Irving Babbitt's "New Humanism" and Its Potential Value to Humanistic Psychology.

Abstract

The New Humanism is a cultural and intellectual call to renewal of American culture and academy that is based on classical Eastern and Western sources. This article provides a biographical sketch of Irving Babbitt, the movement's founder, and an introduction to the major ideas behind it. Particular attention is paid to Babbitt's unique anthropology and methodology. It is argued that an acquaintance with the New Humanism, as well as its similarities and differences with humanistic psychology, can be particularly valuable for psychologists working in the humanistic tradition.Between 1900 and 1940, Irving Babbitt and a number of his colleagues in the United States formulated and advanced what they called the "New Humanism," a movement of cultural and intellectual renewal based on Eastern and Western literary-philosophical sources. They hoped that their New Humanism would protect and resuscitate the dignity of being human from various forms of naturalism that threatened to redefine human nature in exclusively physical and biological terms. This article explores the basic elements of Babbitt's New Humanism and its critique of western culture and academy, as well as its similarities, differences, and potential value to humanistic psychology. BACKGROUNDIrving Babbitt was born on August 2, 1865 in Dayton, Ohio to Edwin Dwight Babbitt and Augusta Babbitt. His parents formed an unlikely match. His mother and

Reclaiming Humanistic Psychology From Modernity: Problems and Solutions

“…The distinctly human gradually becomes all-that-is-not-nature (e.g., Rousseau, 1755Rousseau, /1994. I have argued in a previous work how damaging this false Rousseauvian dichotomy between freedom and nature has been for humanistic psychology and so will not repeat all the points here (Dillon, 2006). Suffice it so say that within such a freedom-versus-nature context, self-realization is seen to be achieved not by the cultivation of distinctively human nature, but either by pure choice and selffashioning or by various types of "construction" (e.g., linguistic, social).…”