objective criteria are themselves justified pragmatically by their long-range consequences. They have led to industrial and technological applications, which have had an enormous success in the past five hundred years in transforming the globe, opening up communication and travel and enhancing human health and welfare. All of this has been for the amelioration and betterment of the human condition on the planet. It is thus vindicated, to use a term of Herbert Feigl. This is not a deductive or inductive proof, but nonetheless it appeals to our rationality. The background for this is the pragmatic outlook. Both so-called descriptive and prescriptive sciences ultimately fulfilled human interests and purposes: knowledge thus was a human construct, though it was warranted because it confronted a real world which delimited the kinds of explanations that were effective about nature. Thus my entire philosophical career was committed to justifying or vindicating the methods of objective inquiry. This was known as “naturalism.” Naturalism has many meanings, but its basic premise is “methodological naturalism”: we ought to test our beliefs, hypotheses, and theories by objective scientific/rational inquiry. This is distinct from what I later called “scientific naturalism,” a summing up of what we know about the universe, based on the sciences at any one period in history. Today “scientific naturalism” means a nonreductive account of nature, drawing its root categories and principles from the sciences. Thus naturalism can find no place for “spirits,” “souls,” “non-natural” or “supernatural entities,” since there was insufficient empirical evidence for them. This drew upon the “principle of coduction,” which I introduced in my book, Decision and the Condition of Man (University of Washington Press, 1965; Dell, 1968). This meant that we needed to draw from many

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levels of inquiry, and thus co-duce explanations. For example, both physicalist and intentional explanations are useful for understanding human behavior. E. O. Wilson in his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (Knopf, 1998) uses the term “consilience” (borrowed from philosopher of science William Whewell) to argue a similar approach: We need to develop empirical generalizations about nature and the biosphere, drawing upon different sciences. Wilson believes that we should strive to integrate and unify our knowledge, with which I concur. Methodological naturalism came under attack by changes within the philosophy of science (from Kuhn to Feyerabend). I never objected to Kuhn, for Deweyites had long held that scientific theories were related to the socio-cultural contexts in which they emerged, but I did object strenuously to Feyerabend, who denied that there were any objective methods of science at all. Similarly, I have objected to the postmodernists who emerged to contest scientific objectivity, claiming that science presents mythological narratives (Lyotard, Derrida, etc.) and was an extension of the power structure (Foucault)—undoubtedly true to some extent. My reasons were practical and pragmatic; namely, we have developed a body of reliable knowledge, which is progressively advancing (though constantly modified), and this knowledge is tested daily by impressive technological applications. If the principles of physics were simply “social constructions,” as some postmodernists have held, how account for the fact that astrophysicists can shoot rockets into outer space with precision, or that biogenetics can create new forms of food? (See my book New Skepticism [Prometheus, 1992] for an account of my epistemological theories, and also Philosophical Essays in Pragmatic Naturalism [Prometheus, 1990].) Thus my primary interest was in arguing that methodological naturalism not only applies to the sciences, but also to ethics, social and political questions, though with far less accuracy and far more disagreements; nevertheless this was a “logic of judgments of practice” (see Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry [1938]).

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I was distressed when pragmatic naturalism came under heavy attack or was ignored in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, particularly in American philosophy, and Dewey went into eclipse. I am pleased that Dewey is currently undergoing a revival. I taught courses in American philosophy all those years and was dismayed that analytic philosophers had abandoned any study of the sciences and focused on language. Although analytic philosophy in its day undoubtedly provided powerful logical and linguistic tools, philosophy seemed to lack a subject matter. This was particularly the case with ethics, whose subject matter seemed to many English philosophers not to be practice but language about practice. This work was usually on the meta level; whereas I thought that philosophers had missed the main point—there did not seem to be any content to ethical judgments; and that they needed to descend to the concrete and messy world where we are confronted by real dilemmas, not contrived abstract lifeboat illustrations. Many philosophers prided themselves on the fact that they never bothered with the world of concrete particulars; nor would they make any recommendation. They simply wished to find out how ordinary moral language functioned and left it at that. During that period I was highly skeptical of the use of ordinary language as a guide in determining the rectitude of moral language. I wrote a paper criticizing Antony Flew—“Has Mr. Flew Abandoned ‘The Logic of Ordinary Use’?” (Philosophical Studies, October–December 1958). We have been fast friends ever since. I should say that I had been disturbed by the failure of faculties to stand up to student militants and defend the academy in the 1960s and 70s—no matter how just their cause might have been. Sidney Hook used to say that the rarest virtue in faculties and administrators at that time was courage. Today many secular humanist and skeptical faculty members are appalled by the growth of the Religious Right, yet they feel so intimidated that they are fearful of speaking publicly on this issue.

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It is for these and other reasons why I later went on to found Prometheus Books in 1969 (to publish books “against the grain” and not generally available to the public), CSICOP and the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER in 1976 (to provide scientific critiques of claims of the paranormal), and the Council for Secular Humanism and FREE INQUIRY in 1980 (to defend a secular and humanist approach to life), and other organizations and activities. In this regard, I was influenced by both John Dewey and Marx, who held that it is not enough to understand the world (a theoretical ivory tower or ideal utopia), one needs to enter into the world of praxis and allow cognition to change social institutions. I have taught at several small liberal-arts colleges and found that one reason for the hesitancy in speaking out was fear of what the Trustees, or alumni, or the Town in which the college or university was lodged, would say. This was particularly true for religiously funded schools, and far less so for State Universities or secular colleges. Granted that professors had tenure, but they worried about promotion, salary increases, and other emoluments. The prevailing milieu in the 1950s and 60s of so many universities and colleges was conservative, and thus professors were simply fearful of rocking the boat. I am glad to say that this has changed in many colleges and universities—though conservatives now are often afraid to question the sacred liberal cows of the campus. I trust that the reader will forgive these autobiographical remarks, but they are relevant to what followed in my career. For I was convinced that it was important to move from philosophy (the love of wisdom) to eupraxsophy (the practice of wisdom), and thus I have labeled myself as a eupraxsopher. I have maintained that we can and should bring the best philosophical and ethical wisdom and scientific knowledge to deal with problems of practice. A similar reticence is found in the sciences; for very few specialists in scientific disciplines are willing or able to interpret their findings to the public and/or make any judgments outside of their narrow fields of expertise. In retrospect, I should have perhaps used the term eupraxology—the

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suffix ology rather than sophy—because it is science which breaks new ground and gives us knowledge, not philosophy; so it is reliably tested knowledge that we need and not simply philosophical wisdom. Some philosophers have deplored what I do, since they wish to focus on technical philosophy alone—philosophers addressing philosophers—and I wished to relate it to praxis and the interests of men and women in ordinary life. I asked, Why should religion or political and economic ideologies here provide all of the answers? Why not scientific and philosophical alternatives? Thus I have repeatedly claimed in public that we can live without religion, find life meaningful, wholesome, and significant without reliance upon received opinion. Hence my focus on normative philosophy became central to my activities. It was because of this in the late 1960s and 1970s that I decided to confront normative questions head on—because the public square was empty of philosophical wisdom; and philosophers were largely ignored. Instead, politicians, religious preachers and prelates business leaders, sports champions, and celebrities were the idols of public discussion—at least in America—and the exemplars of wisdom. Only Sidney Hook and Charles Frankel (both Columbia naturalists) seemed willing to deal with questions of public policy and moral conflicts, and a few scattered libertarians such as Robert Nozick. In 1967, when I was offered the editorship of The Humanist magazine, I decided to take it. The explicit editorial policy I enunciated was that we would deal with concrete moral questions of wider concern to the public. At about the same time I edited a volume for Prentice-Hall primarily on that topic—Moral Problems in Contemporary Society: Essays in Humanistic Ethics (1969). I was amused by the fact that my good friend, Rollo Handy, then chairman of the philosophy department at SUNY at Buffalo, and a strong naturalist, urged me not to assume the editorship. I was an active member of the American Philosophical Association in my early years, and he did not think my colleagues would find it

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philosophically respectable to do so. But I thought that philosophers had withdrawn from treating two vital areas of basic human interest: first, a generalized account of nature based on the sciences (formerly known as metaphysics) and second, a normative outlook in the ethical and political realm based on scientific naturalism, not ancient theological doctrines. The failure of philosophers to fulfill their traditional mission came home to me graphically in 1971, when I decided to convene a conference on biogenetic and medical ethics and could find very few philosophers interested in this field (Daniel Callahan was a notable exception). Incidentally, this public meeting was broken up by disciples of Lynn Marcus, later known as Lyndon LaRouche, the founder of the US Labor Party, who accused me (and Bertrand Russell) of supporting genocide. How and when I supported genocide they never really spelled out. But I soon learned that this was the price I had to pay for being a eupraxsophic activist. This was one of the first of many confrontations that I subsequently experienced at the hands of the extreme left and the extreme right. I am happy to say, however, that since that time medical ethics has developed and has made genuine contributions to the discussion of important moral issues, such as abortion, euthanasia, and the right to die. I was also surprised when Hilary Putnam led an attack on The Humanist for our publication of a special issue on “IQ and Race.” These were the days of Vietnam protests and philosophers were swept into the maelstrom in spite of any academic qualms they might have held. In any case, I decided then and there that I would devote myself to the application of philosophical analysis to concrete moral and social questions. I was perplexed at the fact that philosophers had withdrawn from the public square. (See the book by Thomas D. Weldon, The Vocabulary of Politics,2 which doubted our ability to 2. Thomas Dewar Weldon, Pelican/Penguin Books, 1953).

The

Vocabulary

of

Politics

(London:

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make informed judgments about political questions.) The point is that students at the universities would ask questions such as, “What is the meaning of life?” “How ought I to live?” “What is the just society?” Marxists, Leninists, and Maoists were offering a critique of capitalist societies—Herbert Marcuse was especially influential among students of the New Left. As a former student of Marcuse at Columbia I was perplexed as to how a rather mild Hegelian scholar could be lionized by the students, and how he reveled in it. The great religions also had answers for the students. Many or most of my philosophical colleagues were skeptical of the regnant religious and ideological dogmas. Many of them taught courses in the philosophy of religion, ethics, or political philosophy. But they rarely took positions. Usually they would present all sides of a question and leave the students in the dark about what their own views were. They simply would provide an analytic presentation of a philosopher’s position and then offer criticisms made in the history of philosophy; and not make normative recommendations themselves other than by polite suggestions. There were two main reasons for this. First, as teachers they did not believe that they should indoctrinate, rather they sought to teach the methods of analysis and leave it at that. They had their own strong views, which they were reluctant to express inside or outside class. They would teach the history of philosophy but they would not themselves deal with current burning issues. Second, there was general fear of the repercussions. I decided to take a different approach, to take philosophy to the real world, and to become engagé in the real world (like Sartre in France and Russell in the UK), leaving the ivory tower behind, and descending into Plato’s cave. My life ever since has not been the same. I have by and large eschewed university committee meetings (the true definition of “academic freedom” is “freedom from committee work!” I quipped). I had really embarked upon a eupraxsophic career, though I had not defined it as yet; it meant the concretization of normative

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recommendations in practice (praxis), offering normative guidelines based on science and philosophy. Thus I concentrated on normative questions. By “normative” I mean formulating judgments of value in which we evaluate and recommend alternative courses of action, and descending from the meta to the concrete level of moral choices. Valuational judgments are broader than moral or ethical judgments; judgments may be wise or unwise, effective or ineffective, useful or useless, good or bad, and these are not necessarily ethical, but may be economic, political, æsthetic, technological, or instrumental. Such judgments are made in the applied sciences and ordinary life. Indeed, we are called upon all the time to make concrete choices—it is what defines us as human beings. For many individuals freedom and self-determination are burdens, and they seek to escape from choosing. But choices are so essential for life that we need to constantly make and remake them. Thus we ask the questions, “How shall we choose in any concrete situation.?” The root question for eupraxsophy is this: “By what process shall we decide?” “What are the criteria by which we judge?” and “What values should we accept as intrinsically worthwhile?” At one point, I used the term “act-duction”; we infer actions that are most appropriate to a context, drawing up the valuation base. (See my Philosophical Essays in Pragmatic Naturalism, 1990, Part II.) As a eupraxsopher I was especially interested in the existential question, “Does life have meaning for the secular humanist, atheist, or agnostic who rejects traditional religion?” “Can one choose to live and live well without God?” The dominant religious traditions were undergoing a revival at the end of the twentieth century and so these were live questions, not merely of academic interest. Religious institutions—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.—are among the oldest in human history offering general commandments. They purport to answer the meaning question: “Human life had meaning because God, a divine or spiritual reality, bestows meaning on it, including some forms of salvation and

