Why Secular Humanism and Philosophy Need One Another

by Jason Smick - lecturer, Santa Clara University

This article is meant to highlight what I would argue is the humanist community’s need of philosophy, but also, philosophy’s need of humanist communities.  It seems to me that secular humanism lacks a sense of its own history and the depths, in several senses, of that history.  What I am getting at is encapsulated in a statement by a woman in a BBC documentary on secular cultures and traditions called “Secular Believers.”  The person in question discusses how in spite of its relatively recent emergence in history, humanism is a real and viable alternative way of thinking and living.  Her view expresses what seems to me to be a view common in secular humanist circles. 

But is this view accurate?  I would argue that it is not.  It is true that secular humanism is a legitimate alternative to traditional religious ways of life.  Yet its history is just as long and venerable as those of the religions – if one recognizes that it is a historical manifestation and continuation of the history of philosophy and the philosophical ways of life associated with it.  That many secular humanists and philosophers do not see one another as constituent parts of a single tradition of long duration is understandable, and is itself related to the twists and turns of the history of philosophy.  Most especially, it is related, on the one hand, to the view that modern science replaces philosophy instead of being one of its most powerful, most recent, and most successful expressions and, on the other, to the view prevalent among modern philosophers and most non-philosophers that philosophy is a way of thinking rather than a way of thinking that serves a way of life.

The first thing that needs to be pointed out in this regard is that philosophy is a distinct tradition analogous in many respects to traditions like Christianity and Buddhism.  This is an important point since today it is common to see philosophy as something done wherever there are people who reflect critically upon the world – the charitable idea of what philosophy consists of – or who engage in high-flown speculation unconcerned with practical life – the less charitable idea of philosophy and philosophical activity.
 
There is good reason for this broad conception of philosophy.  There are critical and/or speculative thinkers to be found in every culture, time, and place.  Yet, the term itself – ‘philosophy’, from the Greek philo-sophia (the love of wisdom) – has a specific historical origin just as do terms like ‘Judaism’ or ‘Buddhism’ and the traditions and cultural histories to which they refer.  It is the distinct character of the philosophical enterprise as one devoted to questioning unquestioned assumptions and beliefs and to the articulation of rational accounts of the world and rational ways of inhabiting the world, that allows us to draw analogies between philosophy in the more narrow and precise sense and analogous intellectual and cultural traditions that were born and cultivated elsewhere.  But, as with any analogy, the thing or things drawn into relation to one other and compared presuppose a standard against which these things are measured.  In this case, that standard and measure is philosophy, a worldview and way of life born in Greece some 2,600 years ago.
 
It is also important to stress that philosophy is not only a way of thinking, or at least that it did not used to be only that.  At one time it was a way of life that involved shared ideas, values, practices, and institutions.  These elements bound together the members of the philosophical tradition.  They thereby constituted a community of like-minded people who shared a similar vision of the world and how to live in it even if that vision was interpreted and realized in practical life in different ways by the different philosophical communities that developed and flourished during its earliest phases.

I want to emphasize this claim that philosophy is – or can be – a community in some meaningful sense.  True, we rarely think of philosophy as a community akin to religious communities, and for good reason.  It is now for the most part an academic community limited to circles of academic philosophers.  However, as the recently passed French historian of philosophy, Pierre Hadot, has shown, philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome was a specific way of thinking and living in the world.  Its origins lie in the effort of the early philosophical community to provide accounts of the universe and of humanity’s relation to it and one another born out of an experience of the world marked by a sense that impersonal processes govern it and that our comprehension of these processes is inherently limited and so must be seen as open-ended and revisable.  Negatively, this effort required the critique of existing religious traditions.  Positively, it required the construction of a new mode of thought and life.

Compared to its ancient Greek and Roman antecedents, the philosophical community at present is a faint echo of its past.  In ancient Greece and Rome a given school of philosophy (e.g., the Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, or Skeptics) provided a worldview, community, and rules of life for its adherents.  Philosophers today most often resemble, ironically enough, the caricature of late Christian medieval scholastics insofar as we tend to be concerned with the minutiae of great thinkers’ systems and the perpetuation of an academic discipline, rather than with the cultivation of both a way of life and a community comprised of more than the secular equivalent of theologians.  This is one reason I believe philosophers today need secular humanist communities – like most people, we philosophers need community, a source of solace, a context within which to socialize our children, and a platform for social and political action. 

But secular humanist communities, for their part, need the history of philosophy and the philosophical theorists who continue to preserve and develop its intellectual dimensions.  They need the rich and vibrant intellectual creativity that still defines the philosophical tradition.  Even more so, if secular humanists want a genuinely secular alternative to traditional religious ways of dealing with loss, decline, and death, they could, for example, benefit from the study and practice of Stoic or Epicurean practices meant to help their community members deal with these difficult realities of life.

These considerations indicate why I view the philosophical community as a broken community in need of repair.  It is as though the relation of Christian theologians to the Church or Buddhist monks to the broader community of Buddhists had been severed.  Philosophers generally do not recognize secular humanism as its lived, communal expression, and secular humanists usually do not see philosophers as those members of the community who articulate the meaning of being a secular person and living a secular life.  Hopefully, I have here at least given a few reasons why each might want to rethink its view of the other.  In future columns, I will discuss in more detail some of the specific ways in which this rift might be repaired and the benefits to each group of the community, tradition, and way of life such reparation would make possible. 

This column was first printed in the Humanist Community Newsletter (October 2010)
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(Jason Smick is a lecturer in Philosophy of Religion at Santa Clara University. A native of the Sacramento area, he holds degrees in philosophy, theology, and religious studies. His work focuses on the practical and communal dimensions of ancient and modern Western philosophical traditions, and the relation of secular cultures and traditions to both the religions and Western philosophy.)