Barrows Dunham

From Philosopedia

Dunham, Barrows (1905—1995)

A professor of philosophy at Temple University, Dunham in his Giant in Chains (1953) negatively criticizes for an entire chapter Warren Allen Smith’s seven categories of humanism. Mainly he objects both to “labeling” and to the terminology. He is critical of much of the tradition of Western philosophy in terms of the service it renders humankind.

All the great shibboleths of middle-class philosophy are there: “eclectic,” “modern scientific age,” “faith,” “human personality,” “freedom and significance of the individual.” These terms have two sets of opposites. If you take “systematic” instead of “eclectic,” “medieval religious age” instead of “faith,” “human soul” instead of “human personality,” and “subordination” instead of “freedom and significance of the individual,” you have the characteristic concepts of feudal ideology which the middle class overthrew during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Now, if you take as a second list “systematic,” “age of human control over both physical nature and society,” “science,” “human organism,” and “fulfillment of man’s needs by co-operative social life,” you get the characteristic socialist concepts which, it appears, are in turn to replace middle-class philosophy.

There is a nice dialectic in these relations, for the last set of concepts has obviously drawn upon the other two and has succeeded in unifying the material thus gathered. But the concepts expressive of Naturalistic Humanism, couched as they are in terms so honorific as to be commonplaces of advertising and public relations, show a resolute wish to be neither feudal nor socialist.

The last part of Mr. Smith’s definition rejects “Communistic Naturalism” not only because of immediate political pressures but because the two theories represent different historical epochs and antagonistic social systems. . . . As may be imagined, Mr. Smith got no candidates for that.

At the time his book came out, Dunham was dismissed by Temple University for being a “left-winger,” a suspected Marxist. In 1956, not long after Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch-hunts had become commonplace, Dunham added to his thoughts concerning humanism:

There is a theory and practice of the right relation between theory and practice. This discipline develops the larger generalizations about our place in nature; it refines our ways of choosing and of doing; it seeks to make us, or at any rate our descendants, secure in life and abundant in talent.

Such a discipline is at once humanistic and philosophical. Its theme is salvation: human salvation, that is to say, not the salvation of apes or angels. For the first of these do not philosophize, and the second do not exist.

For myself, I think philosophy assures us that the universe is a process of change, all of it knowable and some of it controllable. Part of the knowable and controllable is the happy place man can make for himself in nature. He will do it, I fancy, economically by social ownership of the land and the means of production, politically by the universal extension of personal liberties and of participation in public affairs. It may even be that government, which is violence made licit, will one day shrink to mere administration.

I leave to others the labelling of these notions, asking only that I be spared the timid classifications, and at the same time that I be not exposed unfairly to comment by the police.

(See entry for Albert C. Barnes.)

Works

A Study in Kant's Aesthetics: The Universal Validity of Aesthetic Judgments (1934)

Man Against Myth (1947, 1949, 1962)

Giant in Chains (1953)

Il Gigante in Catene (Milano, 1955)

The Artist and Society (1960)

Thinkers and Treasurers (1960)

The World of Lincoln Steffens (1962)

Heroes and Heretics, A Social History of Dissent (1963, 1964, 1968)

Ethics, Dead and Alive (1971)

The Tradition of Tenderness in American Culture: Lecture Delivered at Temple University (1981)

Correspondence

{CE; Freethought History #20, 1996; WAS, 9 October 1956}