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Abstract
This paper analyzes the specific shift in the meaning of “civilization” that took place in texts and documents of early American philosophical naturalism. Particularly, it will focus on the specific role that naturalization plays in the edification of a newly secularized, science-oriented, and democratic society, as well as of a naturalized conception of culture and civilization. Indeed, as the work of many philosophers and intellectuals of the Forties highlights, naturalism represents not only the banner of a new idea of civilization, but at the same time becomes the symbol of a powerful postwar ideology.
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Notes
1 By “early American naturalism” I broadly mean that specific philosophical movement which spread in the United States towards the second half of the nineteenth century, following the early reception of Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species (Darwin, Citation1859), and which flourished in the first half of the twentieth century, producing conferences, debates, and philosophical manifestos. See: Kim, The American Origins of Philosophical Naturalism, 2003, pp. 83-98; Nunziante, Citation2012. For a broader account of historical naturalisms and their relationship to contemporary naturalist debate, see De Caro - MacArthur, The Routledge Handbook of Liberal Naturalism, Part I, pp. 5-94.
2 Among the few scholars who have analyzed the political, social, and cultural ramifications of early American naturalism are Purcell Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value, 1973; Jewett, Naturalizing Liberalism in the 1950s, 2014; Nunziante, Citation2012; Weldon, The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism, Citation2020; Giladi, Citation2021, Prolegomenon to any Future Critical Responses to Naturalism, 2021.
3 See Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and postwar American hegemony, Citation2002. For an analysis on how the Cold War transformed American philosophical debate, see George A. Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science, Citation2005.
4 This is the characteristic thesis defended by Purcell Jr. 1973. The idea is that naturalism initially characterizes itself as a progressive movement and then turns into a socially conservative instance. In fact, whereas in its early steps naturalism represents a formidable tool of social change, as the years go by (indeed, as early as the crisis of the 1930s, but especially in the 1940s and 1950s) it loses its transformative power to assume instead a normative and value-driven character - disconnected from the real social processes that were running through American society. See Purcell Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory, cit., pp. 211 and pp. 256-257.
5 Elias, The Civilizing Process, 3.
6 Ibid., 3.
7 Ibid., 4.
8 Franz Boas (1858-1942) and Alfred Kroeber (1876-1960) were the pioneers of the American anthropological school. Both focused, among other things, on the very concept of “culture” (Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man; Kroeber, “The Superorganic”), defending the idea (especially Kroeber) that “civilization and heredity are two things that operate in separate ways” (Kroeber, “The Superorganic”,184). The influence of their ideas on American Social Sciences was huge. It is also true, however, that Boas was born in Germany and remained attached throughout his life to the ideals of the German Kultur (see Degler, Citation1989, Culture versus Biology, 2) and that Kroeber himself, although he was born in the United States, was the son of German parents.
9 Dewey, “The Rôle of Philosophy in the History of Civilization”, 8.
10 Ibid., 4.
11 Ibid., 5.
12 Ibid., 8.
13 Ibid., 9.
14 In 1916 Arthur O. Lovejoy had delivered a very famous Presidential Address at the annual meeting of the APA (On Some Conditions of Progress in Philosophical Inquiry), in which he theorized the need for greater professionalization of philosophy. Lovejoy was pushing in the direction of creating a “scientific philosophy” that would abandon philosophy’s traditional tasks of producing morally edifying discourses or playing the role of an intellectual critique of society and rather transform itself into a science proper, that is, embracing the specialism of inquiry proper to the empirical sciences (Lovejoy, “On Some Conditions”, 123-163; Campbell, A Thoughtful Profession, 281).
15 Schneider, A History of American Philosophy, viii. In recent years Marsoobian and Ryder (Citation2004) have vigorously revived the topic of the distinction between “American philosophy” and “philosophy in America”. The former, they argue, stems from the Puritan tradition of the early settlers and, through the great classics of the nineteenth century, reaches all the way to pragmatism, realism, and philosophical naturalism. The second has developed from the postwar period onward and coincides with the analytical direction that developed, and implemented the European tradition of the Vienna circle, as well as the logical and linguistic analyses provided by Russell and Wittgenstein. See A. Marsoobian- J. Ryder, The Blackwell Guide to American Philosophy, xv.
16 Schneider, A History of American Philosophy, viii.
17 Ibid., x.
18 Ibid., 516-17.
19 Sellars (Citation1969), Reflections on American Philosophy, 5-6.
20 Cho, “Phenomenology as Cooperative Task: Husserl-Farber Correspondence During 1936-37”, 35.
21 Harold Atkins Larrabee (1894-1979) was a professor of philosophy at Union College in Schenectady (New York). Educated at Columbia, then at Union Theological Seminary, and finally at Harvard, he was first a student and then a young colleague of Josiah Royce, William James and George Santayana. He was for forty years Editor of “The New England Quarterly” and author of several books, one of the most famous of which Larrabee (Citation1945) was The Reliable Knowledge: Scientific Methods in the Social Science, published in New York in 1945.
22 Larrabee, “Naturalism in America”, 319.
23 John Herman Randall Jr, who was in some ways the originator of the very project of Naturalism and the Human Spirit, writes thus in his essay entitled The Nature of Naturalism: “Most of the essays in this volume point out that the naturalism they are adopting is not so much a system or a body of doctrine as an attitude and temper: it is essentially a philosophic method and a program” (Randall Jr., “The Nature of Naturalism, 374).
