Humanist Position Research Articles

Another Battle of the Books: American Fiction, 1950–1970

American fiction in the years from 1950 to 1970 may be read as a continuing dialogue between writers married to a variety of traditional forms and attitudes and writers who embraced a number of avant-garde positions. Often this dialogue grows sharp and shrill, spilling over from works of fiction into manifesto, polemic, or criticism, and the relationship between these two groups looks more like a battle than a dialogue—a new battle of the books. The traditionalists are on the defensive generally, falling back a little querulously on humanistic positions derived from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which yielded a man-centered value system, an empirical epistemology, and a mimetic and teleological aesthetic, all of which seem less certain and more ambiguous than they used to. The modernists, heirs to the movement for which James Joyce may stand as a symbol, are the aggressors, announcing in their proclamations the liquidation of the art of the past and taking a nihilistic attitude toward traditional values and forms, espousing a cult of novelty, conceiving of art as a plaything, and pushing their experimentalism possibly toward self-ruin and silence; in short, behaving like traditional avant-gardists. To understand the terms of this dialogue, or the lines of this battle, is to understand more than the tensions between the two camps and more than the substance and form of the fiction written in each. It is to understand certain major cultural phenomena from which this battle issues and which it illustrates and documents.

Kierkegaard's Concept of Subjectivity and Implications for Humanistic Psychology

To clarify the implications of existential thought for humanistic psychology an analysis is made of the writings of Soren Kierkegaard, primarily his major work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript. A study of the basic concepts of humanistic psychology as presented by Buhler, Rogers, May, and Bugental reveals significant similarities with Kierkegaard regarding their focus on subjectivity. Their respective interpretations of time differ, however. The humanist position, focusing upon the "here and now," bears little resemblance to Kierkegaard's radical dialectical analysis of subjectivity in which the future is the dominant mode of time. Drawing from Kierkegaard's interpretation of existence as future oriented, the author presents a framework for an alternative approach to the single case study: the future case In this model, emphasis is upon imaginative involvement with one's future "history."

The History of Trades: Its Relation to Seventeenth-Century Thought: As Seen in Bacon, Petty, Evelyn, and Boyle

The History of Trades has remained unexplored, and in fact forgotten, but there can be no question of its major importance in the minds of such distinguished men as Bacon and Boyle, Petty and Evelyn; and no adequate account of English science or education in the seventeenth century can afford to neglect it. The project was first sketched in The Advancement of Learning and then expanded in the Parasceve appended to the Novum Organum; but in this, as in other cases, there are anticipations of Bacon's thought in the previous century. In the 1530's we notice a modification of earlier humanist education. Although virtuous action continues to be the primary end of learning, the strain of practical wisdom and the appeal to reason and experience, both implicit in the humanist position, are given greater emphasis. As a result, the observation of man and nature takes its place in a curriculum hitherto limited mainly to classical reading. This is evident in Rabelais and Vives, and makes possible the inclusion of trades as a branch of study. On rainy days, Gargantua and his tutor