George Holmes Howison

George Holmes Howison
George Holmes Howison George Holmes Howison
Born	1834 (1834) Montgomery County, Maryland
Died	1916 (1917) (aged 82) Berkeley, California
Occupation	American philosopher

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) was an American philosopher who established the philosophy department at the University of California, Berkeley and held the position there of Mills Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity. He also founded the Philosophical Union, one of the oldest philosophical organizations in the United States.

Howison put "the world" in "its" place through his metaphysical theory of personal idealism, wherein Mutual Reciprocity (p. 7, p. 52) plays both metaphysical AND physical lynchpin. No phenomena but at the behest of mutual reciprocity between 'spontaneously conscious' (p. 38) 'element-complex' (p. 47).

Friends and former students of Howison established the Howison Lectures in Philosophy in 1919. Over the years, the lecture series has included talks by distinguished philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky.

Life

George Holmes Howison was born on November 29, 1834, in Montgomery County, Maryland, and died in Berkeley, California on December 31, 1916. His parents were Robert Howison of Virginia and Eliza Holmes Howison of Maryland. These were old and distinguished Southern families, Presbyterians and slaveholders. Howison’s biography is eclectic and the basis of Howison’s later devotion to pluralism. Howison was the primary originator of philosophical pluralism in America, which was his most enduring contribution to philosophy. Although he was widely recognized during his lifetime, Howison's ideas have spread and come into the present mainly through influence on other notable philosophers whose names have continued to attract attention, especially Josiah Royce, William James, and Borden Parker Bowne. Howison was, by the accounts of those who knew him, a very persuasive philosopher.

When Howison was four years of age his parents freed their slaves and moved to Marietta, Ohio, for the improved educational and cultural life it offered at that time. The various Christian sects there had worked out a consensus and ecumenism, creating a co-operative community in which even Protestants and Catholics worked together. This religious pluralism was exceedingly rare in 19th century North America. Howison attended Marietta Academy and later Harmar Academy where he received a classical education, including ancient languages. He entered Marietta College at 14 and studied German. He studied philosophy in his senior year. After graduating, Howison pursued Christian ministry, graduating from Lane Seminary in Cincinnati and being licensed to preach. Howison did not take a church, however, and served as a schoolteacher and principal several Ohio towns. In 1862 he moved to Salem, Massachusetts as a school principal. There he met and married Lois Caswell, an English teacher, who was related to several prominent academic families associated with Yale University and Brown University. Howison continued to educate himself, especially in mathematics.

Having moved to better and better schools and having made a name for himself as an educator, in 1864 (when he was 30) Howison was offered a post as professor at Washington University in St. Louis. During the following years Howison taught in all the branches of mathematics, including applied fields such as mechanics and astronomy, but also in political economy and Latin. Howison wrote a treatise on analytic geometry (1869) and an algebra primer (1870). In St. Louis Howison also came into contact with a subdivision of the St. Louis Philosophical Society called The Kant Club, which met at the home of William Torrey Harris. With this group he read G. W. F. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit. His association with Harris and the St. Louis Hegelians turned Howison’s main interest to philosophy. Harris’ The Journal of Speculative Philosophy was started during this time and Howison published an important paper on the relations among the branches of mathematics in one of its early numbers. The Kant Club hosted speeches by both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott. Washington University offered no opportunity for Howison to pursue philosophy, so he returned to New England to become headmaster at English High School in Boston. In 1872 Howison moved to the new Massachusetts Institute of Technology as its Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science, remaining until 1878, when financial problems forced M.I.T. to eliminate his position. It was during these years that Howison began writing philosophy. He held various teaching positions and lectured for money between 1878 and 1882, including courses at Harvard Divinity School and the Concord School of Philosophy, where he became better acquainted with Emerson and Alcott.

Also during these years he attended every two weeks the informal philosophical meetings in the Temple Street rooms of Thomas Davidson with a small group that included William James and Bowne. American philosophical pluralism and American personalism began here. These views were differently articulated and defended by James, Bowne, Davidson, and Howison, but their commonalities are many.

Beginning in 1880 Howison traveled and studied in Europe. In 1881 he enrolled at the University of Berlin, studying Kant with Jules Michelet which moderated Howison's enthusiasm for Hegel and planted a predilection for Kantian thinking in Howison's mind which remained for the rest of his life.

