Ordway Tead

From Philosopedia

Tead, Ordway (1891–1973)

A naturalist and a humanist, Tead in the 1950s was an editor of social and economic books for Harper & Brothers.

While on the Columbia University staff, he wrote, “Toward the Knowledge of Man, an Unorthodox Approach to College Studies,” for Main Currents. Basically, he liked Paul Valéry’s “fecundity of opposites,” or the value one receives when probing the reasons why others hold opposite views. On the one hand, he found merits in the arguments of the various either-or groups: absolutism or relativism; objectivity or commitment; authority or freedom; egoism or altruism; the state and other large corporate organizations or the individual; the secular or the sacred.

On the college level, he found that studies need to identify and clarify the elements of this inevitable problem of world conflict among plural value systems. He asked if the public schools and colleges are “godless” in some detrimental way. He asks what is the nature of the sacred, and is there in our thought too sharp and rigid a dualism. He asks if scientific humanism is enough or if the sacred helps by giving height and depth and universality of meaning to the human career. The secular humanist view, he laments, can be too imperious, too apt to overlook the basic values inherent in the religious quests. For him, “a religious way of life” includes creativity, flux, permanency, aloneness, dependency, tranquility, orderliness, community and fraternal love, beauty, meditation, value, restoration (or redemption), freedom, and an innate imperative.

As did the Hindu philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, whose Recovery of Faith (1955) he liked, Tead attempted to reconcile the either-or camps of thinkers, finding much in religion to be admired but finding much in secular humanism also to be admired.

In 1969, Tead wrote Instincts in Industry.

Tead wrote for The Humanist and corresponded with its book review editor:

{WAS, 23 January 1957}