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Paul Carus

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Paul Carus

Paul Carus (German: [ˈkaːʀʊs]; 18 July 1852 – 11 February 1919) was a German-American author, editor, a student of comparative religion[1] and philosopher.[2]

Life and education

Carus was born in Ilsenburg, Germany, and educated at the universities of Strassburg (then Germany, now France) and Tübingen, Germany. After obtaining his PhD from Tübingen in 1876[3] he served in the army and then taught school. He had been raised in a pious and orthodox Protestant home, but gradually moved away from this tradition.[4]

He left Bismarck's Imperial Germany for the United States, "because of his liberal views". [5] After he immigrated to the USA (in 1884) he lived in Chicago, and in LaSalle, Illinois. Paul Carus married Edward C. Hegeler's daughter Mary (Marie) and the couple later moved into the Hegeler Carus Mansion, built by her father. They had six children.[6]

Career

In the United States, Carus briefly edited a German-language journal and wrote several articles for the Index, the Free Religious Association organ.[1]

Soon after, he became the first managing editor of the Open Court Publishing Company, founded in 1887 by his father-in-law.[5] The goals of Open Court were to provide a forum for the discussion of philosophy, science, and religion, and to make philosophical classics widely available by making them affordable.[6]

He also acted as the editor for two periodicals published by the company, The Open Court and The Monist.[3]

He was introduced to Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of American Pragmatism, by Judge Francis C. Russell of Chicago. Carus stayed abreast of Peirce's work and would eventually publish a number of his articles.[7]

During his lifetime, Carus published 75 books and 1500 articles,[8] mostly through Open Court Publishing Company. He wrote books and articles on history, politics, philosophy, religion, logic, mathematics, anthropology, science, and social issues of his day. In addition, Carus corresponded with many of the greatest minds of the late 19th and early 20th century, sending and receiving letters from Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Booker T. Washington, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ernst Mach, Ernst Haeckel, John Dewey, and many more.

Carus's world view and philosophy

Carus considered himself a theologian rather than philosopher. He referred to himself as "an atheist who loved God".[9][10]

Carus is proposed to be a pioneer in the promotion of interfaith dialogue. He explored the relationship of science and religion, and was instrumental in introducing Eastern traditions and ideas to the West.[5] He was a key figure in the introduction of Buddhism to the West,[4] sponsoring Buddhist translation work of D.T. Suzuki, and fostering a lifelong working friendship with Buddhist Master, Soyen Shaku. Carus' interest in Asian religions seems to have intensified after he attended the World's Parliament of Religions (in 1893).

For years afterwards, Carus was a strong sympathizer of Buddhist ideas, but stopped short of committing fully to this, or any other, religion. Instead, he ceaselessly promoted his own rational concept which he called the "Religion of Science." Carus had a selective approach and he believed that religions evolve over time. After a battle for survival, he expected a "cosmic religion of universal truth" to emerge from the ashes of traditional beliefs.[4]

Carus proposed his own philosophy similar to panpsychism known as 'panbiotism', which he defined as "everything is fraught with life; it contains life; it has the ability to live."[11]

Religion of Science

Carus was a follower of Benedictus de Spinoza; he was of the opinion that Western thought had fallen into error early in its development in accepting the distinctions between body and mind and the material and the spiritual. (Kant's phenomenal and noumenal realms of knowledge; Christianity's views of the soul and the body, and the natural and the supernatural). Carus rejected such dualisms, and wanted science to reestablish the unity of knowledge.[12] The philosophical result he labeled Monism.[1]

His version of monism is more closely associated with a kind of pantheism, although it was occasionally identified with positivism.[10] He regarded every law of nature as a part of God's being. Carus held that God was the name for a cosmic order comprising "all that which is the bread of our spiritual life." He held the concept of a personal God as untenable. He acknowledged Jesus Christ as a redeemer, but not as the only one, for he believed that other religious founders were equally endowed with similar qualities.[10]