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immortality.” “Our choices,” they say, “only assure meaning in a divine framework.” Or “The trials and tribulations of this life could be overcome in the next only by a divine lawgiver.” These claims needed to be contested by eupraxsophers. Therefore, the first question for the eupraxsophist is to map out secular alternatives to the spiritual-paranormal-theistic conceptions of reality and to show how and why a meaningful life can be lived without dependence on God. Moral choices only take on meaning for human persons capable of decision. It is the challenge of choosing that provides the stimulus for human adventure, exploration, and fulfillment. Prometheus Revisited Here and directly to the point of this volume, the Prometheus myth provides a significant normative alternative to the mythological figures of theism—Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad. None of the latter have a monopoly of truth, nor can the historic claims of revelation survive scrutiny. They are, I submit, fictionalized tales told by ancient poets, who became apologists for Faith as elaborated in the gospels of the Old and New Testaments and the Koran. They are usually encased with impregnable barriers to critical examination. They are held to be inerrant, absolute and inviolable by many religious believers. Without a detailed discussion here suffice it to say that I have spent decades investigating religious claims and have found them seriously deficient. They lack adequate scientific corroboration and are false in what they purport to be our human destiny (see my The Transcendental Temptation: A Critique of Religion and the Paranormal, 1986). The Gods of theism are anthropocentric and anthropomorphic projections of human hopes and fears. They have no basis in reality. The papers by Noel Robertson and Herbert Schultz in this volume illustrate the powerful impact that the Prometheans myth has had on key literary figures historically. The poets Aeschylus, Goethe, Shelley, and Byron understood its insight and power. Literary metaphors have the power to extend ideas to large sectors of

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intellectual culture. And they are still useful today as a competitor with the reigning theistic orthodoxies. The one difference is that secular humanists know that they are dealing in myth, whereas theists do not, and they are consumed by self-deception. Unlike the classical religious myths, we are not constrained by the Promethean myth, it is simply a convenient historical fiction. It does not by itself provide sufficient guidelines for conduct: its chief value is to demonstrate the importance of courage and the need to share the fruits of our discoveries with others. The classical religious literature expresses itself primarily in the language of myth and narrative. They relate stories and parables of the prophets and deities to dramatize their claims: Moses received the commandment from Jehovah on Mount Sinai, Jesus is depicted as the Son of God, a dead-and-resurrected miracle worker, and Muhammad ascended into Heaven as the supreme messenger of Allah. The core of revealed religion does not offer didactic proofs per se; this is the task of theology (which philosophers have examined and rejected). Rather revealed theology must primarily be an article of faith. But we may ask, “Why believe the unbelievable?” The power of religious language lies in its moral, poetic, and existential functions: it expresses promises passionately hoped for. The naturalistic outlook has been explicated philosophically, drawing upon scientific discovery of the world and the evolution of the human species. Perhaps it is time to clothe it in elegant metaphorical terms in order to dramatize its message. This is the powerful role that the Promethean legend has played historically: an heroic Titan steals fire from the Gods and endows it along with the arts and sciences to human beings. Huddled in caves, overtaken by fear and foreboding, Prometheus provides primitive men and women with the means to create a better life. Hence he is the bestower of culture, and it is this capacity that distinguishes the human species from all others. No longer dependent on their biological drives and instincts, to gather food from trees and plants, to procreate at will, to flee from or protect themselves from wild beasts, they can now hunt and fish, create

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agriculture—and forge the tools to fulfill their ends. They can use reason to formulate their purposes and invent new means for realizing them. They can build shelters and fashion clothing to insure themselves from the vicissitudes of fortune; and they can develop a division of labor, out of which grows the arts and crafts, the economy, and other institutions. The meaning of Prometheus for the secular humanist is that humans possess the power to create a better life and thus reap the benefits of socio-cultural development. They can achieve happiness here and now for themselves, their loved ones, for their children’s children, and for generations to come. The world that was formerly enshrined for the primitive mind in mystery and awe, controlled by fearful demons and deities, is gradually understood by philosophers and scientists. The world that seemed so intractable is now malleable to suit human desires, not only by satisfying our basic need to survive and reproduce, but also to build a culture that enables us to enjoy the fineries of civilized taste. Prometheus graphically illustrates a turning point in human history. For Prometheus proclaimed his independence from the Gods. No longer fawning in pious servitude and supplication, he declared his liberation from the false illusions of salvation and dependence upon unseen power, and he decides to build a better life for himself and his fellow humans. His first act is his declaration of independence, but this could only occur because of his courage, the courage not simply to be (Paul Tillich), but to become what he wills, and to exert the energy and resolve to achieve his goals and realize his aspirations. In my book, The Courage to Become (Greenwood/Praeger, 1997), I argue that there are three basic humanist virtues that are Promethean in origin and come into play. The first is courage. This expresses the will to endure on one’s own, using one’s own resources. It is an affirmation of life; and only when it occurred in some mythical past could human history begin. The human species had a biogenetic evolutionary past, in which blind and unconscious

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forces were at work. Human history properly began when men and women defied nature and the unknown Gods, that sought to keep them in bondage. They sought to understand and master the forces which would dominate them and to create their own futures. Given what we know about the extinction of millions of species on our planet, the human species lives in constant danger. It is not unlikely that our species may one day become extinct. Thus we are not talking of the death of any particular individual, but of the possible entire death of the tribe, society, nation, or race of humans at some point in the future. Thus courage is an essential virtue for humans, in the present as much as in the past. A second humanist virtue concomitant with courage is cognition. This refers to human reason and to the rational powers that can be developed in order to bend nature to our purposes. At root this refers to our coping capacities. They are the practical tools that we invent and that enable us to survive and to thrive on our own: the discovery of fire, the wheel, the axe, the knife, and the sword, and later the more complex forms of social life, the village, the city, and all the adornments of cultural experience. Reason and science have their origins in practice and technology—enabling humans to solve the problems that beset them and to cope with fires, floods, plagues, storms, wild beasts, and marauding tribes. Humans invented walled cities, the chariot and ship, bridge and reservoir, the steam engine, electric generator, the flying machine and automobile, the computer and rocketship—all promising new capacities and powers. Theoretical science and philosophy which later developed added new potentialities for human achievement; for in better understanding nature, we can better forge new tools to cope; thus oral and written language was a supreme invention. The creation of mathematics and the elaboration of theoretical principles of scientific explanation and prediction played a key role in enabling humans to flourish. Both Plato and Marx understood how civilization developed and the importance of the division of labor for that.

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In my book Forbidden Fruit (1988), I argue that humans need to eat of the fruit of two trees in the Garden of Eden. The first is the tree of knowledge of good and evil, transforming blind obedience to God’s commandments to rational choices, using the second virtue of cognition. The second is the eating of the fruit of the tree of life, and the hidden powers it provides for realizing the good life. This is the first virtue, the courage to become—to seize control of one’s life and to live it fully. But there is still a third humanist virtue that exerts a profound role in the development of human history. Courage and reason would be misspent by the lone individual unless he shared what he learned in his own lifetime and transmitted this knowledge of techniques and strategies to others. Thus caring (benevolence and compassion) enables humans to share the fruits of their endeavors with present and future generations. Man is thus not an arrogant egocentric selfinterested being, he is capable of altruistic feelings of empathy. Learning and education are the transmission belt for social-cultural evolution, which now accompanies our bio-genetic evolution. For the present generation humans can engage in biogenetic engineering, which enhances and extends our Promethean powers enormously. Aristotle observed that man is a social animal, and that outside of society he would be either a beast or a God. Thus morality lays down the rules of the game. The common moral decencies are learned by every society that wishes to survive and flourish. The above three cardinal humanist virtues are Promethean in origin. Pragmatic Naturalism and Humanism John Novak, Timothy Madigan, and Tad Clements deal with the core philosophical ideas fundamental to my work: pragmatic naturalism and humanism. All of the above commentators are sympathetic to these themes, and so it is appropriate to begin with them. John Novak: Novak rejects the critics of pragmatism who maintain that is it a “superficial outlook,” encouraging “crass materialism” and “self-centered greed” (this sounds like American

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religious fundamentalism!), and that its earlier naïve optimism is no longer relevant to our time. Novak insists that pragmatic love has a deep and abiding commitment to human connectiveness, experience, and growth. Novak rightly points out the intimate relationship of my thought to the pragmatism of John Dewey and his students. I have been influenced by Dewey’s focus on inquiry, problematic situations, the unity of means-ends, the use of cognitive appraisal in evaluating value judgments, and so much else. Dewey was interested in transforming experience by means of the “intelligent,” creative” and “persistent development of the goods of human experience.” He sought to discover within experience the regulative norms to guide us. These were best realized by education and democracy and by the “self-corrective method of intelligent inquiry.” Novak eloquently elucidates five principles of pragmatism, with which I agree. Here the emphasis is on the process of self-corrective inquiry, where we seek comparative judgments that can be warranted, not ultimate certainties. Novak points to some differences between Dewey and myself. I strongly disagree with Dewey’s views expressed in A Common Faith on the “religious”—which Steven Rockefeller in an influential biography of Dewey considers central to Dewey’s philosophy. A Common Faith comprised the Terry Lectures that he delivered at Yale. There were strong religious proponents in Yale’s philosophy department, and Dewey attempted to accommodate his views to theirs. When the book was published, both Sidney Hook and Corliss Lamont deplored Dewey’s use of the term “religious,” even though it had a naturalistic interpretation of “God language.” God was used metaphorically to denote the relationship between our ideal ends and goals and human efforts to unify the ideal in the real. For Dewey, “God . . . describes the unity of all ideal ends arousing us to desire and actions . . . . It is this active relation between ideal and actual to which I would give the name God” (A Common Faith, New Haven, Conn.: Yale, pp. 42, 43, 51).

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Following Dewey’s lead, some American humanists considered themselves “religious humanists” and they sought to develop a new religion based on it. Thus far they have not succeeded, but have, I believe, muddied the waters, and have given some justification for the carping criticism of powerful religious fundamentalists, who insist that all forms of humanism, including secular humanism, violate the First Amendment Establishment Clause of the American Constitution. This controversy has been carried on for several decades. I have said in response that secular humanism is neither a “religion,” nor “religious,” and that the life stance it recommends can be based upon science, philosophy, and ethics. In my view, to use “God” in metaphorical terms only obfuscates the issue. That is one of the basic reasons why I have introduced the term “eupraxsophy.” I think it important for someone within our culture to go beyond religion. A second point of difference between Dewey and myself, according to John Novak, is that I think that Promethean men and women seek to transform nature to suit their purpose, whereas Dewey had a “less-combative sense” of nature and the self. Dewey argues that the immediacies of experience are to be enjoyed; his consumatory experience presents an enriched and enlarged sense of meaning. I do not disagree with Dewey on this key point, for I share his view that knowing is instrumental, and this likewise applies to the highest reaches of theoretical inquiry. Dewey maintained that the act of knowing transforms that which is known, especially if knowing is contextualized within an existential situation. I surely agree with Dewey that not all of experience is cognitive; nor does it involve probing inquiry. For much of experience is bathed in the immediacies of “having.” I sought to emphasize these qualities in Exuberance (1977) and to point out the fact that experience is wider than knowing. Novak has noted that Dewey’s approach has involved sensitivity and patience—I admit that I am usually impatient with patience.

