John Hoad, Ph.D.
The Angel Oak on John’s Island in Greater Charleston, SC, is reckoned to be several centuries old. There are scars where it has lost limbs, and there are limbs that trail to the ground for support. But it still puts out fresh leaves on branches high in the air. One feels oneself in the presence of an awesome creature of nature.
When I think of some of the great Teachers of humankind, they call to mind the Angel Oak. There may be many fallen leaves beneath the philosophical trees of these giants of thought and spirit, and whole conceptual limbs may have fallen away or need support, but their message still sprouts fresh leaves of insight and inspiration.
The philosopher, Karl Jaspers, called such Teachers "paradigmatic" individuals. And he named four for special mention: Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus, while admitting that others might be named in that rank. But while these “major prophets” may be for the ages, there are numerous “minor prophets” who also play their part in enriching our human condition by their insight and inspiration.
THE FOUNDER. Movements remain in a reciprocal relationship with such founders. Which brings us to Felix Adler, the fountain spring of the Ethical Movement. His dates are 1851 to 1933. He was in his mid-twenties when he was invited to give direction to a group called together to pursue his declared aim of basing a modern religion on the study and promotion of ethics.
He spoke and wrote extensively in the years which followed that beginning in 1876, and crystallized out his ethical philosophy in a major work in 1918, when he was in his late sixties, and his notion of the spiritual ideal in a lecture series published in 1924, when he was in his early seventies.
Adler was a combination of academic and social activist. His philosophical work lacks some of the rigor of the professional philosopher, perhaps, it has been suggested, precisely because he wedded his thought to his life of action. One can read his philosophy as a devotional and inspirational classic. It is still treasured as such among his followers in Ethical Culture, but a funny thing happened on the way to the future. Because his religion of Ethical Culture was defined as dogma free, his own authority as leader of thought became up for grabs in the Movement he founded.
ECLIPSED. It is now a commonplace of our history that the philosophical naturalism of a Thomas Dewey became predominant among the majority of Ethical Leaders and Adler’s transcendental idealism was eclipsed. His rigorous refusal to base his Movement on any dogmatic orthodoxy made this possible, even while his social activist vision continues to inspire and guide.
But the question remains: Is Adler’s transcendental idealism a broken off branch under the philosophical tree of Ethical Culture? The answer of this article is no, it is not. Bucking the naturalistic trend, I believe Adler’s philosophy is alive and fresh. And this is consistent with the diversity that his Movement has always cultivated.
So what are we talking about here? First, let us underscore that Adler had moved away from the supernaturalism of the Judeo-Christian heritage that surrounded him as an educated Jew who also assiduously read the New Testament of the Christian Church As a young man and university student in Germany, his reflections had led to his abandonment of that faith: “The net outcome,” he wrote, “was not atheism in the moral sense, - I have never been what is called an atheist, - but the definite and permanent disappearance of the individualistic conception of Deity.”
What was going on here? As we survey the history of Hebrew religion, we see that the concept of God was shaped in terms of the Very Important Persons of Hebrew society. God was king, judge, patriarch, and commander in chief (or “Lord of hosts” as the expression went). But today we live in a democracy: How would one express ultimate reality in terms of government of the people, by the people, and for the people?
THE MANIFOLD. Adler spoke of reality being a “manifold.” As the components of that word suggest, he was speaking of a reality that is characterized by many-foldedness. The many indicates a multiplicity of units, while the foldedness indicates that the many are somehow enfolded into a unity. Adler arrived at that concept by what he called the “reality producing functions” of the human mind. The human mind comes up with some basic perceptions. A.N. Whitehead was later to call them “ultimate notions” - concepts that cannot be analyzed by factors more fundamental than themselves. For Adler, one of these notions is the manyness and the oneness, the diversity and the unity, of the universe. It is a notion shared with science, which takes a multitude of data and finds a single explanatory law behind them.
In order to act rightly, Adler asserted, I need an idea of the whole. The spiritual reality of the manifold was that whole. To which Adler added that it is an ethical manifold, because the reality he was talking about is the reality of humanity in ethical relationship. The ethical manifold comprises all humans in their diversity, and yet conceived as one humanity. And it is a more than a here and now reality, though it is in the here and now that each of us must engage in it. The reality embraced all humanity, alive or dead.
Adler would not speculate how formerly living humans would be included. He had rejected the ideas of creation and immortality in their usual conceptualizations, but he was sure that there was an essence to every human that transcended the end of life here on earth. Where was his evidence for this? And, on the larger issue, where was his evidence for this spiritual reality that embraces all of us?