Howison returned to the US in 1882, and hoped to teach at Harvard while James was on sabbatical, but Royce, being younger and very promising, was given preference. Howison taught privately for a year and although he did not want to leave Boston, he accepted a position at the University of Michigan, which turned out to be not to his liking. At this time, the University of California decided to begin a philosophy program and recruited Howison, now 50 and a prominent voice in academia, as the Mills Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity, and they invited Howison to create a philosophy program according to his own vision. Howison's extensive administrative experience along with his connections to the eastern and mid-western intellectual lights led to great success. Howison was also an inspiring teacher and so the program attracted students easily. Howison's Philosophical Union became a prominent host for public lectures and even debates, hosting such speakers as James, Royce, and John Dewey.

Howison became a popular and controversial speaker and became the progenitor of the California school of American personalism. His heterodox teachings about the nature of God placed him at odds with the theological community, but his incisive ability to defend it against all challenges and his personal charity and moral excellence kept him safe from serious personal attacks. Despite Howison’s dissatisfaction with other contemporary and historical metaphysicians, he did continue to profess Christianity. He recognized that his support of Jesus’ position was not accepted as he might have hoped by his Christian peers, but maintained that his theory of personal idealism was in line with Jesus’ teaching, particularly as presented by “the 4th gospeler”, John. He said: “I feel the strongest assurance that my new interpretation of the name of God is the genuine fulfilment of the highest and profoundest prescience in the historic religious life.”

Personal Idealism

While he was well known and widely respected in the young professional discipline of philosophy, Howison did not publish prolifically. Most of those who have written on Howsion attribute his reluctance to publish to his perfectionism regarding language and writing. He was exacting, as is indicated by his revision of a widely used dictionary of English synonyms (1892).

Howison, having thoroughly considered the various offerings from the history of his field (see p. 394 of "Limits", for example), arrived at what remains even today a unique offering. He developed his theory in the late 1880s, in consideration of another theory that was the rage of the times, Darwin’s theory of evolution. Considering evolution in the light of the fatalistic-deterministic materialism which had come to dominate the scientific mindset from the times of Newton, in 1901 he published his magnum opus, “The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Idealism” (2nd edition 1905), wherein he supported, amongst much else, these two positions:

1) “Strive as one may, there is no escape from Kant’s implication that not even evolution* can produce time in our consciousness.” (p. 20) Certain knowledge/capacity must be a priori. "He [Kant] suggested that experience may be not at all simple, but always complex, so that the very possibility of the experience which seems to the empiricist the absolute foundation of knowledge may depend on the presence in it of a factor that will have to be acknowledged as a priori." (p. 17)

2) “Issuing from the noumenal being of mind, evolution has its field only in the world of the mind’s experiences, - ‘inner’ and ‘outer,’ physical and psychic; or, to speak summarily, only in the world of phenomena. But there, it is indeed universal and strictly necessary." (p. 41)

Furthermore, attesting to the grand scope intended by the philosophy of “personal idealism":

In the light of the foregoing analysis, a thorough philosophy would now move securely forward to the conclusion that the Continuous Copula required in evolution, the secret Active Nexus without which it would be inconceivable, is at nearest inference the spiritual nature or organic personality of man himself. Whether there is not also involved a profounder, an absolute Impersonation of that nature, to be called God, is a further distinct question... (p. 41)

The Limits of Evolution

Howison’s magnum opus took its title from the first essay, “The Limits of Evolution,” but six more essays fill out his theory, “Modern Science and Pantheism,” “Later German Philosophy”, “The Art-principle as Represented in Poetry,” “The Right Relation of Reason to Religion,” “Human Immortality: Its Positive Argument,” and “The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom.” The 1905 second edition (minimally changed) contains a second preface, and a set of 5 appendices.

In the important title essay, Howison did not deny that evolutionary theory properly explains certain kinds of developments in biological life. Rather he registered an objection to those who attempt to make the idea of evolution explain things either beyond its genuine reach, or in a way that neglected the demands/limits of idealistic reason, as Herbert Spencer and even Charles Darwin himself eventually did, in extending the idea of (materialistic) evolution to social and moral development. Howison stakes out a position that many still hold to be the proper scientific limits in evolutionary theory, although Howison is rarely credited for having explained it so early and so clearly. Howison argues that there are certain "breaks" which evolution cannot cross without recourse to the noumenal realm of "Pure Reason". Evolution is an idea that not only demands the experience of self-active, ideal persons and the structures of that experience, but is itself "strictly necessary" following from the proof of noumenal based "ideality". Howison goes on to show that the idea of evolution, without the help of noumenal principles, cannot bridge the gaps between the inorganic and the organic, physiological and logical genesis, nor "the gap profound" between the unknowable and the explanatory. Howison supplies the needed non-empirical principles, arguing especially against Spencer and his followers.