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Perhaps one aspect of my philosophical career which sets me apart from virtually all other pragmatists is my conviction that the beliefs of pragmatists need to be implemented in action; they may lose their effectiveness unless they are applied. This is not entirely the case for most pragmatists who are removed from the world, though both Dewey and Hook were deeply involved in the social and political controversies of their day and along with others helped to establish new organizations or issue public statements. I have taken this further, in one sense, as the primary test of my own ideas; for I have said that insofar as ideas have consequences, they will grow in importance only if they are concretized in conduct. I have battled tirelessly in the trenches not only in order to judge whether “x is warranted or worthwhile,” but to see whether x could be put into practice, evaluating its efficacy by its personal and social effects. Thus I consider myself to be a practitioner of pragmatism, not simply a theoretician about it. If an idea is a “plan of action,” following Charles Peirce, then in a broad sense I have encouraged the formulation of new plans of action appropriate to the postpostmodern world, and have helped to create new institutions to fulfill these ends. The methods I have used are entrepreneurial and experimental; i.e., encouraging new ideas beyond traditional conceptions. I have said that we may need to introduce daring proposals and novel departures, constantly testing them by their effects upon practice. We need always to be willing to abandon strategies that do not work and to try out new ones. In that sense I consider myself to be the pragmatist’s pragmatist, testing pragmatism itself in pragmatic terms. My main interest throughout has been: Can the human personality live a full life without religion, and can society overcome the traditional beliefs and values framed in the infancy of the species? It is one thing to speculate about the possibility of building a new civilization without transcendental religion, it is another thing to test alternatives in the light of practice. It is not simply enough, and surely destructive, to destroy ancient beliefs and customs by negative

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criticism. It is another thing to develop viable ideals and practices to fill the vacuum. One unintended result of skeptical criticism may be nihilism and cynicism; another, and one that which I have always aimed to realize, is to develop constructive, affirmative, and positive new directions. Merely to show that the claims of traditional religion and the other cultural nostrums of paranormal hope and conjecture have no basis in fact or are incoherent is not sufficient. Because even if the existing beliefs are false or nonsensical, we surely need to fill the vacuum, and to assuage the hunger for meaning, truth, and value; and we need to test new departures in ideals and practices not simply cognitively, but in terms of human needs, attitudes, and emotions. We need always to ask, What will take its place, and will this be experientially viable? This is not a question of speculative theory but of action taken to achieve normative ends. Many noble and ignoble social experiments were tried on a mass scale in the twentieth century—from socialism, anarchism, social democracy, or libertarianism to communism and even fascism. These were often concerned with gusts of great expectation; many of them failed abysmally. I have always deplored utopian schemes per se as dangerous, especially when they sacrifice human freedom or the principles of moral decency, or compromise means to achieve ideal ends. Instead, I have attempted first to test out naturalistic and secular humanistic ideals on a more limited scale. Can men and women of all ages, children, adolescents, college students, singles, married people, and retirees, once they abandon the transcendental temptation, find life sufficiently rich with significance, capable of stimulating creative intensity, able to throb with motivation, intensity, excitement, and joy, and is it able to slake their passionate thirst for meaning? That is the great test, and it is worthy of our continuing efforts to build a world which leaves ample space for the creative exercise of our diverse idiosyncratic individual tastes and talents, but also allows for mutually shared experiences in small faceto-face democratic communities and on the global scale. This is a vital pragmatic standard by which we need constantly to measure our

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ideal goals in practice; and that is why I consider eupraxsophy as the next step beyond the philosophical. The public square—often naked of wisdom—needs to be filled by eupraxsophers, men and women of intelligence and knowledge, but also of genuine good will, moral empathy and caring. Can they bring about significant and enduring change? Timothy Madigan: Madigan provides an excellent sympathetic overview of my writings and the meaning of the Prometheus myth in my thought; and he understands full well my focus on praxis. May I first comment on various dissenting questions that Madigan raises. He observes that I often refer to Nietzsche’s protests against the false Gods of Christianity and his call for the heroic individual (übermensch) to rise above the crowd and assert his own audacious values and beliefs. Nietzsche is an iconoclast, as I am, and I have applauded his role in encouraging the lust for life. Marvin Kohl is also disturbed by the implications of the “arrogance of power” implicit in Nietzsche’s work (discussed later in this essay). I would justify arrogant protest sometimes, and in particular against the death grip which religion has had on human civilization. I do recognize that religious institutions sometimes have had positive benefits for humankind, offering hope and consolation and inspiring charity and beneficence. But I also am disturbed by the negative consequences that this vise has had on human progress, and that is why I have at times appreciated Nietzsche’s radical protests. I quite agree with Madigan’s misgivings about Nietzsche not being a humanist. I have in this regard been largely influenced by Walter Kaufmann’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as a defense of the creative individual and his focus on Nietzsche’s proclamation that “God is dead,” or at least ought to be pronounced as such by modern men and women. Madigan is surely correct that elements of Nietzsche’s views are discordant with humanism: his denigration of reason and compassion, his low view of women, and his total rejection of the values of social democracy. Nevertheless, I find Nietzsche stimulating, especially his critique of Christianity,

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because of its encouragement of passive acquiescence rather than the affirmative expression of the will-to-power. The most that we can say of Nietzsche is that he was a precursor of certain aspects of secular humanism, and that if he belongs in the humanist pantheon, it is only in this latter sense. It is the case that many philosophical movements are often stimulated by one or another aspect of a great thinker. Aristotle has influenced both Thomists and naturalists, Nietzsche both existentialists and humanists. The same thing can be said of other seminal writers historically, such as Protagoras, Socrates, Carneades, Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, Jefferson, Madison, Voltaire, Peirce, and James. These philosophers represented only some strains of humanism and thus belong in the humanist pantheon, though they are not fully representative of it. I submit that eupraxsophic pragmatic naturalistic humanism is unique and different from other philosophical schools that have preceded it. Madigan points out that reason without compassion may lead to repression, and that since humans lacked important powers to survive, according to Homeric mythology, Zeus ordered Hermes to bring more gifts to humans—“a sense of justice and a respect for others,” as well as “equality.” Madigan observes that during the Enlightenment and the French Revolution Robespierre used terror to quell dissident voices. The use of reason to unshackle superstition is not enough, says Madigan, it needs to be blended with compassion. I quite agree. During the Soviet period, Stalinists, who were atheists, launched a brutal assault on dissenting minorities. But it should be pointed out that the defenders of compassion and agape have likewise unleashed Holy Terror against heretics and iconoclasts, during the Inquisition and the Crusades, and that authoritarian nonsecular states, in the name of God and the flag, have repressed countless millions with self-righteous impunity. The Spanish Conquistadors unleashed genocide against native populations in the name of the Cross and the Church in South and North America. Modern-day fascists, such as Hitler and Mussolini, were surely not secular humanists. Thus the use of state terror has been practiced a

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thousand times or more without blaming the Enlightenment for it. The Islamic jihad provides stark testimony today that the butcher’s block has been used repeatedly by religious faiths against unbelievers and infidels and without compunction. Madigan is a defender of the Enlightenment and I am sure would agree with me on this point. That is why I have consistently defended democracy and human rights, including the legal right of opposition to the state and the need to defend the open society (á la Popper, Dewey, and Hook) against totalitarians and authoritarians (especially in my books The Fullness of Life [1977] and In Defense of Secular Humanism [1984]). Today the obligation of rationalists and humanists is to help build planetary institutions that will emphasize the importance of creating a democratic world community. We do not need a false utopianism, but a planetary humanism based upon a realistic assessment of our interdependent global needs. (See my Humanist Manifesto 2000 [1999].) Madigan points to another aspect of the Enlightenment’s mythbusting rationalist agenda that needs to be supplemented. He thinks that Schopenhauer provides some antidote to excessive exuberant optimism. Although Schopenhauer was an atheist, he avoided attacking religion per se because he thought that it encouraged love and compassion (especially the New Testament and Buddhism, if not the Old Testament). Madigan notes that Schopenhauer’s pessimism and resignation is at odds with the optimism and perseverance of my own writings. I plead guilty to the indictment, but still would argue that the appetite for the fruit of the tree of life demands some measure of optimism (is it a total illusion?) over pessimism and that the latter may lead to reticence and withdrawal and the collapse of the verve for achievement or the desire to savor the fullness of life. Schopenhauer became a writer rather than a doer; surely one needs to be both in the secular city; yet undue pessimism, I think, undermines the Promethean quality of striving to attain our goals. In my book Forbidden Fruit (chapter 9) I tried to respond to Schopenhauer’s dilemmas as between restlessness and boredom on the one hand and

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satisfaction and satiation on the other, and to provide counterdilemmas, taking the bull by the horns. Thus, I would point out that exciting expectations and desires stimulate us to action, and that there can be great thrills in the quest. Moreover, when we finally realize our ends, there can be gratification in releasing our passions, and consumatory joys and the immediacies of pleasure can bring intense satisfaction. I have always deplored the exacerbation of the sense of suffering, which, incidentally, Christianity has suffocated in. The Christ figure on the Cross and his sacrificial suffering for humanity is masochistic. “Enough already!,” I respond. “Let us cast off the pall of gloom that pervades the night.” “Tomorrow is a new day!” Perhaps one reason for Schopenhauer’s pessimism was that he was a misogynist, which might explain his undue frustration and negativity. Though in one sense Madigan is correct: We need a balanced humanism, which realizes that my cup, which floweth over, may sometimes become empty. My response is that we need to constantly fill it with new plans and projects, and that is what precisely defines us as human beings: we need not be crushed by events, as awesome as they may at times appear, but can rise again and again to the challenges of life, forge new vistas and we can exult in conquering them. Along with the tragic sense (which perhaps I lack), the satisfactions of achievement and success are there. Granted we often experience failure and defeat and we will be dead in the end, but it can be great fun and excitement while it lasts. I realize that this kind of Promethean audacity in the face of adversity may burn out less heroic men and women; to which I respond to those nay-sayers who refuse to swim out to the deep parts of the ocean: “Try it. Try it. You’ll like the adventure!” Is this merely a question of taste or glands? I think not, for the very definition of human life is exploration. This is what moves scientists and poets, artists and sailors, statesmen and voyagers. Thus we need not be forever fixated on our misadventures or failures. “Go on, go on” says the Promethean. “Let us not huddle together, supplicating the blind

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forces of nature for whatever help they can give.” “What a waste!” I say. But the bold ones may at times tire out everyone else. Is this simply a vulgar American trait of naïve optimism—the frontier attitude that is no longer relevant—as my French colleagues sneer? “No,” I say, “for I am referring to the essence of what it means to be human.” Indeed, French culture itself exemplifies the high virtues of creative discovery succeeding against all odds, and French cultural creativity is the epitome of the Promethean virtues. I agree with Madigan’s wise comment that Schopenhauer’s admiration for Christian compassion “is not ethical . . . if it leads to a sense of futility”; this is particularly the case if we wish to ameliorate social conditions. Madigan also suggests that the stance that we should adopt is that of the meliorist rather then the optimist or pessimist. I would agree, but would stand on the side of the realistic optimist, rather than the tragician. In any case, I am glad to have Madigan’s closing words about Shelley in Prometheus Unbound, for too many critics of the Promethean myth emphasize Prometheus bound, made to suffer at the hands of Zeus because of his insolence, rather than the liberated Prometheus, who best represents the power of reason and compassion and the triumph of achievement. Tad Clements: May I add a postscript on Tad Clements’s discussion. Since he doesn’t provide any criticisms of my writings, I can say only that I agree with the main thrust of his paper and his wise naturalistic interpretation of love. Love is a natural part of the human condition in its various forms, and we can best understand it scientifically without reading in mystical nuances or supernatural interpretations. Spiritualism and Christianity Having begun with sympathetic commentaries on my basic philosophical position, let me turn to the strongest critics in this volume, those based on non-naturalistic and supernaturalistic foundations: Richard Berg and Hendrick Hart. I especially appreciate the fair-minded tenor in which their remarks are made.

