Joseph Warren Beach

From Philosopedia

Beach, Joseph Warren (14 January 1880 - 13 August 1957)

Beach had been drawn to the the University of Minnesota from Gloversville, New York, by the school's president, his uncle, President Cyrus Northrop. For teachers there, "he wrote his first poetry and his brilliant undergraduate papers," wrote historian James Gray. Following Beach's graduation in 1900 he became an instructor in rhetoric. Then for many years he moved back and forth between Minnesota and Harvard, alternating between periods of teaching and periods of working on his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees.

"Slender, intense, sensitive, this young teacher had the figure and face that are usually called poetic," Gray says. "When he read poetry aloud he swayed emotionally before his audience as though he felt the rhythms in his very muscle and nerves. But his early letters reveal, along with all of the eager enthusiasm of the esthete, a skill at dialectics which was presently to make him one of the most distinguished critics of his time."

After taking his M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard University, Beach returned to Minneapolis in 1907 to the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, his undergraduate alma mater. Starting as Assistant Professor, he became Associate Professor in 1917 and Professor in 1924. Beach chaired the English Department from 1939 to 1948, after which time he retired. An expert in many literary figures - Henry James, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and nineteenth-century literature in general - Beach had a special love for poetry. His The Making of the Auden Canon (1957) was a masterful study of how Auden revised his earlier-published poems as his view of the world changed. Beach also brought out two volumes of his own poetry, Sonnets of the Head and Heart (1903) and Involuntary Witness (1950).

By his first wife, Elisabeth Northrop (1871-1917, m. 1907), he had two sons, Northrop and Warren. His second wife was Dagmar Doneghy, who married him in 1918. His brief life in The National Cyclopædia of American Biography (47 , 1965: 596-97) tells that outdoor camping was an important part of his life. His letters and papers are in the Library of Congress.

The author of American Fiction 1920—1940 and The Twentieth-Century Novel, Beach in 1956 just before his death wrote concerning a query about humanism to Warren Allen Smith:

• Of the various brands of humanism], the one that best fits my way of thinking is naturalistic humanism. Humanism is for me a handy way of designating the view that the values we most cherish in ethics have originated in human minds in a natural manner, and that they make up the ideal of a good life to which we owe allegiance individually and as members of the community. For me it implies a naturalistic philosophy, without reference to theological sanctions or supernatural assumptions as to the origin and ‘ultimate’ nature of the universe of which we are a part. As for the origins of our moral sense, it seems a reasonable hypothesis that it is traceable to our experience as men under the conditions of family life and of larger social units, and may have its psychological motivation in the feelings we have for the members of our family and our community, and above all in the need we have to maintain the esteem and love of our fellows. Along with this goes the natural instinct to avoid what is harmful to us, to prize what is helpful, and to wish to have prevail in society those types of behavior that make for the general well-being. In this sense our moral ideals are a natural development out of the ego.

• Such a naturalistic philosophy enables us to make a more rational analysis of our ideals and obligations and to construct a more systematic and coherent system of values than any theological philosophy, which brings in considerations from the outside, not subject to critical examination and tending to introduce confusion into our thinking. Obviously religion, itself a product of the human mind, has been closely associated with our ideas of good and bad, and has often been a vehicle for diffusing and enforcing many of our finest ideals. But it is also regrettably true that the great historical religions have had a negligible effect in preventing national and commercial rivalries and wars, and in many instances have been the cause of tragic divisions among men. And I feel that most religions as they are now professed tend to keep men from maturing intellectually and emotionally; and that there is a great wastage of energy in each generation as men go through the painful process of throwing off the religious teachings of their childhood. I realize, however, that for great populations the entire structure of their mores is bound up closely with the churches to which they belong, and that for them to be abruptly deprived of their religious faith might well have disastrous effects on their personal and social character. It seems a pity that so powerful an agent for good as is the church community should have so largely failed to adjust itself to a world-mentality dominated by the naturalistic and critical spirit associated with scientific thinking. One wishes to be associated with others in the group affirmation of a common faith. But for many decades I have been kept almost altogether away from churches by the sense that intellectual and moral integrity requires that one should not pretend to beliefs that one’s mind rejects. The most nearly congenial to my way of thinking are the Unitarian and Universalist churches. But even with them I am made uneasy by vestiges in the service of a “mythology” which it is hard to reconcile with the critical spirit of their humanism.