Here we come to another key Adler concept: Experience of the ethical extrapolates out to recognition of the spiritual reality. As a young man, as he wrestled morally with his own passions, and as an adult, as he wrestled with the “shadows” of existence - with sin, sickness, and sorrow - he came to an intuitive sense that that wrestling put him in touch with a larger purposive reality. He wrote: “The conviction that there is in man an essential spiritual self, a holy thing, and a spiritual universe, a holy community, are not gifts to which we fall heir at birth, or by some sort of revelation borrow from the experience of ancient teachers; they are a supreme good to be arduously worked out by ourselves.”
But, the skeptic may say to Adler, there is still a question of proof. In answer, Adler would want, first, to raise the issue of how one proves any human construct. He shared the view that all of our sense of reality is an experience of something out there mediated by the mind’s construction of what that out there is. He found this to be true even in science, which, he observed, teaches us to see “imaginary entities well-nigh metaphysical in nature” underlying the “grossest forms of matter.”
VERIFICATION. But what if the scientist says: Yes, we do deal in highly esoteric constructs, but with them we build bridges, we fly planes, we create laser beams, we make plastics, we develop astonishing means of communication. I think Adler would reply: Yes, and for us verification lies in exemplification. He had put to himself the skeptic’s question: “How can ethical truth be verified? How can we be sure that ethical ideals are more than fine wishes, expressing subjective aspiration, but having no counterpart in the ultimate constitution of things? This is the dark doubt that haunts the mind of ethical writers, as well as the average man. We ask to have the things we believe in, the objects of our supreme aspiration, verified. How can they be verified?” His answer, in developing the notion that verification is exemplification, is to take the idea and go forward with it, not backward along some presumed chain of causality. To account for an idea that presses in upon us, we give free rein to the reality-producing powers of the mind and give the idea a place in the synthesized universe of the many and the one, and test its fitness against its expression in the known world.
Adler argued that two things would follow: (1) The mind would be impressed that the ideal plan delineating relationships between the ethical units would make sense and convince one of its reality. Even the frustration we feel that the ideal plan is not yet fully manifested would intensify the conviction that it awaits realization. (2) The ways of behavior traced out in accordance with the plan would win the approval of our spiritual nature. “The life, the ethical experience, must lead to the certainty.”
As noted at the start, Adler did not elaborate the logic of his idealism in the way that a professional philosopher, like the idealist, William Ernest Hocking, his somewhat younger contemporary, did. But his strong intuitions about the nature of reality fired his own imagination and fueled his lifelong struggle to give everyday expression to his beliefs.
THE LADDER. We may restate Adler’s contentions in different words. He believed that for there to be a just world, justice had to be constitutive of reality, even if that justice was awaiting our grasp and application of it. Those who probe the universe find algorithms at work there. For religions of revelation, those algorithms come from above. They have been called “sky-hooks.” The naturalistic philosophies say they come from below. They are “earth-cranes,” that we set up. But the Adler philosophy suggests another way of looking at this. I call it the Jacob’s Ladder approach. Jacob, dreaming, saw a ladder set up between the below and the above, with angels - the vehicles of communication - ascending and descending. We ascend a ladder of exploration of nature, but what we find there, we didn’t put there. When the Fibonacci series in mathematics was discovered in the 13th century, it turned out to be a pattern already in use in the formation of sunflower heads, and seashells, and the arrangement of buds on plant stems. The universe had it built in before humans caught up with it. The laws of science simply reveal the constitutive elements of the universe. Once revealed, humans can make use of them - to build, fly, make, communicate. For Adler, likewise, the human mind comes upon a construct of reality that says each individual matters for the enrichment of the whole of humanity. And that sense of the ethical in life is a telltale mark of the way the universe is going. It is evolving ethically. That insight once revealed must be grasped and applied. It may be summed up by saying that ethics is a major clue to the nature of the universe, and to live ethics out is to give meaning to human existence. It is a simple version of the Anthropic Principle, that what humans are is a clue to the reality of the universe they live in.
THE NECESSARY POSTULATE. A few more quotes from Adler will illustrate this viewpoint. He said: “I affirm the real and irreducible existence of the essential self. Or rather, as my last act, I affirm that the ideal of perfection which my mind inevitably conceives has its counterpart in the ultimate reality of things, is the truest reading of that reality whereof man is capable.” And again: “I say that around the individual, the ethical unit, we build up as a necessary postulate the spiritual universe. Man ethically considered carries with him this infinite environment.” And yet again: “It is the product of the reality-producing functions in their ideal completion. It is the necessary postulate required if the idea of right is to have validity, and the idea of right is required by man insofar as he is agent and not merely a spectator of life.”