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Richard Berg: Berg’s paper contrasts two types of love: humanistic versus psychic love. An important difference between the two types of love concerns the attitude toward death and bereavement. He asks, Which is better able to cope with guilt and forgiveness? Berg approves of the claims of spiritualism that it is possible to communicate with the dead; for this, he maintains, assists the bereaved. What surprises me about Berg’s paper is his admonition to skeptics. The central issue, he states, is not whether communication with the dead actually occurs. The problem of psychic phenomena, like mediumship, is not an epistemological problem, he states; it is not a question of truth and knowledge. He berates the skeptic for criticizing those who claim that they are actually in touch with a departed person on the other side. Skeptics are apparently beating a dead horse, he says. “Bereaved people who seek out a medium do not really want knowledge,” he affirms. “What they really want is consolation for lost love.” I beg to differ. I don’t see how we can cavalierly dismiss the question of truth or falsity. Having studied mediums and psychics and those who visit them, this is the central issue for a large number of people. Does the medium actually contact Aunt Jennie or Uncle Jake? Now Berg is undoubtedly correct that many who visit mediums and channelers do seek consolation for lost love, yet those who do so genuinely believe that the phenomena are real. Those who visit come away enchanted by the possibility; the least sign of a possible communication is taken as evidence. Others who go to mediums often come away confused or angry. “No, the medium did not succeed”; and/or, “he or she gave misinformation”; and/or “what he or she said was so general that it could have applied to anyone.” I am mystified by Berg’s denial that truth is at issue. Does he not wish as a philosopher to know whether actual contact was being made? For the naturalist, the mystics and psychics violate the methodological criteria for evaluating truth claims. Hendrik Hart

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apparently shares Berg’s acceptance of the truth of spiritualism without sufficient skeptical doubt about its authenticity. For the humanist, love, honesty, sincerity, and truthfulness are basic virtues. The grieving process is painful; and we need to feel compassion for those who are experiencing grief. However, coming to terms with death is important; and some kind of closure is essential for mature reconciliation with its finality. Many people who seek to make contact are never satisfied; they may have a morbid fixation on contacting a dead person. Far better, the humanist would say, to have a realistic view of death, to come to terms with it, and to get on with life. Similarly, coming to terms with lingering guilt that one may have about one’s relationship with a departed loved one is very important; but this can best be done, I submit, in realistic terms, not by spinning out fantasies. Some people undoubtedly prefer the latter to the former, but should we abandon the search for truth? The question of truth or falsity especially applies to mediums and psychics, some of whom may believe that they have contact, but many of whom are engaged in fraud and know that they are deceiving people. This category includes the Fox sisters, Eusapia Palladino, Margery Crandon, and recent so-called channelers such as John Edward, Sylvia Browne, and James Van Praagh. Do they knowingly lie and deceive people, employ ruses and tricks to take people in? Some may believe that they have such powers, but I submit that they are mistaken. I know of no case where a mediumship has been corroborated evidentially and where communication occurs. I do know of fraud, deceit, and self-deception in most cases. The case of Bishop James Pike and his relationship to Arthur Ford is particularly enlightening. In the first instance, Pike was himself hardly the model of virtuous humanist moral conduct. The good bishop engaged in an affair of three years’ duration with Maren Bergrud, using a secret apartment in San Francisco for his trysts. Maren and Pike’s son, Jim Junior, apparently both committed suicide, though at different times. Pike was in a distressed state of

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mind, feeling some guilt about both individuals. He sought out poltergeists as evidence of communication from afar. Alleged poltergeist activity, I should add, can be given naturalistic explanations—they are sometimes due to the settling of a house, a gust of wind or draft, or perhaps deception by a child or an adult. We can thus explain so-called “poltergeist” activity without attributing it to some spiritual infestation. The scientific investigation of paranormal claims seems to me to be eminently worthwhile. It was conducted by the Society for Psychical Research on both sides of the Atlantic, for well over a century, as well as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. Is it wrong to investigate mediums, or channelers, who claim to have special gifts? Is it wrong to examine their credentials and their success rates? I think that any person of common sense would say Yes, we should so investigate these claims and not be taken in. The Pike case is especially revealing. I knew Bishop Pike and followed his career beginning during the years that I was a graduate student at Columbia and later, and I was at that time influenced by Pike’s views of religion (a Jamesian approach), and like Pike by those of Paul Tillich, who taught at Union Theological Seminary. What intrigues me is the naïveté in Pike’s approach to psychic phenomena. Pike, I think, had an abnormally exacerbated sense of guilt about the two suicides of people close to him, and he sought out three mediums and participated in nine séances. Two famous séances were held with the medium Arthur Ford, one on Canadian television in September of 1967, and the second one at Ford’s apartment in Philadelphia. It is alleged that Ford revealed to Pike privileged information that Pike said “could not have been gained in any other way than by direct communication.” How did Ford know these facts? Was he a genuine medium? I have carefully read over the accounts of the Ford-Pike séances: the accounts of Pike in James A. Pike and Diane Kennedy, The Other Side: An Account of My Experiences with Psychic Phenomena (N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968); Arthur Ford,

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Unknown but Known: My Adventure into the Meditative Dimension (N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1968), and Allen Spraggett, with William V. Rausch, Arthur Ford: The Man Who Talked with the Dead (N.Y.: New American Library, 1973). I found nothing unusual in what Ford’s “spirit control,” Fletcher revealed. Ford used the classical “cold reading” techniques on many occasions, fishing for information; in some cases he missed completely, and in others he provided false or contradictory information. What is unusual about Ford was his use of “hot readings.” There are several lines of evidence for this, much of it detailed in Spraggett’s book. Spraggett was religion editor for the Toronto Star and a well-known psychic proponent. According to Spraggett, Arthur Ford died leaving specific instructions that all of his papers and files should be burned. These instructions were not fully carried out. It was discovered later that Arthur Ford had a “Pike file” and that Ford had done meticulous research into the Pike family, with numerous newspaper clippings and the results of fieldwork; and indeed that he clipped obituaries from the New York Times about many deceased persons mentioned in the séance. Thus Ford had surreptitiously compiled this information before the reading. This is what is called a “hot reading,” and is very common in psychic circles; the information gleaned was not due to any alleged contact that Ford had with Pike’s son “on the other side.” This famous Ford-Pike TV séance had received worldwide attention. The second reading was private, yet certain salient facts emerged. Pike maintains that Ford referred to privileged information that his son revealed through Fletcher and that he was embarrassed about it: this apparently was the fact that Jim, Jr., had used drugs, including LSD. According to Ford The suicide “had been the result of a ‘bad trip,” “another LSD tragedy.” Jim, Jr., had got mixed up with friends at college in California and again in New York. In the first séance Ford mentioned several acquaintances of Pike. Donald MacKinnon father, Bishop Karl Block and Carol Rede, providing information which surprised Pike. The obituaries of each

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of these persons were found in Ford’s papers. Ian Stevenson, later president of the Parapsychology Association, related that Ford told him that he always consulted the Who’s Who entries which were available of people he was to read. Spraggett also quotes a former secretary of Ford who says: Arthur Ford never went to a thing like the Pike sitting without untold research [this informant said]. He did the research himself. He showed me how to do it. He went to the library in Philadelphia. I did not go with him when he researched the Pike séance but I know he did it (Allen Spraggett, Arthur Ford: The Man Who Talked with the Dead, p. 250).

This is not simply circumstantial but direct evidence of fraud on the part of Ford. For a detailed account of how hot readings are done, see Lamar Keene, The Psychic Mafia (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books). Thus I am intrigued by the claim that we should ignore such questions of truth or falsity. Does everything and anything pass muster? And should any claim to psychic contact be accepted at face value without any questions asked? I don’t see how we can accept that form of self-deception. (Incidentally, Prometheus himself was supposed to have had foreknowledge, a claim which I of course reject.) I believe in the importance of consolation for the bereaved, but not at the price of abandoning any questions about the sincerity and truthfulness of the alleged mediums or their claims. Surely Christianity does not need to borrow from spiritualism to support its foundations, nor need it abandon any and all standards of truth to rationalize belief in the beyond. Hendrik Hart: Hendrik Hart’s paper is rich in suggestive questions; given the limitations of space, I can only treat some of them, though I appreciate full well the challenges he raises. Hart defends the postmodernist critique of humanism: “Promethean humanism seeking freedom within the bounds of reason, may have spoken to the imagination of moderns, it will have much less to offer to postmoderns,” for it “ignores otherness, difference, individuality,

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and subjectivity.” I agree with him when he says that the world is full of conflict, and many are unfortunately left behind: other species, blacks, lesbians and gays, women and those who are different. I disagree with him, however, when he adds that if we are to live together, “we need to look beyond reason and justice.” Where would that leave us? In a never-neverland of uncertainty and confusion? The democratic revolutions of the modern world for tolerance and human rights were basically humanist revolutions. The principles of justice now recognized in democratic societies took a long time to be achieved; more often they were earned against the defenders of the faith and the ancien régime. Hart says that love may help us find an alternative as a channel for living together. Although we may differ about the nature of love, perhaps we can practice it ourselves, he says; perhaps we can be different people without devouring each other. I would hope so; men and women professing different belief systems need to live together in harmony—and this applies to humanists and religionists alike. I fully share Hart’s call for compromise, negotiation, and tolerance. Hart, however, suggests agape as an alternative to the Promethean myth, which has been offered by Christians as a model for social harmony. I shudder to think what would happen if this became social policy. More often than not, the appeal to agape arouses apprehension and fear in many who hear it and have suffered at the hands of the disciples of agape, who have committed genocide among native peoples, as colonialists sought to impose a Christian order or during the Inquisition and the Crusades. It is a bloody tale of holy horrors that religious dogmas, in the name of agape, have committed against the witch, the homosexual, the Jew, Muslim, heretic, or nonbeliever. Surely Professor Hart is opposed to repression and he is for the downtrodden, but surely not at the price of the principles of reason and freedom which serve as a basis for human rights. The doctrine of human rights, I hasten to add, are not contained in the Bible—which was able to accommodate slavery and monarchy, paternalism and a patriarchal society. The principles of

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human rights are not to be found in the Koran or the Book of Mormon either. These resulted from humanistic principles that were enunciated during the Enlightenment and were fought for during the French and American revolutions. I share belief in the power of human (if not divine) love; and I have invariably sought to forgive those who have offended me, as best I could, and where possible, I have tried to work with those who committed immoral acts, attempting to understand and perhaps even rehabilitate them if I could. In this sense Jesus’s “Turn the other cheek” has some merit in my view in interpersonal relationships, but surely not as social policy. (How does one respond to the brutal fascist or Stalinist dictator?) But it is the union of agape with doctrine that especially disturbs humanists, because it has most often been applied only to those who agreed (until recently) with the Christian faith, not the non-Christian. England, France, and Germany were Christian nations that bled white a generation of young men twice in the fields of Flanders, professing agape as they marched off to war. What does this mean in a global community where only onethird of the world professes (more or less) different sects of Christianity, interpreting these in multifarious ways. In ethics, the admonition to “love one another” is fine, but what does this mean concretely in Zimbabwe where poor black farmers battle with white farmers for a piece of land, or in Northern Ireland where Catholics and Protestants are engaged in terrorist battles, or in the southern United States where believers in agape, such as George Bush, quote compassion yet apply capital punishment with vengeance. Christians who profess agape are on both sides of the barricades, for and against abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, women’s rights, the rights of gays and minorities; so the general admonition is often empty and vacuous. What of Promethean autonomy? Hart asks: What is the relationship between (1) agape as other-seeking, passive, and submissive, and (2) autonomy as self-affirming and rebellious. Yes, here there is a difference that can’t be papered over; for there are