His beliefs attempted to steer a middle course between idealistic metaphysics and materialism. He differed with metaphysicians because they "reified" words and treated them as if they were realities, and he objected to materialism because it ignored or overlooked the importance of form. Carus emphasized form by conceiving of the divinity as a cosmic order. He objected to any monism which sought the unity of the world, not in the unity of truth, but in the oneness of a logical assumption of ideas. He referred to such concepts as henism, not monism.[10]

Carus held that truth was independent of time, human desire, and human action. Therefore, science was not a human invention, but a human revelation which needed to be apprehended; discovery meant apprehension; it was the result or manifestation of the cosmic order in which all truths were ultimately harmonious.[10]

Criticisms of Carus' ideas

It is claimed that Carus was dismissed by Orientalists and philosophers alike because of his failure to comply with the rules of either discipline.[13]

Legacy

The legacy of Paul Carus is honored through the efforts of the Hegeler Carus Foundation, the Carus Lectures at the American Philosophical Association (APA), and the Paul Carus Award for Interreligious Understanding[14] by the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions (CPWR).

Bibliography

His publications include:

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c Oriental Ideas in American Thought, from Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, edited by Philip P. Wiener (Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1973–74).
  2. ^ William H. Hay, “Paul Carus: A Case-Study of Philosophy on the Frontier,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, 17 (1956), 498–510.
  3. ^ a b The Monist:An International Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry, featuring essays from scholars around the globe.
  4. ^ a b c The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844–1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent, by Thomas A. Tweed (Paperback), page 65-67
  5. ^ a b c "Open Court: About Us". www.opencourtbooks.com.
  6. ^ a b History of the Heleger Carus Foundation – The Hegeler Carus Mansion Archived 28 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine
  7. ^ William James and Yogaacaara philosophy: A comparative inquiry Archived 26 September 2011 at the Wayback Machine, by Miranda Shaw, (University of Hawaii Press, 1987), page 241, note 4
  8. ^ History of the Heleger Carus Foundation – Open Court Publishing Company Archived 28 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine
  9. ^ The Gospel of Buddha, by Paul Carus, page 26
  10. ^ a b c d e Recent American Thought Archived 2 March 2008 at the Wayback Machine, from The Radical Academy Archived 30 March 2008 at the Wayback Machine
  11. ^ Skrbina, David. (2005). Panpsychism in the West. MIT Press. p. 149. ISBN 0-262-19522-4
  12. ^ Meyer, Donald Harvey (Winter 1962). "Paul Carus and the Religion of Science". American Quarterly. 14 (4): 597–607. doi:10.2307/2710135. JSTOR 2710135.
  13. ^ Future Religion – Making an American Buddha Archived 10 November 2013 at the Wayback Machine, by Judith Snodgrass. A review of republished The Gospel of Buddha
  14. ^ The Paul Carus Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Interreligious Movement Archived 16 June 2006 at the Wayback Machine. See also: Carus Award 2004 Archived 27 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine
  15. ^ "History of the Devil Index". www.sacred-texts.com.
  16. ^ Owens, Frederick William (1910). "Review: The Foundations of Mathematics by Paul Carus". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 16: 541–542. doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1910-01969-8.
  17. ^ "Review: The Mechanistic Principle and the Non-Mechanical by Paul Carus". The Harvard Theological Review. 7 (2): 271–272. April 1914. doi:10.1017/s0017816000011196.
  18. ^ Salter, William Mackintire (July 1915). "Review of 4 books: Nietzsche and Other Exponents of Individualism by Paul Carus; The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche by H. L. Mencken; The Philosophy of Nietzsche: An Exposition and an Appreciation by Georges Chatterton-Hill; Nietzsche, sein Leben und seine Werke by Richard M. Meyer". The Harvard Theological Review. 8 (3): 400–408. doi:10.1017/s0017816000008993.
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