Malcolm Cowley
From Philosopedia
Cowley, Malcolm (28 August 1898 - 27 March 1989)
Cowley was an editor of New Republic and author of popular editions of selected works by Hemingway, Faulkner, Hawthorne, Whitman, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He wrote to Warren Allen Smith concerning humanism:
- I am a humanist, yes, but not a naturalistic humanist. Naturalistic humanism, so-called, implies an oversimplified notion of the nature of man. Communism makes the same mistake (which is not to confuse naturalistic humanists with communists, except on this one point). The mistake is to regard humankind as composed simply of the individual integers of the human race that we see or read about or have enumerated or find traces of in caves or rocks—a plus b plus c to the nth power equals the human race. Add the integers together and the result is less than the human race, because each human society is also an integer, and because individual human beings are all of the incomplete and unable to subsist by themselves without the support of the society to which they belong. The society is something invisible, yet real and measurable in many of its effects. In order to represent this invisible reality, men invented religions, which are essentially based on the dual nature of man - as individual and as part dependent on the whole. Rituals and ceremonials are therefore an essential part of human society, because they are designed to render visible and tangible this relationship that we sense but cannot see. Any state belief will therefore become a religion - and unless it faces the problem squarely it will become an impoverished and ultimately dangerous religion (as communism has become in Russia).
- What I am saying is not to question the application of the scientific method to human society. It is simply to suggest that the scientific method has so far, and in most cases, been asking the wrong questions.
- As for naturalistic humanism, as represented by The Humanist, I sympathize deeply with most of its aims and wish strongly to endorse its campaign for civil liberties and for secular education. It is going at these matters in exactly the right way, by organizing groups and giving them a feeling of cohesiveness (i.e., by becoming a sort of church). On the philosophical side it doesn’t go far enough.
In Exile’s Return (1934) and A Second Flowering (1973), Cowley wrote of the “lost generation” of authors.
Correspondence
Asked in 1951 about humanism, Cowley who had been elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1949, responded to Warren Allen Smith:
