MAX OTTO: UNITARIAN HUMANIST
1876-1968
A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
by G. C. Sellery
Dean Emeritus, College of Letters and Sciences,
University of Wisconsin
Professor
Max Carl Otto was born in the historic town of Zwickau,
Saxony, in 1876, and was brought to America by his immigrant
parents in his fifth year. He went to school, through the
sixth grade, in Wheeling, West Virginia, where his father
kept a restaurant. He studied the Lutheran catechism diligently
under a stern, old-fashioned pastor, and also learned to
concentrate so thoroughly on what he heard in church that
he could repeat the essentials of the sermon to his Lutheran
parents. The resulting development of the power of concentration
has stood him in good stead ever since.
Young Max served as a waiter in the family restaurant until
he was sixteen. Then he went off to Cincinnati and Chicago
on his own. In Chicago he was employed as a messenger for
the R. G. Dun rating agency, and did incidental human salvage
work on Sundays for the Y.M.C.A. This latter avocation led
to a regular quasi-religious post in the Milwaukee Y.M.C.A.,
where he worked with boys. But recognizing the need for
further education if he were to "grasp this sorry scheme
of things," he gave up his job in the Y.M.C.A. and
filled in some of the many gaping holes in his preparation
for college by study in local academies. This accomplished,
he was admitted, somewhat irregularly, to Carroll College,
Waukesha, by President Rankin, who was not averse to stretching
the rules in favor of a young man of obvious ability and
persistence. From Carroll, after a couple of fruitful years,
he moved on to the state university at Madison, where he
majored in history under the great Frederick Jackson Turner,
and secured a distinguished B.A. in 1906, with election
to Phi Beta Kappa. (At Wisconsin also the rules were stretched—or
rather broken—in his favor, for he, whose prose is
so simple and strong, had not taken the required course
in freshman English.)
Otto took up graduate studies in philosophy, and won his
Ph.D. in 1911. The tutorship or direction of the studies
of another young American enabled Mr. Otto to spend a summer
and a semester in Europe, with a term under Windelband at
Heidelberg. He had been appointed assistant in philosophy
at Wisconsin in 1908 and instructor in 1910, and there he
rubbed shoulders and sharpened wits with Boyd H. Bode and
Horace M. Kallen, and other promising fledglings in philosophy,
while beginning his ascent of the academic ladder to a full
professorship in 1921. A year earlier he was married to
Rhoda Owen, a graduate of Wisconsin and a history teacher;
and later on they spent seven productive months of travel
and study in Europe. The family grew to include a son and
a daughter.
Mr. Otto also produced, under his wife’s critical eye,
three books with significant titles: Things and Ideals
(1924), Natural Laws and Human Hopes (1926) and The
Human Enterprise (1940), together with a large sheaf
of periodical articles, public lectures, reviews, and contributions
to other critical volumes. His share in the controversial
Is There a God? (1932), originally a running debate
in The Christian Century with H. N. Wieman and D.
C. Macintosh as his antagonists, reveals with clarity the
antitheistic position he reached, as does his chapter in
Religious Liberals Reply (1947). His address in the
centenary volume, William James: The Man and The Thinker
(1942), naturally discloses much of his own philosophical
position, which is briefly but cogently set forth in his
chapters in Philosophy in American Education (1945),
a report by Brand Blanshard and four other members of the
commission appointed by the American Philosophical Association
to investigate the subject.
Mr. Otto's service as a teacher of philosophy, and as chairman
of the department of philosophy at Wisconsin since 1936,
came to an end in 1947, when he became a professor emeritus.
He has been honored with the presidency of the Western branch
of the American Philosophical Association.
The philosophy which Max Otto developed did not involved
the abstract, deductive systems which ingenious minds have
invented through the ages to explain the universe and man
in whole or in part; it was not the sort of philosophy one
finds in the older histories of the subject. Of course,
he knows these systems, and he has been heard to say that
he would give his right arm—"well, at least a
little finger"—to read the lost treatise of Protagoras
on Truth, for its possible anticipation of pragmatism, of
which he himself is a representative. Pragmatism is, in
fact, essentially an American product—native, democratic,
homespun, redolent of the soil. It grows out of and is rooted
in the common problems and common sense of men and women—refined
common sense, of course, but still common sense, whether
at work in business, agriculture, politics, economics, science,
or religion. The underlying purpose of this philosophy is
the enhancement of human life for all. "Humane, warm,
and in the best sense simple," President Burkhardt
of Bennington said of Max Otto, "his wisdom is pervaded
by a profound sense of dedication to the enrichment of man's
intellectual and spiritual life."
Max
Otto's philosophy was conceived—and born—in Wisconsin.
Of course his native endowment of mind and heart, his experiences
of life, and his struggles for clarity of purpose underlie
the vision he caught at the university. One may also safely
assert that the elder La Follette's program for social betterment
had a part in Max Otto's philosophy, and that it was nurtured,
enriched, and confirmed by the teachings of William James
and John Dewey—especially of John Dewey, his good and
great friend.
Within
the broad reaches of his philosophy, Max Otto, a man of
genuine religious temper, places stress on the need of our
age for a nontheistic faith. The writer ventures to quote
from his own review of The Human Enterprise, written
when that important book was published: "The theistic
foundation of truth, goodness, beauty, and humane feeling
being seriously weakened, it is an urgent requirement of
the times that an alternative foundation be found for those
who do not accept the theistic foundation. This other foundation
the author finds in practical sympathy for the needs of
mankind as they progressively reveal themselves in the working
out of the actual problems which confront humanity."
Max Otto's abandonment of supernaturalism, which he pushed
to its extreme limits in the debate with Wieman and Macintosh,
involved him in serious difficulties almost from the beginning
of his career as a teacher at Wisconsin. For it inevitably
colored what became his great and increasingly popular course,
"Man and Nature," where he takes a frankly naturalistic
view of the universe. The first attack came in 1912, when
clerical critics and their sympathizers in Madison and elsewhere
in the state demanded his elimination from the staff as
an enemy of religion, and, strangely enough, as a violator
of the state constitution, which forbids sectarian religious
instruction in the university. The stamina of the young
instructor was put to a very tough test. It would have been
an easy way out to give up the course; but Max Otto, after
prolonged reflection, declined to do so. His students and
not a few of his colleagues—some of whom hardly knew
him—stood by him, and Van Hise, the great president,
irritated though he was by this additional disturbance,
in effect backed him up in his forthright commencement address
of that year (1912), entitled "The Spirit of a University."
Freedom of thought, Van Hise here declared, inquiry after
truth for its own sake, adjustment of the knowledge of the
past in the light of the newest facts and highest reason—"this
is the essential spirit of a university, which under no
circumstances should it yield."
This spirit, President Van Hise proclaims, "forever
makes a university a center of conflict. If a university
were content to teach simply those things concerning which
there is practical unanimity of opinion . . . there would
be quiet; but it would be the quiet of stagnation."
Max Otto's student following and influence grew steadily
in the following decades, and many liberal theologians gave
him their enduring friendship. Nevertheless, he was exposed
to three more bitter attacks. In the latest and fiercest
of these, that of 1932, he, a professor in politics, was
used as a whipping boy for his friends, the LaFollettes,
and was assailed in press and platform as an exhibit of
the pernicious radicalism—and atheism—they were
said to foster. But again students and colleagues, in increasing
numbers, rallied to his side, and again the president of
the university, now Glenn Frank, defended him—as his
predecessors had done in each of the preceding attacks—and
his opponents were thereafter reduced to occasional and
ineffective sniping. Max Otto had won—the university
had won—a veritable "Twenty Years' War."
Professor Otto's knowledge of scientific method and scientific
achievements is wide and deep. It is conveniently shown
in a pocket-size book entitled Science and the Moral
Life (I949), which consists of selections from his writings.
(It is one of the series called "Mentor Books,"
published by the New American Library.) Mr. Otto was not
blind to some of the perilous fruits of science, notably
the atomic bomb, and he did not exculpate their propagators.
But scientific method, he is certain, must be extended to
the social and, of course, to the religious field, to what
he calls the search for the good life. Scientific method,
he makes clear, is a way of investigation which relies solely
on disciplined empirical observation and rigorously exact
proof, proof that extends beyond inner or personal conviction
to outer or public demonstration.
