Herbert J. Muller

From Philosopedia

Muller, Herbert J. (1905 – 1980)

When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Muller was a professor of literature at the University of Indiana. He and Nobel winning geneticist Hermann Muller were brothers.

He is author of Uses of the Past (1952), in which he wrote:

Science remains the author of our major problem, in its gift of tremendous power that has been terribly abused; but for the wise use of this power we need more, not less, of the objective dispassionate scientific spirit. For our philosophical purposes we need more of its integrity and its basic humility, its respect at once for the fact and the mystery.

Religion can no longer rest its claims on a dogmatic supernaturalism, because any dogma that is irreconcilable with tested knowledge must be rejected. . . . [One] sentence . . . sums up the dark and deadly pages of Christian history: "If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities."

“The First Crusade,” he once observed, “set off on its two-thousand-mile jaunt by massacring Jews, plundering and slaughtering all the way from the Rhine to the Jordan. ‘In the temple of Solomon,’ wrote the ecstatic cleric Raimundus de Agiles, ‘one rode in blood up to the knees and even to the horses’ bridles, by the just and marvelous judgment of God.’ ”

Some of Dr. Muller’s other books are Modern Fiction: A Study of Values (1937); The Spirit of Tragedy (1956); The Loom of History (1958); Freedom in the Ancient World (1961); Religion and Freedom in the Western World (1963); Science and Criticism: The Humanistic Tradition in Contemporary Thought (1964)Freedom in the Modern World (1966); Adlai Stevenson: A Study in Values (1968); The Children of Frankenstein, A Primer on Modern Technology and Human Values (1970); and Thomas Wolfe (1976).

See a review of Muller's Uses of English by Warren French, who related how Muller told linguists at a 1966 seminar at Dartmouth

• “language is necessarily involved in everything that English teachers teach—it can never be separated from composition and literature,” as in the dreary grammar drills that were unreservedly denounced. The linguists attacked principally a notion of a “correctness…supposedly determined by a fixed, uniform, permanent standard, comparable in authority to the Ten Commandments.” Muller goes on to defend the importance of a child's coming to understand the importance of “Standard English”; but he points out that all participants could agree that “teachers should not at once begin nagging the young child about his mistakes” and that “efforts to teach Standard English should be gradual, tactful, and respectful of the child.”

When he comes to literature, Muller parts company with the general conclusions of the seminar that it should be taught as its own reward and argues, with the uncommonly pragmatic good sense that he radiates throughout his essay, that “children have no natural reverence for the unique work of art” and that more stress should be placed on its “broad social values.” “Especially at a time when the study of literature is considered impractical and superfluous,” Muller needles, “it would seem poor strategy to play up its unique aesthetic qualities at the expense of its relevance to basic problems and common interests.” Dealing with composition, however, he moves closer to the group as a whole when it maintains that too many papers “go nowhere in particular because they started with nothing in particular to say and no real desire to say it.” He notes wryly, however, that participants could agree more easily on the wrong ways to try to involve students than on the right ones, although he sympathizes with the attitude that writing should “make you more alive, give you a more interesting self to live with, or simply get you the satisfaction of having made something really your own.”

Correspondence

See correspondence with the book review editor of The Humanist, in which he writes about the humanities, humanism, and naturalistic humanism.

{HM2; HNS; TYD; WAS, 23 March 1956}