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XIX: Toward a Modern Humanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Martin Schütze
Martin Schütze*
Affiliation:
The University of Chicago
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Extract

(Read under the title “Main Types of Literaturwissenschaft: A Critical Survey and a New Approach,” at the Fifty-first Annual Meeting, in Philadelphia, 1934. —Ed.) A MODERN humanism would be a mode of life controlled by an active aspiration to adjust present conditions to the highest interests and values of personality. It would be three-fold, involving (1) the physical-biological organism, (2) the powers finding expression in letters and the arts, and (3) the social, ethical, religious, political and economic beliefs, theories, interests, and circumstances by which personality is affected. The principle of integral unity—which is the central theme of this essay and the ultimate measure of the reality, validity, and value pertaining to the ideal of humanity here projected—demands an unremitting endeavor to combine and harmonize those three main parts of personal being. Culture is an ultimate personal unity of values.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , March 1936 , pp. 284 - 299
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1936

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References

1 Metaphysics, iv (γ), 1.

2 Cf. the present writer, MP., xvii (1919), 85 (June, p. 29).

3 This subject has been treated in the seventh chapter of Academic Illusions.

4 In Die Philosophie im Beginn des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, Festschrift für Kuno Fischer (Heidelberg, 1905), pp. 51–135.