24 Larrabee, “Naturalism in America”, 319.
25 Ibid., 320.
26 Ibid., 320.
27 Ibid., 321.
28 Ibid., 351.
29 Ibid., 324.
30 Ibid., 351.
31 Gotshalk, “The Paradox of Naturalism”, 156.
32 Ibid., 156.
33 This is one of the critical points on which Purcell Jr. most insists. Early naturalism is a scientific-cultural phenomenon marked by a strong social inspiration. And equally strong is the idea that liberal society must necessarily be socially transformative to be considered authentically democratic. But with the crisis of the 1930s and even more in the 1940s, we witness a strong defense of existing values, as well of as the the current model of democracy (which almost all naturalists still judged to be radically flawed). The latter is taken as an instance endowed with normative value; it becomes the model that all democracies should follow. And the progressive and transformative social instance is, in fact, transformed into a conservative one aimed at preserving the good old existing system. See Purcell Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory, pp. 233-272.
34 See Sellars (Citation1918), The Next Step in Religion and Dewey (Citation1934), A Common Faith.
35 Murphy’s paper was presented at an APA Western Division panel entitled The Last Hundred Years in American Philosophy. Among the panelists, in addition to Murphy, was Schneider himself, whom we mentioned earlier. About the normative value of naturalism, see also the reflections in Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory.
36 Murphy (Citation1947), “Ideals and Ideologies: 1910-1947”, 378.
37 UNESCO was established as a specialized agency of the newly formed United Nations and was part of a broader internationalization program, which included the establishment of other parallel international agencies, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (whose creation was part of the 1944 Bretton-Woods Agreement), the FAO and the World Health Organization.
38 Julian Sorell Huxley (1887-1975), an English biologist and humanist with liberal tendencies, belonged to a family of important tradition (his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was Darwin’s friend and supporter, his father, Leonard, a prominent publisher, and his brother Aldous is the famous writer). He was the first director of UNESCO and in that capacity prepared, in 1946, the document to which we will refer below (UNESCO. Its Purpose and its Philosophy). The latter was presented at the first annual session of the General Conference in Paris and was followed by the Preambles to the UNESCO Constitution (Nov. 4, 1946).
39 Huxley, UNESCO. Its Purpose and Philosophy, 6.
40 Ibid., 6-7.
41 Ibid., 7.
42 Ibid., 7.
43 Ibid., 7-8.
44 Ibid., 12.
45 Ibid., 17.
46 Ibid., 13.
47 Ibid., 16.
48 Ibid., 38.
49 Ibid., 39.
50 Ibid., 60.
51 Mc Keon reports on some of the heated debates that erupted during the first congress in Paris in ‘46, and how strong misgivings were already being raised by some delegates at that founding convention about that idea of “single philosophy” advanced by Huxley. The head of the Yugoslavian delegation, Vladimir Ribnikar, and the head of the U.S. delegation, William Benton both advanced, though on different grounds, serious misgivings about Huxley’s proposal. According to them, issues related to education and culture should be reserved for the initiative of local communities. Similarly, during the Second Annual Session (Mexico City, December 1947), while the use of mass communications was being discussed, the fear was expressed by some delegates “that the nations in possession of superior technological equipment might be led by that material superiority to practice cultural imperialism”. See McKeon, “A Philosophy for UNESCO”, 579.
52 Huxley had an intense involvement with U.S. academia. In the four-year period 1912-1916 he took over as head of the Department of Biology at the Rice Institute in Houston, Texas.
53 Let us remember that by the mid-Forties continental metaphysics had a questionable reputation to say the least: “Heidegger constitutes an international danger” Marvin Farber wrote in 1945 (Farber, Citation1945, “Remarks about the Phenomenological Program”, 3).
54 Hook (Citation1944b), “Naturalism and Democracy”, 40-64.
55 Murphy (Citation1945), “Book Review. Naturalism and the Human Spirit”, 404.
56 Sellars (Citation1946), “Review. Naturalism and the Human Spirit”, 438.
57 Ibid., 437.
58 With Sidney Hook, Sellars had an intense polemical exchange in the 1940s precisely on the issue of materialism. See Sellars, “Is Naturalism Enough?”, 533-44; Hook (Citation1944a), “Is Physicalism Realism Sufficient?”, 544-51; Sellars (Citation1944b), “Does Naturalism Need an Ontology?”, 686-94.
59 Sellars, “Review. Naturalism and the Human Spirit”, 438.
60 Sellars (Citation1949), “Social Philosophy and the American Scene”, 71.
61 Sellars (Citation1949), Farber, McGill, Philosophy for the Future, ix-x.
62 See the negative reviews of the project: Williams, “Review”, 341-43; Lenzen, “Review”, 248-49; Creegan, “Review”, 368.
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Antonio M. Nunziante
Antonio M. Nunziante is Associate Professor at the University of Padua (Italy). His main area of research involves epistemology, naturalism, and history of ideas. He has worked on modern thought (Leibniz, Hegel), and on early American naturalism and phenomenology (M. Farber, W. Sellars). He is currently writing a book on the topic of Naturalism and civilization.