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radically different conceptions of the good life, and Jesus and Prometheus cannot walk easily arm in arm. Christian agape is tied to the belief in a dead-and-risen deity who will rescue mankind from a sinful world, if we merely submit to its doctrine of salvation. What Promethean impudence for Jesus to even suggest this. Prometheus, as I read the myth, urges independence and the nonsubmissive courage to excel and to create the conditions for ameliorating life. For the Christian it is obedience to the Jesus myth that is the highest virtue: “Believe and ye shall be saved.” For Prometheus it is breaking the chains of false illusions and embarking on our own voyage. Hart asks Promethean humanists: “Is autonomy and self-determinism as freedom to stand above any and all determination . . . freely creating its own meaning, inventing its own values, seeking itself as the sovereign origin of its own limits?” Yes, it is, I respond. But then Hart asks, Is that autonomy not a “destructive arrogance, what the Greeks called hubris?” Here my answer is No, for men and women acting autonomously in history have sought to determine their own futures and have embarked upon great adventures, and this has not always taken the form of destructive arrogance. Does it involve hubris? Yes, I say, by all means, but by hubris I mean proper pride, not a self-defacing sense of guilt and sin, but acting courageously (as Richard Taylor points out in this volume, extolling the Aristotelian and pagan virtues, which Christians have attempted to extinguish). Let me turn the questions on Hart, by suggesting that it is Christianity (and other similar religions) that have unleashed “destructive arrogance” against the human species and have so feared and hated men and women that they sought to suppress many of the finest talents for achievement, discovery, and creativity. Indeed, Christianity has sinned against men and women by imposing a false set of eschatological doctrines on them and compelling them to suffer for a false faith. I wish to ask Professor Hart the following questions: (1) What if Christianity was a contrivance of ancient propagandists for a faith, that Jesus never existed, or if he did, that we know very little, if anything, about him, and that the Christianity

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created in his name by Paul and others is a false religion? This is suggested by the higher biblical criticism. (2) If this is the case, then virtually all of the moral principles of piety and virtue commanded in the name of Jesus are merely human constructions (as I believe they were). (3) If so, then is it not the height of destructive arrogance on the part of Christians to insist that humanists abandon this life (as so many countless saints, priests, popes, martyrs, and prophets have demanded) for the sake of the next? (4) If the virgin birth and resurrection are actually false, as I believe that they are, then who is antihuman, and who has arrogantly sought to crush the finest human talents throughout ages? (5) And if this is the case, should we not applaud Prometheus for finally liberating humanity from this and other forms of religious oppression? These no doubt are strong words, but I propose that all systems of ethics, Christian and nonChristian, Muslim and Jewish, humanist and nonhumanist, are human creations that have evolved in civilization over historical time. Where does that leave our ethical lives? In no worse shape, I submit, for humans have had the ingenuity and moral beneficence to create moral rules of the game; and indeed they have done so in many instances without seeking to scare us with fictionalized tales of hell and damnation or paradise and salvation. Thus both religious (impudently and audaciously declaring it as “God-given”) and nonreligious systems are a product of our biology and culture. The Prometheus figure that I have been adumbrating has at least two qualities: (a) the self-affirming will to become (this need not imply degenerate arbitrariness), and (b) altruistic and empathetic concerns within human experience for the needs of others. Jesus and his followers did not invent or discover the principles of altruism. They have existed in China, India, Japan, and other pre-Christian and nonChristian societies. Simply attempting to coöpt them as the Christians do and giving them divine sanction is a display of persecutorial arrogance from which the human species is still endeavoring to free itself. Thus, instead of condemning Prometheus,

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I would indict Christianity—and I should add Judaism and Islam as well! One final point: Hart asks whether naturalistic philosophy and its commitment to science and reason can ever be adequately justified, or whether this lies beyond verification. I have already suggested that a powerful case can be made for vindicating its effectiveness in comparison with all other methods of knowing. I would exclude “intuition and intimation,” appeals to “revelation,” “spiritualistic prophecy, or noncognitive emotive feelings” as true per se in their accounts of the world, unless they can be corroborated in some way. It is only a few centuries since the methods of science have been used, and in field after field they have left speculative metaphysics and theology behind. Let’s never close the door to wonder and awe, or our openness to new ideas, but let’s not abandon rational standards. I don’t see how and why philosophy should be turned into religion; nor indeed how eupraxsophy, which extends the reach of science and ethics, should be reduced to a deep religious faith. The basic issue for us today concerns the nature of our ethical values and principles. Throughout the long history of philosophical ethics, philosophers have raised the question about the foundations of ethics. It is clear—from Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, and Dewey to the present—that it is possible to develop a set of ethical principles and values autonomously, without deducing them from antecedent theological premises; moreover, human civilizations have evolved recognizing the common moral decencies, the ethics of excellence, our obligations toward others, human rights and responsibilities. These are neither antirational nor independent of rational criticism. Hart’s last question needs to be addressed: “How will agape and Promethean love travel together in our world?” Obviously we need to do so, cojointly and with other faiths and professions; and we need to do so, I submit, by using reason, discourse, and debate, and the principles of compromise and negotiation. Christianity represents an enduring part of our cultural heritage, but so does the humanistic-scientific aspects of culture, which are

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responsible for our law, ethics, science, and philosophy. We need to find common ground in the twenty-first century and beyond, not by returning to the ancient faiths spawned in our agricultural and rural, pre-urban and pre-modern past, but by developing values more appropriate to our global space-and-information societies; and it is not by deprecating reason, science, and humanism, but by using them for further dialogue. Incidentally, these sentiments were spelled out in Humanist Manifesto 2000, which I drafted in 1999, as a basis for global cooperation between all members of the human community, religious and nonreligious. Whatever our faiths or lack of them, we need to share common ground if we are to save our planet from destruction. Sexuality and Love Vern and Bonnie Bullough: In their excellent review of changing historical attitudes toward love, sex, and marriage, the Bulloughs point out that value judgments toward sexuality have been transformed over the millennia—from the Greek adoration of the male body and homosexual love, through the Christian war against sexuality and the body as “venereal,” to the contemporary world where women have been liberated and a new humanist morality has evolved. The Promethean challenge to the Gods applies par excellence to the effort by many monotheistic religions to regulate, control, and repress sexuality. The war against sexual pleasures, by authoritarian religions, especially by the Roman Catholic Church and Puritanism is a crime against humanity. Witness the vengeance of celibates against sexual pleasure, the insistence upon sexuality being confined to marriage and procreation, the rejection of contraception, abortion, and homosexuality. In one sense, these prohibitions are a violation of basic human rights: the right to control one’s own body and reproductive freedom. What right does the church have to intervene in the inner lives of individuals? In principle, a person’s sexuality should be a private matter (among adults), and should not be the business of church or state. Other monotheistic religions have

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likewise assaulted the rights of women who are relegated to a lesser state—as in the Islamic world. The leading sexologists of the twentieth century have helped us to define and promote the sexual revolution, and have long protested these forms of repression. The Bulloughs point out that sexual pleasure is a positive good, that virtually any sexual pleasure (uncoerced and nondestructive) is better than none, and that although sex and love often add to each other, and sexual compatibility is a virtue in sustaining marriage, sex need not be confined to marriage, procreation, or even love. Thus the women’s movement, gay liberation, and the recognition of the diversity of human tastes and pleasures, indicates that we should not seek to impose the missionary position on everyone. The Bulloughs have defended the rights of lesbians and homosexuals, transvestites and cross dressers, transsexuals and others as neither unnatural nor sinful. What seems to be clear is that there is enormous variation in sexual acts, fantasies, and fetishes that turn people on. This being the case, it is difficult to label certain kinds of sexual turn-ons as “normal” or “natural” and others as “abnormal” and “unnatural.” Differences in sexual taste are apparently as idiosyncratic as differential preferences in clothing, music, the arts, food, or languages. Human beings are sufficiently malleable so that a great range of sexual behaviors will develop. This is one reason why tolerance is an important attitude to develop. But easily defining sexual deviance or normalcy is difficult, and that is an added reason why the social temptation to prohibit certain types of behavior ought to be resisted. Morton Hunt: I agree fully with Morton Hunt’s desire to explain love “in scientific rationalist terms.” He makes it clear that we do not as yet have an integrated “grand theory of love,” but nevertheless we do have probabilistic hypotheses of the middle range (perhaps Money’s love maps is one of them). Love is not some ethereal mystical entity, but a perfectly natural human phenomenon that can

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and should be understood in naturalistic terms. This does not mean that love would lose its allure and appeal, only that we can better comprehend how and why it functions the way it does in human life in order to evaluate it. The Principles of Sexual Morality: The Right of Privacy. All of the above papers are concerned with scientific questions describing human sexual conduct and attempt to give some causal account of how and why people behave the way they do. The three papers do have important moral implications about the subject under scrutiny. I wish to turn to these questions directly. Inasmuch as none of the papers treat my own writings on sexuality, I thought that I would focus on one aspect of human sexuality: the right of privacy, and how this pertains to homosexuality, bisexuality, and what I have labeled as “pansexuality.” What are the moral principles, from the standpoint of secular humanism, that should govern human relationships in the area of sexuality? At the present time, the sexual act is separated from procreation, given the discoveries of modern science and technology. Of the thousands of times that persons may have orgasms, only a relatively few, perhaps one, two, or three, will eventuate in procreation and eventually birth. In vitro fertilization, cloning, and biogenetic engineering have ruptured the relationship between heterosexual sex and procreation. Women are free of the traditional methods of producing babies. Although one might say that the oldfashioned way is still great fun, nevertheless the options have expanded enormously. What is the purpose of so many sexual encounters? Obviously enjoyment, pleasure, excitement, satisfaction, release (getting your rocks off). One may engage in foreplay, fondling, sodomy, oral and anal sex (one commentator quipped that the humanist definition of sex is “everything beyond the missionary position!”). Money’s love maps show the wide range of tastes and proclivities and the fact that various kinds of sexuality can flourish between adults and be enjoyed. Some of these forms of behavior may be destructive—as in

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the case of rape and violence or the coercion by an adult of a child or adolescent, or of a husband of his wife or vice versa. The principle of privacy suggests that adults ought to permitted to satisfy their consensual sexual proclivities, so long as they do not harm others. Society should not intrude in the bedroom. Some have sought to confine sexuality to marriage. If both partners enter into a contract and desire that relationship, then this is their free choice, and it ought to be respected. But it need not, if the partners are sexually incompatible or seek sexual experiences outside of marriage and have a tacit agreement that this is permissible. I submit that human beings should seek lasting relationships and that these should be based on sincerity, truthfulness, and honesty. Sexual fulfillment is enhanced when it is related to love, or at the very least deep feelings of affection. This involves some empathy and compassion for the other person and this presupposes genuine trust and respect. To be in love does not mean that I simply want my own desires satisfied—this is infantile love—it also means that I truly wish the person I love to prosper in his or her own terms and that this relationship allows the mutual fulfillment of both persons. Pansexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality: Plato was the first major philosopher, and perhaps the only one historically, to defend on moral grounds the love between two males, especially between an older man and a youth. For Plato this had a moral dimension, for the older man was concerned with the virtuous development of the younger man. It began in physical attraction, an idealized version of male beauty captured in so many statues, of the naked male body that were widespread in Greek and Roman culture. Was Plato’s discussion of homosexuality simply reflecting the homoerotic attitudes of Greek culture. The bonds between two or more comrades in time of war, it was said, could develop a powerful legion of lovers who were invincible in defending each other in heroic battle, and this was heralded by the Greeks. The place of women and girls in Greek culture, as in so many others, was lower in public esteem than that of men and boys. The Symposium, Lysis,