The postulation of this spiritual reality grew out of Adler’s concept that every ethic implies a metaphysic. Ethics, as he once argued, is independent of theology, but it is dependent upon a philosophy of the human. Define human nature, and you determine ethical norms. Human relationships are the center of our concern, but human relationships spring from a matrix of evolving reality, at the center of which is the ethical manifold. “We have replaced the God-idea,” he asserted, “by that of a universe of spiritual beings interacting in infinite harmony.” Deity as democracy. And the constitution of that democratic ideal is the law of love and justice. The naturalists are not wrong. They just don’t go far enough to experience the all-encompassing spiritual reality.
We may call Adler’s spiritual congregation of the whole a “diagram” of relationships. For him, the infinite reality had an ontological status, that is, he believed in its real existence. But we may use it as a model for human behavior. Which brings us to his supreme ethical rule. This is often stated as "act so as to elicit the best in another and thereby in oneself.” That formulation, properly understood, means that in working with others to bring out their best, we will be challenged to bring out our best. But it is easy to miss the “thereby.” How many parents, how many partners, have claimed to be helping others to change for the better while missing the challenge that this means they change too!
THE SUPREME ETHICAL RULE. Adler’s full formulation of his supreme ethic is more sophisticated and elaborate than that. He links his ethic with his metaphysic. (1) Act as a member of the ethical manifold (the infinite spiritual universe). (2) Act so as to achieve uniqueness (one’s own complete individualization). (3) Act so as to elicit the best in another (their distinctive, unique quality as a fellow-member of the infinite whole). His ethics is a read-off from his philosophy of a whole, a unity, of many diverse and distinctive units.
How would one relate this ethical transcendentalism to Ethical Culture? It has become clear that we operate in Ethical Culture at two levels. At one level we have the foundational basis of membership, which may be stated as follows: Membership in Ethical Culture is based on a commitment to study, live by, promote, and apply ethical values. Period. As you enter the concourse that leads to Ethical Culture, you are not asked to check your mental baggage at the gate. Your ticket in is simply that commitment to pursue ethics as a life-transforming experience and behavior. But it is common experience in Ethical Culture that we don’t just leave it there. We explore philosophy, often to an extreme. And a variety of philosophical views is held by both Leaders and members.
The variety has its boundaries. We are not as eclectic as the Unitarian-Universalists, though we share their commitment to freedom of thought. The frequency range of our broadband of thought has taken on the name humanist. This is a beautiful word for a beautiful idea. Rooted etymologically in the humus of the earth, it bespeaks a viewpoint that focuses on humanity as its primary object of moral concern and as its primary resource for personal and social change.
But some humanists - mainly outside of Ethical Culture - have attempted to capture the word as exclusive to a secular point of view, which is anti-God, anti-supernatural, anti-transcendent, anti-metaphysical, . I once coined a word to define such an attitude. I called it “super-trans-meta-paranoia” - a negative knee jerk reaction to what these prefixes stand for. However, in my experience Ethical Culturists generally are not so much aggressively secular as just decidedly naturalistic. Adler didn’t like the connotations of the word, humanist, but if we were to use it of him, we would have to describe him as a transcendental ethical humanist. This is a valid viewpoint within Ethical Culture.
THE VISION. There are many who remain satisfied to focus primarily and almost exclusively on human relationships in the span of this lifetime as the passionate concern of their religious motivation. For Adler, transcendental reach exceeded empirical grasp. The all-important individual stood at the epicenter of centripetal forces of community, history, culture, art, evolution, and religion. Every individual is embraced by all humanity, all the ages, all the universe. And reciprocates. “Man ethically considered carries with him this infinite environment,” Adler asserted. It is a tremendous vision, and we are yet to make the most of it. This Angel Oak still produces acorns.
NOTES: Adler quotations are from “An Ethical Philosophy of Life” (1918) and “The Reconstruction of the Spiritual Ideal” (1924). “Skyhooks” and “earth cranes” are metaphors from Daniel C. Dennett, “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life” (1995). “Ultimate notions” are dealt with in Alfred North Whitehead, “Modes of Thought,” (1938).
Posted by John Hoad on November 01, 2002
