The idea of developing a theory of ‘panentheistic
humanism’ in which the human person is considered to be open to and constituted
by a relation to ‘ultimate reality’, or God in Christian terms, arose out of my
recent work, which has been concerned to foster a constructive dialogue between
religious people, atheists, and agnostics.[1] There I discovered that at
bottom many, though not all, of the blockages of communication between these
different groups arise out of issues to do with language, metaphysics, and the
challenges of coming to terms with the varieties of human experience. This position paper represents an introduction
to the general idea of ‘panentheistic humanism’ and a discussion of one central
issue with which it is concerned, namely, naturalism.
The project is currently at the ‘scoping’ stage. That
is to say, as a part of the Max-Planck-Forschungspreis,
I am probing the robustness of the idea and its potential fruitfulness for thinking
about religion and modernity, secularization, and social and religious
plurality. This entails developing an historical narrative, structured by the
heuristic thesis of ‘panentheistic humanism’, as one reasonable way to speak of the openness of human beings to
‘ultimate reality’. This historical-methodological approach is used to both justify the systematic thesis of the
emergence of ‘panentheistic humanism’ as a more adequate contemporary
philosophical anthropology than that of the currently dominant ‘exclusive
humanism’, and to demonstrate how the
former binary concepts of the sacred and the profane, of the immanent and the
transcendent, and of the religious and the secular, have traded upon a
dualistic metaphysics, which no longer presents a coherent vision of reality
within which to envisage human beings in relation to God.[2]
In Part I,
I begin by introducing the philosophical and scientific background to the
theory of ‘panentheistic humanism’, and then go on to sketch the meaning of
this concept in contrast with Karl Rahner’s philosophical anthropology.[3] Using a modified version
of Hans Joas’s method of ‘affirmative genealogy’,[4] I argue that current
binary thinking, which attempts to demarcate two metaphysically distinct
domains: ‘nature’ and ‘super-nature’, fails to provide a satisfactory picture
of reality. This has resulted in ‘scientific naturalist’ accounts becoming
dominant in philosophy. In order for current impasses between ‘exclusive
humanism’ and religious ‘super-naturalism’ to be overcome, I argue that it is
necessary to develop a conception of humanism in which reason is open to the full range of human experience.[5] The concept of ‘panentheistic
humanism’ is used to orchestrate this historical and systematic project of
philosophical anthropology.
In Part
II, I then focus on one of the
central claims upon which the theory is grounded, namely, the openness of human
beings to ‘ultimate reality’, which include experiences of God, as a
constituent part of human identity.[6] I approach this particular
issue here through an engagement with recent discussion on the philosophical
question of naturalism.
[1] See Anthony J. Carroll and
Richard Norman (eds.), Religion and
Atheism. Beyond the Divide, London and New York: Routledge, 2016.
[2] Whilst these binaries have
been typically viewed as in various relations with each other, these relations
have often been conceived, in oppositional
terms: eternal/mortal, infinite/finite, super-natural/natural and so on. Here I
am developing the idea of constitutive relations between God, humans, and
nature.
[3] See Karl Rahner, Grundkurs des Glaubens, Freiburg,
Basel, Wien: Herder Verlag, 1976, pp. 13-142.
[4] See
Hans Joas, Die Sakralität der Person. Eine
neue Genealogie der Menschenrechte, Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011, pp.
147-203.
[5] For a discussion of experiences of
‘self-transcendence’, see Hans Joas, Braucht
der Mensch Religion? Über Erfahrungen der Selbsttranszendenz, Freiburg in
Breslau: Verlag Herder, 2004.
[6] I use the concept of ‘ultimate
reality’ as a summary term for the various experiences of ‘self-overcoming’ and
of absolute value commitments, which are associated with religious traditions
and also, at least with respect to absolute value commitments, with the
humanist morality of some atheist traditions. The term ‘ultimate reality’
indicates that each person has some ultimate concern(s) in their life though
this/these varies/vary between individuals, communities, religious and
non-religious traditions, and between civilizational epochs. As such the
language of ‘ultimate reality’ or indeed of ‘ultimate realities’ conveys the
basic idea that whether it be God, Enlightenment, living a moral life, being in
harmony with the cosmos, or money and power, everyone needs something ‘to get
them out of bed’ in the morning. How one deals with proximate concerns thus indicates attitudes to ultimate concern(s),
and proximate concerns often combine as subsets of ultimate concern(s). In this
sense, the term ‘ultimate reality’ is more inclusive than the concept of ‘God’,
which is necessarily particular to religious traditions that are theistic.
However, as a Christian, I write from the point of view of someone for whom the
Trinitarian God of Christianity is ‘ultimate reality’. I thus describe
‘panentheistic humanism’ from a Christian point of view and hope to show that
though not equivalent to other conceptions of ‘ultimate reality’ ‘panentheistic
humanism’ points towards significant points of overlapping concern for all human beings. In matters pertaining to
‘ultimate reality’, I presume that no one can claim a ‘view from nowhere’ and
has a responsibility to combine ‘internal’ and ‘external’ perspectives as best
as they can. See See Robert Neville Cummings (ed.) Ultimate Realities. A Volume in the Comparative Religious Ideas Project,
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001, Robert Neville Cummings, Ultimates. Philosophical Theology Volume One, Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2013. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
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