• Of ancient philosophers, the Stoics and Epicureans are most congenial to me; but a combination of the two seems requisite for an adequate humanism. The Epicureans are admirable for building up a philosophy in naturalistic terms, and for stressing happiness (or the finer satisfactions) as the ultimate end of human activity. The Stoics depend too much on the notion of a transcendental moral order of the universe, for which we have no evidence; but they add to Epicurean ethics their important emphasis on the social order among men and the necessity for the individual to make sacrifices to this ideal. Perhaps the finest picture of the virtues peculiar to man is given by Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics. But his stress is rather too heavy on the individual freeman and too light on what we owe to the social body; and he writes within the framework of a slave state.

• In modern English literature, where I am most at home, the writers who have most influenced me in my impressionable years are probably Matthew Arnold (in his effort to divest religion of Aberglaube and to refine our critical sense and our social values and manners), and George Meredith, who in his poetry and fiction gave a fine representation of a naturalist system of ethics in theory and practice. But our English and American novelists almost from the start have been essentially humanists. They have been concerned with those qualities in the individual that make for the good life in society; and they have been pretty free from a more than conventional reference to theological assumptions. Among those who stand highest in these respects are George Eliot, Henry James, Thackeray, Dickens, and Hardy.

• Our poets have been more handicapped by religious commitments, though Tennyson and Browning, as well as the early Wordsworth, made a valiant effort at “liberalism.” Shelley was, of course, a queer combination of eighteenth-century rationalism and Platonic mysticism. Many of our recent poets have failed to meet the challenge of modern thought. They are too much haunted by the notion of “original sin,” which, to my thinking, is as false an assumption as the Rousseauistic premise of the “natural goodness of man.” Man is a naturally selfish animal, but with great capacities for social behavior when properly trained and motivated. Many of our modern poets are also under the impression that they cannot do business without a large allowance of “mythology,” and they don’t trust men to stand up to the problems of life without constant appeal to their Urvater. The war years and the great depression have been more than they could take, and when the socialist ideal seemed to fail them they were readily discouraged and too often simply “gave up the game.” Literary men and young men tend to be impatient; they live in great hopes for the immediate future; and when their hopes are not realized within a generation, they tend to turn cynical and religious. A stable philosophy must have a longer range.

• The Babbitt-and-More “new humanism” was provincial and puritan; it relied altogether on the “inner check,” as we all must; but the inner check was too much conceived of as a check on all natural impulse, and the positive impulses were strangled with the negative. Their literary criticism was a witch-hunt. In contemporary Germany and France Existentialism (à la Heidegger and Sartre) seems to me the most vital philosophy. German existentialism (in Pastor Bultmann) promises to be a good solvent for “mythology” in Lutheranism. But there is (in Jaspers) too much reliance on “transcendentals” and too much suspicion of the positive empiricism of science. The Sartre existentialism has one radical defect. It seems to imply that every man must go it alone and make a completely fresh start; there seems to be no general system of ethics available; whereas the humanistic ideal and set of values (owing much to the teachings of Jesus) have a long and august history. This may not be so clear in France as in English-speaking countries, where Protestantism has done so much to break down the all-or-nothing complex.

• With us, humanism is available to the well-informed. But it does lack organization, and is at a disadvantage in comparison with organized religion. It is bound to make headway in a world permeated with the critical spirit of science. But it suffers from the widespread notion promoted in every pulpit that, unless the world is purposeful and benevolently directed by an intelligent spirit, we have no stable grounds for our moral idealism. It suffers from the aversion of numerous creative writers today who feel that our humanism has no room for the “soul,” the will, or the imagination. What we need is a prophetic voice with the literary genius of an Emerson, but an Emerson not pledged to a transcendentalist view of the universe.

In honor of Beach, the University of Minnesota's English department offers the Joseph Warren Beach Memorial Lecture every spring.

(For a contrary view concerning Heidegger, see the statement of Paul Edwards in the entry for Heidegger.)

Correspondence

Following is Beach's views about naturalistic humanism and philosophy in general.

{WAS, 2 July 1956}