Pragmatic Humanism Revisited by Ana Honnacker

Author:Ana Honnacker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030024413
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Humanism as Religion, Part II

The third option opens up a middle way between the first two. It brings together the concept of humanism as a religion without God as well as Dewey’s idea of a religious humanist faith by employing a functional definition of what religion is. Schiller, for example, suggested an understanding of religion as “that which issues in and fosters the best life” (Schiller 1912, 369) or the “soul’s aspiration towards an ideal wherewith to rectify and transfigure the actual” (Schiller 1934, 312). Over against the traditional, substantial understanding of religion that conceives the idea of the supernatural to be constitutive for religion, the functional understanding is wider, since it allows encompassing a variety of human attempts to find meaning and fullness of life, naturalistic as well as supernaturalistic. Thereby, a fundamental human striving is acknowledged (Kolenda 1976, 12–14). From the perspective of pragmatic humanism, though referring to the supernatural is a comprehensible reaction to human contingency and the demand for compensation, it has to be rejected as illusory and distracting. The humanist religiousness rather manifests in states of “amazement, astonishment, wonder, well-being, fulfillment, satisfaction, assurance, security, safety, ecstasy, joy, and more” (Kolenda 1976, 78–79). What really transforms our lives is our “ideation”, our imagination of ideals.17 Pragmatic humanism could very well be understood as a religion, namely, a religion that fosters the transcendence of the actual only by creative human powers.

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