HUMANISM. Humanism in America is the result of two related factors, Unitarianism and Modernism. The latter was the more extensive in its influence and the more philosophical in its principles, though the less consistent in its earlier forms.
Schleiermacher initiated Modernism by replacing written revelation with religious experience, and thus replacing theology with psychology. Our knowledge of God is the result of analyzing experience, precisely the experience of the feeling of dependence. In this way, Schleiermacher believed, the essential doctrines and values of Christianity could be defended against secular scientism, and only the unessential husks of religion would be discarded.
Early Modernism was inconsistent because it retained too much Christian content that could not be obtained by psychological analysis. Humanism is the result of a consistent application of Schleiermacher's principles by which everything Christian is repudiated.
This is most fundamentally seen in the argument about God. The nineteenth century modernists almost without exception believed in God. In Hegelian fashion they may have doubted his personality, but they believed in God.
However, the logic of the matter soon showed that psychological analysis of feelings, in addition to losing the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, never arrived at anything that could clearly be called God. The more consistent thinkers then asked, Why should the term God be retained where none of its common historical meaning remains?
What can be retained is a set of values, of which the integration of personality is not only one, but, as many humanists say, the highest. They use this as an argument against Christianity. Christianity used to be successful in integrating personality, they contend, but recent experience has shown it less successful. Therefore Christianity is not essential.
This argument, however, leaves Christianity unscathed because Christians do not admit that integration, in this life at least, is the highest good. Furthermore the argument injures Humanism because humanists admit that Christianity in some cases produces integration. Now, if integration is the highest good, Christianity in these cases is better than Humanism, and Humanism has no claim on these people for acceptance. But a philosophy that is "true" or useful only part time and has no logical claim on some people, is not true and cannot make a universal demand.
Other values that Humanism discovers in experience are truth, friendship, and beauty. On these Humanism bases its ethics, or religion if one wishes to retain the term.
This is also another point at which the Christianity of verbal revelation, and even secular philosophy, can easily attack the modernist-humanist line of thought. The reason is that experience can justify nothing. Nietzsche is more convincing that any humanist when he asserts that falsehood is usually a greater value than truth. It is even more difficulty to justify beauty - if the word has any definite meaning at all. And friendship, developed into some socialistic or communistic political theory, has no empirical argument in its favor. The most that empiricism can say (and the more skeptical considerations would dispute even this ) is that such and such is the case: e.g., truth seemed useful to John Doe's purposes on a given date; or, Little Lord Fauntleroy thinks the Sistine Madonna is beautiful. But to say that Mr. X on one occasion thought that Y was a value, or that many X's so thought, is far from proving that Y is a value.
Ethics requires normative principles that will never follow from descriptive premises. Therefore Humanism cannot prove that Humanism itself is of any value.
Gordon H. Clark
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