To be sure, Howison envisioned the materialists' "the world” as but the (personal) phenomenal aspect of an harmonious pluralism of such “supernatural”, or ideal, persons, who, thus genuine and complex, ultimately constitute his (personal) "the world" of creative "beings really free" (p. 351). At p. 47 he states,

“Thus creatively to think and be [editorial emphasis] a world is what it means to be a man. To think and enact such a world merely in the unity framed for it by natural causation, is what it means to be a ‘natural’ man; to think and enact it in its higher unity, its unity framed by supernatural causation of Pure Ideals, supremely by the Moral Ideal, is what it means to be a ‘spiritual’ man, a moral and religious man; or, in the philosophical and true sense of the words, a supernatural being – a being transcending and yet including Nature, not excluding or annulling it.”

For more detail on what Howison means by such ideality, consider his presentation of “Final causation”. For example, at p. 38,

“This, the mind’s consciousness of its own form of being as self-conscious, - that is, spontaneously conscious and spontaneously or originally real, - is the ultimate and authentic meaning of causality. In the cause as self-conscious Ideal, the consciousness of its own thinking nature as the ‘measure of all things,’ – as ‘source, motive, path, original, and end,’ – we at length come to causation in the strictest sense, Kant’s Causality with freedom. It might happily be called, in contrast to natural causation, supernatural* causation; or, in contradistinction from physical, metaphysical causation. The causality of self-consciousness – the causality that creates and incessantly re-creates in the light of its own Idea, and by the attraction of it as an ideal originating in the self consciousness purely – is the only complete causality, because it is the only form of being that is unqualifiedly free.”

Also, at p. 325, "If men are free, then, they must be taken as being logically prior to Nature; as being its source rather than its outcome; as determining its order instead of being determined by this."

And, at p. 307:

"For the ultimate and real meaning of the argument is, that a soul or mind or person, purely as such, is itself the fountain of its percipient experience, and so possesses what has been happily named 'life in itself.' Proof of the presence in us of a priori or spontaneous cognition, then, is proof of just this self-causative life. A world of such individual minds is by the final implications of this proof the world of primary causes, and every member of it, secure above the vicissitudes of Time and Space and Force, is possessed of a supertemporal or eternal reality, and is therefore not liable to any lethal influence from any other source. Itself a primary cause, it can neither destroy another primary cause nor be destroyed by any. The objector who would open the eternal permanence of the soul to doubt, then, must assail the proofs of a priori knowledge; for so long as these remain free from suspicion, there can be no real question as to what they finally imply."

The Art Principle in Poetry, IV

At p. 201:

"This brings us to a final removal of the mistake made in saying that the principle of art's being its own end implies indifference to truth and good. The principle does not mean that the contents of a work of art — of a poem, for instance — are not necessarily true and moral; much less does it mean that the contents, if the artist choose, may violate truth and morality. Such a meaning would contradict the nature of art, as we have now seen it. The meaning is, that while truth and good, in all their various gradations from the lowest to the highest, form the essential contents of art, its character as art—as distinguished, that is, from science and religion — turns upon its form, and that its whole business, in dealing with whatever contents compatible with its nature, is to put them into its own form, instead of the form proper to religion or to science; to put them into this form upon the form's own merits, and not merely as if the form were subsidiary to the form of science or of religion. The proper form of science is explanation and argument,

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and the proper form of religion and morality is exhortation and command; but that of art is simply the directest embodiment of its theme as the theme itself requires. Assured that the theme is compatible with the ideal nature of art, the artist knows that it will justify itself and work its own work, if it can only find expression in its natural embodiment."

