Paul A. Schilpp

From Philosopedia

Schilpp, Paul A. (6 February 1897 - 5 September 1993)

Schilpp, the editor of the twenty-one-volume Library of Living Philosophers and who had been associate editor of Religious Humanism, was an educator on the faculties at Northwestern University, the University of the Pacific, and Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. In 1956, he went on record concerning his views about humanism:

Humanism, to me, connotes an emphasis on man as both the end and goal of all human endeavor as well as upon the essential dependence of man upon himself in the processes of individual growth and of social development and progress. I believe, in other words, that man has to work out his own (individual and social) salvation with fear and trembling, yes, but also with courage, insight, and caring.

Such working out need not preclude, however, man’s making use, in this process, of any and all avenues of approach open to him: the use of nature and of natural laws as he comes increasingly to understand these, as well as the use of his intellectual, moral, aesthetic and spiritual powers as he learns to develop and understand these.

In terms of method and procedure I suppose I would fit mostly into the category of naturalistic humanism. But, in terms of metaphysical considerations, I would rank as a theistic humanist. So long as man is—in the area of ultimates—still as largely ignorant as he is today, and in view of man’s obviously finite nature and even more finite (and limited) knowledge and comprehension, it seems to me the height of human arrogance for finite man to want to rule out God. Such procedure reminds me of the attempt, on the part of a mosquito, to rule out the possibility of man because the mosquito never has met a man and, if it had met one, could, obviously, neither explain nor understand man.

But I cannot grant that theistic humanism of necessity must be held “within the framework of a supernaturalistic philosophy.” If there is a God, He must have some nature, which will be “natural” to Him as human nature is natural to man (or dog-nature is natural to a dog). God, in order to be God, must, I suppose, be thought of as superhuman; but this implies no more that He is supernatural than the fact that man is supervegetative implies that man is supernatural. God is merely beyond finite man’s finite grasp—as, indeed are many natural phenomena events yet in this atomic age.

I would insist, therefore, that my theistic humanism is a type of naturalistic humanism.

Everything that has ever been achieved in human history has been achieved by man (from the sub-beastly atrocities of war and other forms of head-hunting to the highest achievements of human hands, heart, mind, and spirit). Though man is finite, the latent capacities of his nature are so nearly limitless that no man can actually imagine or even dream what man may yet be able to achieve: If he will marshal and use the best powers of his rational, moral, and spiritual capacities in the building of a better world of human understanding, appreciation, freedom, and love.

More detailed statements of the writer’s theistic humanism are found in This Is My Faith (1956) and in his Tully Cleon Knoles Lectures in Philosophy, Human Nature and Progress (1954).

(Schilpp was an honorary member of the Bertrand Russell Society).

{WAS, 27 August 1956}