Gerald Wendt

From Philosopedia

Wendt, Gerald L(ouis) (1891–1973)

An expert on nuclear industry and its uses in peace, Wendt was a leading Ethical Culturist and member of the American Humanist Association.

Of humanism, he wrote to Warren Allen Smith concerning Smith's seven categories of humanism:

• Humanism connotes to me a sense of fellowship, if not of brotherhood, with every human being; a sense of responsibility for the genetic inheritance of man as the highest product of evolution, and for its best use in man’s creative functions; awareness of man’s ignorance of his environment, of his own nature, and of the possibilities of human society; a conviction that he can increase his understanding and thus improve all three by the use of his intelligence in research; a willingness to consider any hypothesis, recognized as such, concerning the vast, pervading and surrounding unknown, but freedom from any mythical, mystical, or authoritarian dicta concerning it; a fervor to bring the best that man has achieved within the reach of all men through education; and a faith that future generations will use improved understanding to accelerate the processes of psychic and social evolution, and to solve the mysteries amid which we, in this infancy of the human race, must live. Certainly, of the seven categories, I fit only into the seventh, naturalistic or scientific humanism. I cannot answer for others, though they must be legion. Perhaps it will do to mention Jean Rostand and Julian Huxley. I deplore the use of the same word to cover both the first three and the last four categories. The first three are literary classifications, not philosophical. Aristotle may have been a member of one of the last four categories, but he was not a devotee of Aristotle and not a “classical humanist.” Present devotees of Aristotle, Montaigne, or Babbitt are literary devotees, or devotees of the literature of humanity. “The proper study of mankind is man” is a literary, not a scientific or philosophic statement. In general, the first three categories are literary, the last four philosophical.

From 1938 to 1940, Dr. Wendt was director of science and education at the New York World’s Fair that opened in 1939. He was science editor of Time from 1942 to 1945 and then editorial director of Science Illustrated until becoming head of UNESCO’s division of teaching and dissemination in the department of natural science at its Paris headquarters, from 1950 to 1954. From 1959 to 1962, Wendt edited The Humanist, and he was chairman of the North American Commission of the International Humanist and Ethical Union from 1965 to 1968. At the Fourth International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress held in Paris (1966), Dr. Wendt addressed the group. He was a signer of Humanist Manifesto II.

Wendt wrote Atomic Energy and the Hydrogen Bomb (1951), You and the Atom (1956), and The Prospects of Nuclear Power and Technology (1957).

Correspondence

Wendt wrote the following to Warren Allen Smith, who had been book review editor of The Humanist. When the entire staff resigned with Editor Priscilla Robertson in 1959, Wendt was chosen as the journal's editor.

{EU, Howard B. Radest; HM2; HNS; HNS2; WAS, 1 May 1956}