Abstract
Methodological naturalism is the appropriate starting point both for science and for understanding ordinary experience. But it has to be distinguished carefully from metaphysical naturalism. Furthermore, the relation between a naturalistic, scientific stance and humanistic attitudes needs further elucidation. Historically, it is argued that in the development of modernity, humanism and science stem from different sources and have yet to be integrated. The chapter ends with the introduction of “middle-ground humanism,” a concept that may facilitate the search for shared moral orientations across different understandings of our human situation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Taylor acknowledges the importance of naturalism in his Sources of the Self (Taylor 1989). The only reason I can imagine for his avoidance of the term in A Secular Age is that the book focuses on social and personal developments and not on the concept of nature as an all-encompassing realm.
- 2.
Steven Pinker, for example, characterizes “[e]nlightenment humanism” as incorporating the idea that “the ultimate good is to use knowledge to enhance human welfare” (Pinker 2018, 34).
- 3.
The most extreme case is probably the “way of the future”-church, founded by Anthony Levandowski and dedicated to “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.” https://www.wired.com/story/anthony-levandowski-artificial-intelligence-religion/.
- 4.
Fortunately, Dawkins leaves no doubt that he is “not advocating a morality based on evolution” (ibid., 3). Nevertheless, his conceptual strategy is based on the use of morally charged vocabulary, taken from the human life world and imputed into the realm of genetics without any clear indication of the categorical transfer involved here.
- 5.
For the sake of justice it should be mentioned that the term “cooperation” can be used both as a value term and as a term for observable behavior, though still not among genes, but among individual animals living together in a group.
- 6.
For further information, see the homepage of the “Religious Naturalist Association”: http://religious-naturalist-association.org.
- 7.
It is true that the naturalistic stance was developed already in antiquity, with Democritus and Epicurus being the founders of atomistic materialism. The essence of this line of thought was delivered to Renaissance thinkers in the form of the didactic poem De rerum natura by Lucretius, after its rediscovery in 1417 by Poggio Bracciolini. In Lucretius, however, we find what might be called, paraphrasing a Hilary Putnam-title, “materialism with a human face.” Human affairs and cosmic order are presented in an interwoven manner, and an aesthetic sensitivity pervades the work. In other words, the crucial component of scientism, namely the idea that reality is disclosed by the exact sciences only, is absent in ancient materialism.
- 8.
As one of many examples for this kind of ideological revisionism, see Chap. 6 of Eagleman 2011, where it is argued that neurobiological insights have once and for all refuted ideas fundamental for the humanist stance and for any democratic society like equality, freedom, and the ability to deliberate.
- 9.
“moral sentiments,” according to Wilson, are “hereditary predispositions in mental development” (Wilson 1998, 262). It remains entirely unclear how those hereditary traits are (a) distinguished from, say, cognitive capacities, (b) whether they should be suppressed or fostered and (c) whether ethical norms may be derived from innate individual traits at all.
- 10.
It goes without saying that this statement does not imply any depreciation of the values embraced by scientistic naturalists nor the claim that they cannot appropriate humanist values full-heartedly and authentically. It is only meant to underline the fact that the scientistic concept of experience is so un-comprehensive that it doesn’t allow for conceptualizing adequately the sources of values. The personal stance is not to be confused with what the conceptual resources allow for on the level of theoretical explication.
- 11.
Somewhat confusingly, later in his Sources of the Self, Taylor introduces the concept of a “constitutive good” (ibid., 90, as opposed to “life goods,” ibid., 91). It remains unclear, however, whether the former concept is meant to constitute a new category even above that of the hypergood, or whether it intends to make explicit the constitutive character of hypergoods. In my reading, the latter is the case and I will therefore not differentiate between hypergoods and constitutive goods.
- 12.
In Taylor’s rendering, hypergoods always appear as something endorsed as intrinsically meaningful and attractive. But we should distinguish between the formal structure of highest, second-order evaluations and their positive or negative content. Ever since the skeptics of Antiquity, and with renewed force in the pessimistic worldviews since the nineteenth century, inverted hypergoods with negative appeal became possible. Or perhaps we should rather say that the cognitive “hyperentity” and the moral “hypergood ” became dissociated. Schopenhauer, for example, sees his “will” as the deepest truth about reality but at the same time as something to be rejected morally. Within the Western tradition, the identification of being, truth, goodness, and beauty has always been a strong thread, but—as Schopenhauer already saw clearly– Buddhism and Hinduism tell a different story.