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Phædrus, and other dialogues return time and again to the glorification of the love between males. In Delphi there is a striking nude statue, with penis, protruding buttocks, and well-developed pectorals dedicated by the Emperor Hadrian to his handsome young lover, who died rather suddenly and in whose honor the emperor had his statue erected in cities throughout his Realm. Alexander the Great likewise had a male lover, who accompanied him during his campaigns. The death of his lover shattered Alexander, who was inconsolable, and who died shortly thereafter. This ideal of homosexuality thus pervaded Hellenic civilization. One can ask, Was Plato gay? At no point does he condemn homosexuality on moral grounds, but rather extols it as the highest form of human love, with barely a whisper about the qualities of heterosexual love. Socrates, Plato’s teacher and mentor, was most likely bisexual. Married to Xanthippe, he sired two sons. The picture that we have of him by his wife, particularly during the last days of Socrates, was that she was a shrew and complained to Socrates about his neglect of her, spending all of his time in the agora with his adoring young men, who followed him about and were enamored of his character and his love of philosophy. In the Symposium, Plato has a lusty and ambitious youth, Alcibiades (who later became a famous general), recount the night he spent in the arms of Socrates under his cloak. Apparently nothing happened. After drinking all night Socrates got up the next morning and went about his business in the usual way— he was a man of great fortitude. Yet it was Socrates himself who presents the case for male love in the various dialogues of Plato. Indeed, one of the charges against Socrates during his trial by the Athenians was that “he corrupted the youth of Athens,” and this charge is parodied by Aristophanes in his play, The Clouds. Socrates induces young men to enter his lair. As far as we can tell, Aristotle, the pupil of Plato in the Academy, was not gay. He married, had a daughter, and does not extol homosexuality, though, as I have said,

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his pupil Alexander was bisexual, having married and sired children as well as having male lovers. How many other philosophers were homosexual or bisexual is difficult to say. Lewis Feuer suggested that philosophers undergo psychoanalysis, but this is difficult to do retrospectively. Many philosophers, as far as we know, did not wed but remained bachelors: Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer easily come to mind. And some twentieth-century philosophers were openly gay, such as Wittgenstein, Santayana, G. E. Moore, and C. D. Broad. Others were lusty heterosexuals, such as Russell, Heidegger, Marx, Dewey, and Hook. Perhaps we cannot generalize; but it would be useful if some were outed and/or came out of the closet. Is there an affinity between the life of reason and gayness? Perhaps the life devoted to rational pursuits is so demanding that it leaves time for little else? Is the life devoted to reason an exclusive male pursuit? There have been all too few women philosophers historically, but this most likely was due to social prejudice, and fortunately this is being corrected today when opportunities for women have been opened up in the colleges and universities and many female philosophers of distinction have emerged. What a contrast that Prometheus presents with Christ. Interestingly, Christianity itself is homoerotic. One can make a case, from the gospels alone, which are not necessarily reliable, that Jesus was himself gay. When he was arrested in the garden at Gethsemene, he had spent the night with a youth, seeking the secrets of heaven. The naked youth fled as the authorities arrived. An alleged Secret Gospel of Mark, published by Morton Smith, clearly shows a gay Jesus. Smith thinks that this gospel was suppressed by the Christian tradition. In any case, the partially nude Jesus on the cross represents the male figure in masochistic torture, sacrificed by God the Father to redeem our sins. This is the Christ that believers are asked to adore; Jesus had all male disciples in his entourage, and as far as we can tell never married. Studies indicate that a significant number of Roman Catholic priests are homosexual and also there has been a

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proclivity in a significant minority for pederasty. Perhaps this is due to an enforced celibacy which denies them the enjoyment of sexual orgasm, which is considered sinful, and leads them to seek other outlets without women involved. Apparently the message of Jesus and his virtuous praise is for passive acquiescence, and submissive obedience, often taken as feminine virtues: the presentation of the buttocks for rape and conquest seems to result, the denial of male aggressive and warlike behavior for retreat and withdrawal. Women’s sexuality suffered denigration by the church fathers, and the term venereal was associated with sex and considered evil. Sex was not to be enjoyed for its own sake, but only as a means of procreation. What a distorted and sick sense of sexuality has the Roman Catholic church and Puritanism imposed upon humanity. What a sin against the body! Granted that Christian warriors have waged war and conquered nations; and they have been cruel and rapacious in spite of Christian admonitions to “turn thy other cheek.” This suggests that Christianity is a feminine religion that sought to whip its supplicants into submission, and that it could not restrain the Promethean quest for achievement in spite of efforts to do so. What a contrast that Prometheus presents to Christ. Representing the classical picture of male audacity, he challenged the Gods and rebelled vociferously against Zeus’s hegemony. He had proper pagan pride and magnanimity. He was concerned with extending the domain of human power: the tendency for aggressive behavior is often taken as a trait of male machismo. What, we may ask, is the Promethean attitude toward sexuality, particularly toward homo-, bi-, and pansexuality? After a long hiatus, these questions are again open sesame and being discussed by philosophers—the gay-liberation movement is relatively new and with it the possibility of exploring the moral basis of same-sex relationships. Let me suggest that the outright religious condemnation of homosexuality—that it is against God’s law, evil, and to be condemned as wicked—cannot be easily justified. Indeed, one can

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make a case that homosexuality (and lesbianism) is at least equal to heterosexuality—at least for a number of human beings who are attracted by the same sex. One can thus say that the total war against homosexuality is another crime of religious hatred against the human body. There are various reasons that attraction to males readily come to mind: first, the adoration of manly proclivities, the tendency to admire battle, and rebellion, the power to overcome adversity, audacity, and competition are themes that pervade civilization. The general fascination with sports and the celebration of champions— male and also female today—represents an appreciation of the talents of contest and achievement. Similarly for the intense approbation of young and seasoned warriors as they do battle on behalf of the tribe, social group, or nation. Soldiers defend the tribe or nation, and if and when they achieve victory, they are commended for their patriotic courage and valor. Heterosexuality for most people represents the natural biological response of males and females; and these are powerful impulses which spill out and seek to find hedonic release. This is shared with all other species: sexual pleasure is the stimulus goading the members of a specie to reproduce; and though it is culturally conditioned and modified, it is instinctive at root. For two people of the same sex to find sexual arousal and pleasure would prima facie seem to go against the grain, for by channeling the object of attraction from members of the opposite sex to one’s own sex in one sense would seem to require great exertion, or at least this is the case for many or most people who find same-sex encounters distasteful and disagreeable. Thus to seek members of the opposite sex is the norm; to seek members of the same sex requires great effort, often against powerful social pressures, and this makes it a higher value because it is yearned for and earned. The main caveat to this is that various forms of homosexuality and lesbianism are fairly widespread in some cultures and/or there most likely is a genetic disposition or developmental tendency (love maps, according to John Money). In other words, it is not simply a

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question of free choice. Homosexuals or lesbians do not usually choose to be gay, and many young people are crushed when they discover that they are. For these individuals—perhaps 2, 4, or 10 percent of the population depending on the culture—homosexuality is as natural and instinctive as heterosexuality; it is part of their nature. Thus there is no great battle, for they are doing what for them comes naturally. Incidentally, to the extent that this is the case, then the effort of social conservatives to prohibit or punish homosexual behavior (among adults) would be a cruel denial of the rights of human beings to express their proclivities. The causes of homosexuality are complex. Many insist that they are genetic, others that this behavior arises in the prenatal or developmental process and can be learned. Still others claim that it is learned or conditioned behavior, exacerbated especially in certain social situations—such as sailors or prisoners forced into isolation, etc. In many cases the urges may become so deep and strong that they define the person and they become very difficult to change. Although some people claim that homosexuality can be conditioned out, this is very unlikely for most gay people. Homosexual or lesbian sexual encounters for them can be as desirable or ennobling as heterosexual encounters, and the foreplay and orgasmic release as pleasurable or gratifying—according to the people who have experienced them. Similar for affection and love, which can be intense. Thus one cannot necessarily say that heterosexuality is always superior to gay sexuality. It is a question of taste and proclivity. Perhaps one can ask this of any and all experiences. Is reading to be preferred to exercise? Are certain kinds of foods superior? Is the taste of steak better than the taste of fish? Is bourbon better than gin or wine? Is bouillabaisse superior to pasta, Beethoven better than rock? It depends on the intrinsic quality of the experiences for those who have enjoyed same-sex relationships and may prefer it. It is very important that one is not censorial here, or legalistic, or absolutistic, and insist a priori that heterosexuality in all

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cases is better than homosexuality, when those who have had both may prefer the latter to the former. What about bisexuality—the ability to be aroused by both sexes? Some sexologists have denied that this condition exists, and that a person prefers either female or male sexuality. There are so many cases in which individuals claim to be aroused by either or both sexes that I think that they are mistaken, and there are some very famous people historically who allegedly were bisexual, including Cæsar, Alexander, Napoleon, and others. In any case, the role of fantasy is a powerful stimulant to arousal—but the object of affection may be either male or female. Similarly for the capacity to love either or both sexes. Sexuality and love need not be present in all cases; and a person can be aroused sexually for its own sake, by the female softness, the contours of the breasts and hips and lips, or by male muscularity. And a person can be either passive or active—in both sexual play and orgasm—or conversely be indifferent. One can argue that the ability to love both female and male forms and characteristics is a higher kind of sexuality and affection and that a new plane has been reached—the expansive fullness of life and exuberance can be tapped in a variety of ways. To love members of the opposite sex is, as it were, biologically instinctive; to love one’s own sex requires learning and channeling (unless one is predominantly homosexual); and in this sense it encourages and nourishes brotherhood or conversely sisterhood. Males often compete with males, females with females; to be able to reach another plane of harmony and acceptance is the ground for a new form of brotherhood or sisterhood; or if you will, humanhood; and as such a new dimension of moral excellence. Thus Plato’s defense of homosexuality on moral grounds, that it has æsthetic qualities for both partners, perhaps should be restated for bisexuality. The rigid conservative will no doubt be turned off by such talk as preposterous, vulgar, and demeaning; yet it unifies Promethean love with Christian love—for men to love both men and women and vice versa broadens the dimensions of human experience; similarly for the

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ability to love more than one person outside of a monogamous relationship in a lifetime. Pluralsexuality in this sense would be more expansive. Self-Interest and Altruism A question which pervades several papers in this volume is whether the Promethean myth focuses on the individual’s arrogant rebellion against the Gods and his quest for power, or whether it leaves room for an altruistic regard for the good of others? In my view, this is a false dichotomy. I think that it is a fallacy to either minimize or dismiss self-interest theories as immoral and a negation of altruistic morality, or to seek to reduce all forms of altruism to self-interest. David Goicoechea. David Goicoechea in his insightful “The Humanist Welcome” poses the question as whether there is “a humanist welcome” for others. David is indeed correct when he observes that the guiding concern of my work is ethics; and he is also correct when he says that I agree with Levinas and Singer that ethics is not founded in metaphysics or ontology. Kurtz, Levinas, and Singer, says David, want a pragmatic metaphysics that emerges out of human practice empirically. He asks whether my ethical approach is rooted in a humanistic welcome and whether I hold (along with Levinas and Singer) a new form of the Golden Rule? He maintains that we must go beyond the exuberance of the ego to the ethics of the other. With this I heartily concur. What is it that will move the egoist to a moral sense of justice, asks David? Levinas maintains that we must welcome others, this is a feminine attribute for women, for women are welcoming and nurturing. Perhaps so. I wish to go beyond egoism or even altruistic egoism, because, I submit, that we have moral potentialities that can be nurtured and developed. Moral growth is a precondition of the welcome; and it does not involve a purely selfish component. We come to feel and experience moral claims made upon us, which we willingly accept as appropriate.

