After a lifetime of humanist activism, I decided to transition out of my career in high technology into humanist philosophy. I decided to approach humanist philosophy as I had approached high technology: To think everything through from first principles. I have now discovered several things that I think are important philosophical perspectives for the twenty-first century. I can tie all of my discoveries together into a neat package by establishing a new school of philosophy called Naturalistic Transcendentalism.
Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism was an important movement that arose early in the nineteenth century prior to Darwin publishing The Origin of Species. It arose out of the Enlightenment, which recognized the importance of natural law in the working of the universe. Ralph Waldo Emerson studied as a minister before beginning his work as a philosopher. In his first philosophical work, Nature. Emerson talked about his desire to achieve revelations. As he explored further how he could experience revelations, he soon talked about the human faculty of intuition. Emerson saw intuition as a key religious experience of knowing what is right, but without using a scientific reasoning process.
Transcendentalism emphasized the importance of human intuition in modern life, but was not opposed to the idea that human intuition is part of nature. As the transcendentalists continued to think about human intuition and the role human intuition plays in the forming of human judgement and the setting of goals, writers such as Thomas Carlyle, who lived from 1795 to 1881, talked about intuition being a phenomenon of “natural supernaturalism.” After Darwin published The Origin of Species many people misunderstood the naturalistic leanings of Transcendentalism’s origins. As science and the philosophy of science continued to develop into the twentieth century, people stopped thinking along Transcendentalist lines, and began to think about things from a more humanist perspective. Humanist thinking downplayed the importance of human intuition in favor of reasoning and in favor of conclusions about how to live life that are closer to everyday applicability.
Naturalism
As we look at these issues today, our naturalism is much more complex than it was in the early nineteenth century. It is now time to admit that human intuition is important within two dimensions. First, it plays a central role in the making of human judgements, and is therefore worthy of study. Second, it is a very important part of the subjective life of human beings. It even underlies human creativity, which is utilized by scientists as they propose new hypotheses.
Today, naturalism is so oriented toward scientific thinking that modern science declares that human intuition should not be studied until we can understand the natural law that causes it to work. Naturalistic Transcendentalism takes exception to this view, and declares instead that it is appropriate to study human intuition using the most powerful observations that exist of human intuition: our subjective observations of our inner beings. Modern naturalism declares our human being and all our human experiences to be natural phenomena that are not well understood in detail. There is still debate about which branch of science is most important to shedding light on how human intuition, and the rest of our subjective being, works from a scientific perspective.
Naturalistic Transcendentalism
It is appropriate to take up this line of thought more or less where the Transcendentalists and some other philosophers of the early nineteenth century left off, but from a twenty-first century perspective, in order to study the subjective human being and one of its most powerful faculties: human intuition. Questions abound, from what role should human intuition play in our personal philosophies to understanding the nature of the humanities. Thinking since the early nineteenth century has resulted in a triumph of philosophy in a mature philosophy of science. Perhaps if we pick up from where the Transcendentalists left off, we can form an equally significant philosophy of the humanities.