Right Relation of Reason to Religion

at p. 224:

"It is this New Doctrine, known generally, and properly enough, as the doctrine of Rationalism, that I am permitted by the courtesy of this Congress1 briefly to explain and defend. To the question, What is the right relation between reason and religion, you will now understand me to answer, It is that reason should be the source of which religion is the issue; that reason, when most itself, will unquestionably be religious, but that religion must for just that cause be entirely rational; that reason is the final authority from which religion must derive its warrant, and with which its contents must comply; that all religious doctrines and instrumentalities, all religious practices, all religious institutions, and all records of religion, whether in tradition or in scripture, must alike submit their claims at the bar of general human reason, and that only those approved in that tribunal can be regarded as of weight or of obligation; in short, that the only real basis of religion is our human reason, the only seat of its authority our genuine human nature, the only sufficient witness of God the human soul. Reason, I shall endeavour to show, is not confined to the mastery of the sense-world and the goods of this world only, but does cover all the range of being, and found and rule the world eternal; it is not merely natural, it is also spiritual; it is itself, when come to itself, the true divine revelation."

Royce's "The Conception of God"

In 1897 Josiah Royce gave a talk which, along with the arguments of Sidney Edward Mezes, Joseph LeConte, and Howison (presaging his later definitive opus), and the follow-up replies by Royce Himself, was published in the book entitled “The Conception of God: A philosophical discussion concerning the nature of the divine idea as a demonstrable reality” (edited by Howison). Howison’s section, entitled “The City of God, and the True God as its Head”, spans pages 79–132.

Howison characterized Royce’s conception of the “Absolute” as (merely) reflective of Royce’s own philosophically unfulfilled conception of self-unity, falling short of the necessity and sufficiency of genuinely inter-personal Morality, ’Conscience’. At p. 90:

In other words, the conception is a philosophical and real account of the nature of an isolated human being, or created spirit, the numerical unit in the created universe, viewed as such a spirit appears in what has well been called its natural aspect; viewed, that is, as the organising subject of a natural-scientific experience, marked by fragmentariness that is forever being tentatively overcome and enwholed, — if I may coin a word to match the excellent German one ergänzt.”

For his part, Royce, at p. 327:

For obvious reasons, the foregoing discussion has been planned with constant reference to the criticisms of Professor Howison, contained in his contribution to the original discussion before the Philosophical Union. My difference with Professor Howison appears the most fundamental amongst those developed during that discussion; and yet, despite the plainness of speech in some of the foregoing incidental replies, I have everywhere borne in mind the hope of reconciliation expressed at the outset of this supplementary paper. Nor have I desired to make my criticisms merely destructive. Professor Howison appears, at the outset of his argument, as one who deliberately adopts idealistic principles. If, as I have said, his actual doctrine takes rather the form of an Ethical Realism, that is because, to his mind, the ethical relationships amongst individuals, while existing solely for the sake of the individual minds themselves, appear to him, as he expresses himself, to be irreducible to the contents in any one mind, or to any other element definable in terms of any single unity of consciousness.

Where Howison had said, regarding Royce’s argument for a (non-plural, non-reciprocal) Absolute, p. 106:

…I say, we evade reading the result of this strange but striking dialectic as Solipsism, and, reading it from the reverse direction, we are fain to call it Cosmic Theism, under the silent assumption that its real contents are thus enlarged so that its embrace enfolds a universe of minds, or persons. And yet these so-called persons are rightly designated as only finite selves, mutually relative and phenomenal merely, since the reality of the unifying Organic Experience, as reached by the argument, requires that it shall be strictly one and indivisible, and that the supposed manifold of finite selves shall none of them have any real and changeless Self but this. One single Infinite Self, the identical and sole active centre of all these quasi-selves, which are severally made up of specific groups of experiences more or less fragmentary, as the case may be, none of them with any inner organic unity of its own, — this is the theory; and even for this hollow shell of a personal and moral order we have no logical warrant, but have silently carried it in, over our argument, on the hint of moral sense that of course there are manifold centres — or, at any rate, manifold groups — of experience besides our own.

And, at p. 111:

It is not to the force or validity of the argument that I object, but to the misinterpretation of its scope. It is a clinching dialectical thumbscrew for the torture of agnostics; yes, with reference to them and their very lawful stadium of thinking, it is even a step of value in the struggle of the soul toward a conviction of its really infinite powers and prospects; but I cannot see in it any full proof of the real being of God. Strictly construed, it is, as I have just endeavoured to show, simply the vindication of that active sovereign judgment which is the light of every mind, which organises even the most elementary perceptions, and which goes on in its ceaseless critical work of reorganisation after reorganisation, building all the successive stages of science, and finally mastering those ultimate implications of science that constitute the insights of philosophy.