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I must confess that I have difficulty with David’s suggestion that we might follow the lead of Levinas in thinking about “the face of the other” in terms of “infinity and transcendence.” It is difficult to know what this means. The world that I encounter and the persons within it are concrete and particular. I don’t find the infinite or transcendent lurking in their faces. I can welcome them, be kind, sincere, and helping without being burdened by the metaphysics of transcendence. Thus, in answer to David, I believe that a humanist can accomplish everything that he wants in the moral sphere, without a covert metaphysical face. I hope that I have not misinterpreted either David or Levinas on this point. Marvin Kohl: Marvin Kohl raises similar concerns about Prometheus. He quotes from Paul Johnson, who is hardly a friend of secular humanism, as Kohl recognizes: “Promethean humanism cannot be a successful spiritual force” (whoever said it should be?) “unless it can shed its more rampant forms of egoism,” says Kohl. In particular, its emphasis on “defiance and audacity” override other values, such as empathy, sympathy, and caring. Let me first agree with Kohl’s main point, if secular humanism were simply identified with Promethean defiance, it would be an encapsulated moral philosophy, stunted in its moral growth and focus. But whoever said that Prometheus was the be-all and end-all of secular humanism’s moral compass? Surely it needs to be supplemented by other aspects of a moral theory, as Dewey and Russell have argued for, and indeed as I have argued for. I have focused on the common moral decencies and our basic responsibilities to the needs of others in my book Forbidden Fruit (1988) and more recently in my The Courage to Become (1997), which emphasize that compassion (altruism, empathy, and caring) represent a basic humanist virtue, along with courage and reason. But let me then go on to disagree with Kohl, for he seems to reject independence and defiance, the demands of the ego to accept itself, to make its imprint in the world, to exult in creative achievement. And contrary to what Johnson has said, there have been

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powerful movements in the world which have thrived first on individual freedom—laissez-faire capitalism, for one—and rebellious defiance—Marxism in its protest against the excesses of capitalism, for two. The fate of the latter is now in question, but human progress in a basic sense has grown out of rebellion and revolution—the French and American revolutions, the American civil war against slavery, to illustrate the value of radical protest to achieve worthy goals and principles of justice deemed socially worthwhile. So it is an appropriate value under certain social conditions. Moreover, from the standpoint of the individual, there are some who are so smothered and oppressed by the social forces around them, so hemmed in and restricted, that they need as individuals to assert themselves against the status quo. I think that the entrepreneurial creative spirit often needs to be unleashed, or at least conditions ought to encourage it. I am not talking here about destructive megalomania or demonic freedom, but rather positive, assertive, beneficent freedom. The Promethean myth does not encourage destructive or malevolent liberty. Prometheus rightly challenged the Gods, gifted fire and the arts and sciences to humankind so that they could leave their caves of ignorance and terror. Thus Prometheus was a liberator of humanity; in one sense the most important one, since with the Promethean myth men and women no longer cowered in dependence on the Gods, but sought to make their own histories. Since the Gods never existed, the Homeric poems were used by some writers to deceive and keep in bondage other men; and the revolt of Prometheus was justified. On the contrary, Paul Johnson’s defense of obedience, submission, ascetic denial of human power is, I submit, negative, demonic, and destructive of the capacities for creative progress and expresses a war against the spark of humanity itself, a suppression of our finest potentialities. Saying this does not imply that I am denying the altruistic, other-regarding, or caring impulses or concerns of humans; surely not, but a new ethic is based upon naturalistic and humanistic grounds, not obedient to ancient codes handed down from

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On High. So there is an important dimension of altruistic behavior in humanistic ethics, but Kohl goes too far, in my judgment, the other way, seeming to sacrifice the individual to “the common good.” “Moral good,” says Kohl, “is essentially common good.” This he attributes to Dewey, Russell, and himself. He says that “the wellbeing and happiness of others is an overriding feature of morality,” and he adds politics to the list. Now I think that we do indeed have an obligation to fulfill the common good where we can, but that it is overriding in each and every case seems to me to open the door to the authoritarian or totalitarian temptation. I am a pluralist in ethics, and I hold that what we ought to do depends on the context under analysis; hence, it is not the case that in every situation the wellbeing and happiness of others is the overriding value. Nor do I think that Kohl would agree, where there may be a conflict between the individual—Kohl himself—and others. We do have an obligation to try to fulfill the common good, but it is not the supreme imperative of all moral and indeed political decisions. I would raise the same objection to Mill’s utilitarian criterion and Kant’s categorical imperative—they are empty and vacuous, too abstract by themselves in concrete situations. Nevertheless they are useful general guides that a rational person will consider, but not in each case absolute, final, and overriding. Kohl discusses “the welfare of humanity” as the overriding good, indeed the general good. But what is this welfare if it does not mean at the same time the happiness of individuals to pursue their individual, idiosyncratic, and multifarious purposes? I agree that the welfare of humanity is a high value that we surely ought to be committed to, but is this not the same sort of vague and amorphous Rousseauian general will, which has an ethereal abstract good to achieve. Rather, the good of society, as I see it, will allow the maximum freedom for individual persons to pursue their diverse values and ends—and this means the encouragement of egoistic interests alongside of shared interests, to pursue the life as an artist, a

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Thoreau in the woods, a poet, a lone philosopher-scientist or entrepreneur working to realize his or her dreams. I fear that Kohl’s denigration of egoism entirely is a mistake. For we have an obligation not only to altruism—to attempt, where we can and where it is within our power if we have the resources to do so, to help those who need help—but also to ourselves. Self-love and self-respect are values worthy of fulfillment, even though the morbid Christian emphasis on self-denial and asceticism has indicted them as sinful. On the contrary, one of the sins against humanity is selfhatred, the sense that one’s own needs and interests are only secondary, to be subsumed under those of others or the general welfare. This attitude, if exacerbated, can become masochistic and destructive of the individual, and in my view may do more to deaden or weaken the lust for life, the desire to achieve, and to experience the fullness of life than anything else. Those who advocate it are preaching the suppression of individual initiative and freedom and vital concerns of the self. My answer is that we have only one life to live, let’s not run away from it. Surely Kohl does not mean that we should relinquish or abandon it to the general welfare. We may sometimes need to exert a heroic effort to do so where, let us say, the life of our community is threatened by a despot or madman. But generally, I submit, that a person—alongside with an obligation to express a genuine caring and altruistic concern for others—has an obligation to fulfill his or her own needs and values. And indeed, this should at times be overriding; particularly where one’s own life or highest values are at stake. I repeat, there should be an internalized and consciously recognized feeling and reflective understanding that we are our brothers’ or sisters’ keepers, and that where we can seek to express a loving concern and care for others, and the welfare of society, we ought to do so. But I add to this that we also need to pay heed to one’s own deepest inclinations, needs, and desires. Some selfish behavior, thus, is a prerequisite of our own willingness to live, survive, and achieve excellence and nobility. This is likewise a Promethean virtue. Thus in summary we are both egotistic, self-

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interested persons—anyone who denies this is a liar or a fool—and we are potentially altruistic beings who need to develop a moral appreciation for others. It is not a question of either-or but both that are essential ingredients of any viable humanistic ethic. May I add one last postscript, similar to my rejoinder to Hart: The claim of Paul Johnson that the Promethean outlook is arrogant, destructive and megalomaniacal, and that any moral theory based upon it will fail, is itself the height of arrogance. Indeed, the ethics of Jesus and St. Francis—as Christian agape—is a supreme effort to restrain, or extinguish, among the noblest human qualities for achievement. Since Jesus, Francis, and Johnson are only human, and Christian agape is an historical contrivance of the churches, it is presumptuous for them to proclaim that their virtues are offered in the name of God and to seek to condemn all who disagree to perdition. God is a human construct, framed in the image of Man. What self-deceptive gall to deny that and to assume that this human construct imposes an absolute morality transcending other human moral systems. It is a megalomania of Christian (or Judaic or Islamic) power presented by theologians and religionists who seek to impose by compulsion and power their own set of human preferences on others. This has done more to denigrate human vitality and human realization, from which fortunately the Renaissance, the scientific, democratic, and humanistic revolutions of the modern world have attempted to liberate us. Viva the Promethean spirit! Jan Narveson: Jan Narveson’s paper, “Love and Self-Interest,” conversely moves to the other extreme. As is clear, I think that his defense of self-interest is essential—and any effort to thwart it entirely expresses a morbid pathological attitude; but I do not think that each and every case of altruism can simply be reduced to selfinterest. Some cases can, and what is often heralded as altruistic concern may mask a deeper egoistic motive. But there are and indeed ought to be eloquent instances of self-sacrifice, a denial of one’s self-interest for the good of others and for altruistic motives— as a teacher altruistically sacrifices his or her time and effort for the

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good of his or her students over and beyond the call of duty, or a friend sacrifices his or her own needs and interests for his or her friend, or a contributor to a charity really sacrifices his income—this is often done without any thought of public appreciation or recognition. Such altruistic behavior indeed is a mark of a morally developed person, and it expresses among the finest moral dimensions of human beings. Among these forms of beneficence are the acts of a benefactor or patron toward others, or the willingness of a person to share his coat or bed with another. These acts have been heralded by Christians and humanists as esteemed and they do exist; to deny them is to fly in the face of phenomenological experience. We are interested in our own good, and should be, but also in the good of our children or parents, brothers or sisters, friends or neighbors, countrymen and even every Hottentot in distant lands. Only an essentially infantile person would say that this is an instance of self-service. We may get a tax reduction or public recognition for a gift to a charity; but we also may do so because we think it morally worthwhile. In many cases we may prefer not to do such an act, or find it extremely inconvenient, yet our moral convictions may make demands upon us such that we do make provisions or sacrifices for others. I come back to my point that we are complex human beings; and we are both selfish (self-interested), and caring (altruistic), and I see no contradiction in saying this. Human motivation cannot be simply summed up in an oversimplified theory of motivation that is expressed by either self-interest or altruism with the two poles inseparable. There are a great number of motives and intentions that move us besides these. The philosophical fallacy is to try to reduce all virtues to one or the other pole of a theory that is polar or bipolar, when it is multipolar. We want to climb mountains, go skiing, eat borscht, kiss a fair maiden, enjoy a work of art, play pinochle, dig a ditch, plant a garden, or give blood during a blood drive. We may wish to go to the sea, hear a symphony, read a philosophical treatise,

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work hard in building an industry, or work at a career or job—and to reduce each of these to self-interest or altruism is a seductive fallacy. Richard Taylor: Richard Taylor, as usual, provides a provocative thesis, with which I agree; namely, that the Christian emphasis on agape and compassion has missed the essential virtues of Greek ethical philosophy that needs to be preserved; namely Aristotle’s emphasis on moral excellence. The language of duty, obedience, obligation, does not appear in Aristotle—these Christian virtues were later formalized by Kant. Rather, the focus is on the good and how to achieve it. In discussing friendship—not based on pleasure or utility primarily, but between the virtuous or good—the difference becomes apparent. Accordingly, Taylor points out the contrast for Aristotle: the good involves the fulfillment of a person’s nature and the actualization of his highest potentialities, namely reason, and this is the pre-eminent source of eudaimonia or well-being. I agree in general with Aristotle’s approach to ethics, though I would balance it with some concern for altruism, empathy, and compassion, because I believe that a person does not complete his or her potentialities as a human being unless he or she develops some moral regard for the needs and interests of others. This does not deny the recommendation that our first obligation is to oneself, to master as best one can one’s future plans and directions in life. Thus autonomy is an essential virtue for secular humanism, and selfactualization is a basic value. Excellence or nobility is what we seek, however, and this is defined by the parameters of who and what we are. A Promethean can thus draw upon Aristotlean ethics in realizing his aspirations with courageous determination. My main caveat with Taylor concerns his remark at the end of his paper, when he criticizes my comment that “everyone is capable of being a Prometheus.” He says that this was not plausible for Aristotle, nor is it plausible for Taylor. But I beg to differ, for Aristotle had two definitions of the good life: (a) the highest contemplative wisdom—and this, he said, cannot be shared by most men (and women), for they lack the prerequisite talent, time, life of