- 13.
Hans Joas (2013) has meticulously reconstructed the history of the human rights as a process whose inner logic can be described as a sacralization of the human person. See below, 154.
- 14.
One should be cautious, though. The incompatibility diagnosed here pertains to symbolic expressions, whose relation to the respective underlying experiences is complicated and not a simple case of mirroring. Thus, what looks incompatible in terms of semantic meaning might be related to quite similar experiences and existential positions.
- 15.
The most famous case in point within the Christian tradition is the story of Abraham being tempted by God through his command to sacrifice his only son Isaac and Sören Kierkegaard’s treatment of the scene in his book Fear and Trembling (cf. Kierkegaard 2003). The phrase “suspension of the ethical” was coined by Kierkegaard in this book.
- 16.
The superior binding force of the moral qualifies it as a hypergood, and it may be acknowledged by people coming from very different traditions. But naturally, the very idea of this tradition-transcending force itself has a very long and important history and tradition. Understanding this history establishes what Hans Joas calls an “affirmative genealogy” (Joas 2013, Chap. 4) and greatly contributes to our understanding of what morality means and why it binds us in the way it does.
- 17.
The most prominent case of appeal to self-evidence (as opposed to recourse to religious or worldview hypergoods) is of course the American “Declaration of Independence” from 1776 with its famous “We hold these Truths to be self-evident.”
References
Dawkins, Richard (1976/2016): The Selfish Gene (40th Anniversary Edition), Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Dawkins, Richard (1998): Unweaving the Rainbow. Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, Mariner Books Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston/New York.
Dewey, John (1925/2008): Experience and Nature (The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 1, ed. Jo Ann Boydston), Southern Illinois University Press: Carbondale.
Dewey, John/Tufts, James Hayden (1932/2008): Ethics (The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 7. 1932, ed. Jo Ann Boydston), Southern Illinois University Press: Carbondale.
Dworkin, Ronald (2013): Religion without God, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA/London.
Goodenough, Ursula (1998): The Sacred Depth of Nature, Oxford University Press: Oxford/New York.
James, William (1897/1956): The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. Human Immortality, Both Books Bound as One, Dover Publications: New York.
James, William (1902/1990): The Varieties of Religious Experience, Vintage Books/The Library of America: New York.
Joas, Hans (2013): The Sacredness of the Person. A New Genealogy of Human Rights, Georgetown University Press: Washington, DC.
Joas, Hans (2017): Die Macht des Heiligen. Eine Alternative zur Geschichte von der Entzauberung, Suhrkamp: Berlin.
Kant, Immanuel (1788/2015): Critique of Practical Reason, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Kierkegaard, Sören (2003): Fear and Trembling, Penguin Books: London.
Kitcher, Philip (2014): Life After Faith. The Case For Secular Humanism, Yale University Press: New Haven and London.
Monod, Jacques (1972): Chance & Necessity, Vintage Books: New York.
Montaigne, Michel (1979): The Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame, Stanford University Press: Stanford.
Pinker, Steven (2018): Enlightenment Now. The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Viking Press: New York.
Rawls, John (1987): “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus”, in: Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1, (Spring, 1987), pp. 1–25.
Spinoza (1677/1995): Ethics, Everyman: Vermont.
Taylor, Charles (1989): Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.
Taylor, Charles (2007): A Secular Age, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA/London.
Thompson, Evan (2007): Mind in Life. Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of the Mind, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA/London.
Toulmin, Stephen (1990): Cosmopolis. The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
Wilson, Edward O. (1998): Consilience. The Unity of Science, Vintage Books: New York.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jung, M. (2019). Varieties of Naturalism and Humanism. In: Science, Humanism, and Religion. Studies in Humanism and Atheism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21492-0_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21492-0_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-21491-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-21492-0
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)