See also: the footnotes, particularly 1&2 at p. 43, and section I of Appendix B, p. 395, of “Limits”.

Human Immortality: Its Positive Argument

at p. 297, Limits:

Our real experiences, day by day and moment by moment, are so intrinsically organised and definite, it does not at first occur to us that the principles which organise and define them, rendering them intelligible, and consciously apprehensible, are and must be the spontaneous products of the mind's own action. We do not at first see, as careful reflection later brings us to see, with Kant, that the mental elements without which the apprehensible presence of the items of experience would be inconceivable and inexistent cannot possibly be derived from these, and thence applied to the mind. But this later penetrating reflection convinces us that what our experienced objects must have in order to be objects — to be perceived at all — must be brought by the mind itself to the very act of experience. What must be presupposed, if the objects are to be perceived at all, can by no conceivable means be explained as first coming to the mind from the objects, and must therefore, as the only alternative, be acknowledged to be contributions from the mind's pure self-activity.

But when we have reached this conclusive conviction that the roots of our experience and our experimental knowledge are parts of our own spontaneous life, we then readily come to see, further, that the system of our several elements of consciousness a priori is precisely what we must really understand by our unifying or enwholing self, — is exactly what we try to express when we say we have a soul, and that this soul possesses real knowledge; that is, a hold upon eternal things. The realm of the eternal, in short, then becomes for us just the realm of our self-active intelligence; and this it is which, if we can show its reality in detail, will prove to be the clue to our immortal being. So the critical question is, How can the real existence of such a priori consciousness, such genuinely self-active intelligence, be conclusively made out? I have already in a few sentences indicated the general line of this proof, as we inherit it from Kant; but there is now required some fuller account of it, made intelligible and convincing by clear particulars.

The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom

at p. 324 and p. 374, respectively:

Our result thus far is, that determinism and freedom, when justly thought out, are in idea entirely reconcilable. Determinism proves to need no fatalistic meaning, but to be, possibly enough, simply the definite order characteristic of intelligence; while so far from freedom's being indeterminism, chance, or caprice, these are seen to be incompatible with it, and freedom proves to be, like determinism, the spontaneous definiteness of active intelligence. And one thing, of the highest importance, we must not overlook—our discovery that no free being can be the product of processes in Nature, that on the other hand none can exert freedom in an unpredestined natural world, and that consequently every free being in relation with such a world must himself predestine it, must impart arrangement (or "form") to it from the form of his own active intelligence. In fine, a condition of our making freedom possible in a world ordered by the rigour of natural law is that we accept an idealistic philosophy of Nature: the laws of Nature must issue from the free actor himself, and upon a world consisting of states in his own consciousness, a world in so far of his own making.

Freedom and determinism are only the obverse and the reverse of the two-faced fact of rational self-activity. Freedom is the thought-action of the self, defining its specific identity, and determinism means nothing but the definite character which the rational nature of the action involves.

and at p. 326 and p. 350, respectively:

This exaltation of man over the entire natural world, however, though easily shown to accord with the teaching of Jesus, and to be clearly prefigured in it, is nearly antipodal to ordinary notions, to the current popular "philosophy" assumed to be founded on science, and to much of traditional theology. But by this fact we must not be disturbed, if we mean to be in earnest about human freedom and human capability of life really moral and religious. And the next step in our inquiry will reinforce this "divinising of the human" very decidedly.

I am to show you all this by the light of Final Cause, which is to take the place of the less rational category of Efficient Causation, since—let it be repeated — this last cannot operate to sustain moral relationship, and since moral values, measured in real freedom, are for the conscience and the new theology the measure of all reality.

then, at p. 327:

Solution of this knot by any other conceptions of freedom and determinism than these, there plainly can be none. But the solution is secure if God and other spirits are alike rational, simply by their inner and self-active nature; in other words, if the solution is by spontaneous harmony from within, and not by productive and executive domination from without. If the Sovereign is perfectly rational, if the whole of his being is just perfect intelligence, and if the free subjects are also essentially rational, while this rationality defines the course of their being as a whole, then the perfect definiteness of his realm and the freedom of its members — his perfect possession of it by complete knowledge, and their complete possession of their own lives, rationally self-determined — will in the whole coincide, and the harmony is complete.

Research resources

• Guide to the George Holmes Howison Papers at The Bancroft Library

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers
• "all knowledge is personal", Michael Polanyi