The search for the good life, to Max Otto, involves not
only economic reconstruction in the interest of the fairest
distribution of earth's bounties to all men, but also political
action to promote this distribution. "Unless enough
Americans," he declared in 1939, "are willing
to invest their idealism in the project of remaking our
social order into a positive means for utilizing our resources
for the common good, it will not be long before there will
be no idealism to invest."
Abridged
from The Cleavage in Our Culture edited by Frederick
Burckhardt
UNITARIAN
HUMANIST WHO FEARED A CREED
Edwin
H. Wilson, a primary author of the first "Humanist
Manifesto" and a lifelong advocate of Unitarian humanism,
desribed Max Otto's refusal to sign the manifesto.
Prior to 1933,
Max Otto (professor of philosophy), Horace M. Kallen,
and V. T. Thayer (a signer of the manifesto) were all
young men on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin
at Madison. V. T. Thayer was an educator and editor who
wrote extensively on church-state separation. At one time,
Max Otto and Horace Kallen roomed with the Thayers. According
to Dr. Thayer, there was an occasion when the three young
men were the lone dissenters on an issue before the campus.
This position would not be unusual for anyone whose thinking
was generally categorized as radical, as was the case
with this group.
Unfortunately, the manifesto editors did not contact Dr.
Kallen in 1933 to seek his signature and advice. However,
because he was continuously important to humanism, I have
included him in this history. When asked in 1973 why he
had not been invited to sign "A Humanist Manifesto"
in 1933, Kallen wrote to me that John Dewey had once asked
him to sign the document. He explained that he had responded
to Dewey by saying that he had had stronger objections
(left unspecified) to signing the 1933 document than "Humanist
Manifesto II" in 1973.
Max Carl Otto, although he declined to sign "A Humanist
Manifesto," never wavered in his humanism and was
the author of a series of important books and reference
material on church-state and educational issues. In response
to the request for his signature on the manifesto, Dr.
Otto replied on April 4, 1933:
I cannot believe that publishing the "Humanist
Manifesto" will in the slightest degree "clarify
the public mind" or "constitute a constructive
work" in any significant sense. It will, on the contrary,
I fear, be one of those theoretical gestures which leave
with some persons a feeling that something has really
been done when all that has been done is that something
has been said. I am of the opinion that Humanism, as I
understand the philosophy of it, cannot be "sold"
to men and women; it must be attained by them, and that
means slow, painstaking work. Much as I regret to say,
No, to your request that I join you in a general announcement
of ideas and aims, I do so with real conviction. Why must
we, too, advertise?
We published
his subsequently amplified comments in the same issue
of The New Humanist in which the manifesto appeared:
Publication of the "Humanist Manifesto" will,
in my opinion, serve no sufficient purpose. I cannot
believe with you that it will clarify the public mind,
or do constructive work for the cause. A set of fifteen
principles, detached from the living experience which
precipitated them and lacking the life and warmth of
the interests they represent, can do little to inform
the mind and nothing to stir the heart. Humanism—if
I understand the philosophy of it—cannot be "sold"
to people. If the "Manifesto" were a rallying
cry issuing with glowing conviction from a group on
the march together, or if it gave promise of gripping
men and women of humanistic leanings, drawing them into
closer, more understanding and more active unity, it
would be a desirable signal. Unfortunately, I see no
such service in it. And experience has taught me to
beware of deceiving myself into thinking something has
really been done when all that has been done is that
something has been said. It would be easier for me to
write, "Sure, go ahead, put me down." If I
take the harder course and do not sign the document
which I know will carry the names of men I greatly admire
and respect, it is because of a deep conviction that
the "Manifesto" will prove to be an ineffectual
gesture, and a tactical error.
It is not surprising
that Otto refused to sign, given his view on humanism.
In his 1949 book, Science and the Moral Law, he
said: "All Humanisms have one thing in common. It
is the ideal of realizing man's completest development.
From here on they diverge."
-Dr. Otto was a lifelong member of
the First Unitarian Society of Madison, Wisconsin
The Cleavage in Our Culture: Studies in Scientific
Humanism in Honor of Max Otto edited by Frederick
Burckhardt (Boston, Beacon Press, 1952).
Science and the Moral Life by Max
Otto (New York: A Mentor Book, The New American Library,
1949).
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