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leisure, or interest. (b) But there is a second-highest virtue, which is available to all other humans, and this is practical wisdom, which he heartily advocates. Aristotle, of course, is limited by his time, and so he excludes slaves, women, and children, but it applies to all citizens of the state. Thus Aristotle need not be read as an elitist aristocrat with a narrow focus. Indeed in the Politics he defends the view that the best polis is that which is based on a large middle class sharing power. Granted that proper pride is the mark of a noble person and that the number of truly great persons, (geniuses and heroes) may be few, yet most humans, I hold, can indeed achieve some measure of nobility in their own terms. It is of course true that not everyone can write Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, the Nocturnes of Chopin, or draw a canvas of Picasso. Yet I should say that degrees of excellence and greatness can be achieved by anyone and everyone. This would democratize Aristotle even further, who was limited by his own cultural milieu. Taylor himself does this when he says that a good marriage is between friends in the third sense, when excellence and virtue qualifies a relationship between a man and woman, thus allowing for equality (non-Aristotelian) between the sexes. Eupraxsophy James Lawler: I wish to thank Jim Lawler for his astute analysis of the philosophical import of both Kant and Hegel, which I found most instructive. The great antinomy that is felt in the global economy today is that although free-market economics is a dynamic engine of economic growth, it often ignores social needs and leaves out vast sectors of humanity on the planetary level. Socialist economies in the twentieth century were unable to compete with free-market economies. Lawler is correct in his assessment that the reason why Marxism collapsed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is because planned economies were unable to provide the incentive and rewards for productivity; thus they failed by underproducing. The Chinese seemed to have learned the lesson that the free market can

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unleash human entrepreneurial talent. Whether they will be able to safeguard human rights and democratize is the key issue today. Unfortunately, there are still other lessons to be learned. Acquisitions and mergers in capitalistic societies tend toward monopoly, and the emergence of huge and powerful conglomerates, restrict the conditions of competition and undermine political democracies. The business cycle still has not been solved—contrary to Francis Fukuyama’s claim that we are at the end of history. Yet the free market encourages and accelerate the emergence of new technologies and innovations, lower costs, and enhance productivity, which constantly stimulates economic growth. Regretfully, the free market is often insensitive to social needs and the needs of significant sectors of society who are left behind: the unemployed, dispossessed, aged, infirm, those unable to compete in the marketplace. And it often ignores important public needs: transportation, the environment, health care, the encouragement of culture and the arts. Price should not alone determine the real value of every commodity or service in society. Free-market capitalism expands the pie of production; but if left unregulated, it exacerbates differences in income and wealth in society and tends to plutocratic control within the corporate state by an oligarchy of wealth and influence. This is exacerbated in the United States, but is seen in other capitalist societies. The antinomy today is between a freemarket economy and political democracy, and the weakening of the latter. That is why, in my view, we need to develop a new political opposition in capitalist societies, which in spite of oligarchies can enforce anti-trust laws, defend progressive income tax and publicworks projects, without inhibiting free-market entrepreneurial dynamism. Plutocratic trends are all the more disconcerting in the area of freedom of expression, because democracy presupposes a free market of ideas and an open society. The problem with corporate capitalism is that it tends to limit independent voices of opinion— newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, web sites and

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Internet companies are controlled by fewer and fewer media conglomerates. If capitalism ends up by destroying the competition of ideas, emphasizing entertainment and ratings above all instead of information, then there is insufficient opportunity for diverse points of view to be heard or for opposition parties to emerge offering genuine alternatives. The great challenge we face is for democratic institutions to regulate economic activities, with prudence and limits, and enable necessary social projects to be built. The anti-trust laws need especially to be enforced. But because the means of communication are increasingly dominated by owners of wealth, this is increasingly difficult to accomplish, especially when corporate lobbyists can pervert the political process by money and corruption. All of these problems for both capitalist and quasi-socialist societies have been intensified by the emergence of global conglomerates more powerful than most of the political states of the world (Mobil and General Electric, for example, are each more powerful than 50 nations of the world). Indeed, the national state is increasingly redundant and impotent to make necessary reforms, because they are always threatened by the fact that industrial and technological giants will take their business elsewhere to the detriment of the national economy, with consequent unemployment and economic stagnation. GATT and NAFTA, and the European Union provide opportunities to widen markets, and the World Bank has emerged to monitor national economies and to apply fiscal and monetary restraints—though they are surely have not been democratically elected. Under such conditions, the labor movement has become impotent. All of this demonstrates that the contradictions which Kant saw in his own day between a free-market laissez-faire economy á la Adam Smith and the demands of morality; and which Hegel likewise saw in his own day, have been taken to a new level on the transnational planetary scene. This does not deny the enormous wealth which free-market economies have produced, it merely notes the grave problems still faced by globalization.

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This is why I have argued in Humanist Manifesto 2000 that the best option is to build new democratic global institutions which enable free markets to operate, yet regulate them within limits for the social good, applying compensatory policies to assist the underdeveloped and underprivileged sectors of world society. This means that we should allow for a maximum of economic and cultural freedom on the local, regional, and national level, yet at the same time develop new democratic global institutions to monitor the environment, provide a floor of social benefits, encourage universal education and human rights. This would entail, in my view, a new federal system of government, a democratically elected world legislature, an International Police Force and Court of Justice to ensure human rights, a planetary income tax and an Environmental Protection Agencies with the powers of enforcement to make this possible. Thus the free global market needs to be modified and regulated, at least minimally, by a global democratic system of governance, allowing for a maximum of decentralization and the free expression of multicultural differences, but also recognizing our interdependence and the need for a new planetary humanism. The world has changed significantly since the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, and in this post-Marxist and post-laissez-faire age we need to deal with the realities and needs of the twenty-first century and beyond. Praxis: But I have not dealt with Lawler’s main point, namely that Kant, Hegel, and Spinoza provided eupraxsophies and should be added to the list of illustrations. I appreciate Lawler’s pointing out the eupraxsophic elements in the above thinkers. But he has missed the main point of the concept of eupraxsophy, namely its emphasis on praxis or conduct, not philosophy, not the love wisdom but its practice. Eupraxsophers thus descend to the world of concrete facts, real existential situations, the blood and guts of lived experience; they enter into the world to try to work out courses of action, applying the principles of sophia (meaning by that scientific knowledge), whereas philosophers are not practitioners; and it is the

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latter that we need, a new specialty of doers and agents in the world, not separate from it, willing and able to make moral recommendations and to act upon them, not one stage removed on the meta level. By this interpretation neither Kant nor Hegel nor Spinoza were eupraxsophers, though Marx, Dewey, and Russell were. Philosophers regrettably often withdraw from the world in secluded isolation (usually the universities) whereas eupraxsophers are out there hobnobbing with the facts, the nasty facts! We need both theoretical and experimental physicists, both research scientists and applied engineers. Eupraxsophers are the engineers of applied science. Truth is, however, we need both philosophy and eupraxsophy, and it is the abdication of the former that I have sought to redress. Unfortunately, philosophy by itself is not enough, having been displaced by science. Philosophy is largely unable to present the principles of sophia, upon which we may act; for its pronouncements are often so abstract and general and they lack concrete content. They seek to offer principles of logic or dialectic—Hegel is the best illustration of this—whereas eupraxsophy needs to draw upon detailed empirical studies in psychology and economics, politics and anthropology, sociology and the policy sciences, in order to decide what to do in specific contexts under analysis. Eupraxsophers need to get their hands dirty, in the muck of things. Today, priests, ministers of the cloth, psychologists, counselors, and physicians do this work, eupraxsophers need to do it as well. Why? Because religion plays an inordinate role in ministering to human needs, most usually based upon false theologies of hope, they distort the truth, and in the place of sound advice they offer the pabulum and balm of ancient religious nostrums. The great clash in the world is between competing religious worldviews—Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism still persist, whereas scientific naturalism and humanism have been overlooked. Hopefully, eupraxsophers, armed with the tools of ethical philosophy and science, can provide alternative remedies for wise conduct.

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One complaint often heard against humanism is that it is too vague and amorphous, and that it does not apply its ideal principles to practice. One recommendation is that it becomes politically involved and that it enlist political activists to the cause (as did the Religious Right and the Roman Catholic Church in the United States or Islam in Muslim theocracies). I am not objecting to this per se, since I think that individual humanists need to be politically involved, but we have a far more basic task as eupraxsophers. We need to “minister to the soul” (if I may use a metaphor). We are practitioners of eupraxsophy and of meaning. As an alternative to the medicine men of the past, gurus and spiritualists, soothsayers, rabbis, mullahs, and priests, we need to demonstrate that life can be lived and lived well without the illusions of religiosity, that it can be rich with significance and overflowing with joy, and that concrete choices can be made wisely and satisfactorily. This is the first task of eupraxsophy as practitioners of a different life stance, a lifeenriching eupraxsophy of the good life. No doubt philosophers, insofar as they seek to educate students in colleges and universities, may perform these tasks, but often once removed they remain on the abstract metaphysical and historical level. They need to guide their students and society at large, first by rejecting the false ideologies of salvation upon which humankind is still fixated, and second, by embracing the positive reaches of human discovery and experience, and finding new meaning and purpose. Eupraxsophy in this sense is positive and life-affirming, and it can play a meaningful role. And as such this can have significant social and political consequences for the future of humankind.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Richard A. Berg is a professor in the Department of Philosophy, Lakehead University. His teaching and research interests include ancient Greek and medieval European philosophy, Indian and Chinese philosophy, moral issues and applied ethics. The late Bonnie Bullough was a professor of nursing at the University of Southern California and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Vern L. Bullough is a State University of New York Distinguished Professor Emeritus from Buffalo State College. He and his wife Bonnie received the Kinsey award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex for their research on sex and gender issues. The late Tad S. Clements was a professor in the Department of Philosophy, State University of New York, College at Brockport, and author of Science versus Religion. David Goicoechea is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Brock University. His book on Zarathustra’s Love Beyond Wisdom came out in 2002 and his book Eulogies and Laments came out in 2003. At present he is busy writing on 2000 years of agape. Hendrik Hart is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Toronto’s Institute for Christian Studies. He taught systematic philosophy from 1967 to 2001, and a significant part of his work involves dialoguing with atheists.

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Morton Hunt is the author of scores of books and several hundred articles, primarily about the behavioral sciences. His best-known works are The Natural History of Love and The Story of Psychology. Marvin Kohl is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, State University of New York, College at Fredonia. He is author of The Morality of Killing and editor of Beneficent Euthanasia and Infanticide and the Value of Life. Paul Kurtz is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is founder and chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, the Council for Secular Humanism, and Prometheus Books, and author and editor of over 40 books, including Forbidden Fruit, The Transcendental Temptation, and Eupraxsophy. James Lawler is a professor in the Department of Philosophy, State University of New York at Buffalo. He specializes in Marxist and Existentialist thought, and is author of the upcoming book Matter and Spirit: The Battle of Metaphysics in Modern Western Philosophy before Kant. Timothy J. Madigan is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Classical Studies, St. John Fisher College. He was formerly editor of Free Inquiry magazine, and co-edited (with Vern L. Bullough) the book Toward a New Enlightenment: The Philosophy of Paul Kurtz. Jan Narveson is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Waterloo, and the author of several books, including The Libertarian Idea, and hundreds of papers on ethical and political subjects. John M. Novak is President of the Professors of Education Society and Professor of Education at Brock University. His recent books

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include Inviting School Success (with William Purkey) and Democratic Teacher Education. Noel Robertson is Professor Emeritus of Classics, Brock University, where he specialized in Greek Religion and Mythology. He is author of numerous articles on the ancient Greek world. Herbert Schutz is Emeritus Professor of Germanic Studies at Brock University. He is author of several books, including The Prehistory of Germanic Europe, The Romans in Central Europe, and The Germanic Realms in Pre-Carolingian Central Europe, 400-750. The late Richard Taylor was a professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Rochester, and author of over a dozen books, including Metaphysics, Good and Evil, and With Heart and Mind: A Philosopher Looks at Nature, Love and Death.