Baker Brownell
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Brownell, Baker (12 December 1887 - 5 April 1965) was an American philosopher.
Brownell was born in St. Charles, Illinois, the fifth of six children of Eugene A. and Esther Burr Baker Brownell. The future American philosopher grew up in St. Charles, Illinois, where he graduated from St. Charles High School.
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[edit] Education
Brownell attended five universities - the University of Washington (1906-1907); Northwestern University (1907-1909); Harvard University (1909-1913); Tuebingen University (1912-1913), and Cambridge University, England (1913).
While at Harvard Brownell took classes with Josiah Royce and George Santayana, and met William James, who had already retired from Harvard.
Brownell received a B.A. in philosophy from Northwestern in 1910, after completing his last year of undergraduate work at Harvard. He received an M.A. in philosophy from Harvard in 1911. In 1912-1913 as a recipient of the James Walker Traveling Fellow in Philosophy (awarded by Harvard), he attended Tuebingen University in Germany and Cambridge University, where he became acquainted with Bertrand Russell].
Upon his return from Europe in 1913 Brownell worked as a cub reporter for the Chicago Tribune. From 1914-1917 he lived in Emporia, Kansas, where he was an instructor in English at the Kansas State Normal College and edited a journal, Teaching.
[edit] 1910s
During World War I, he served as an enlisted man and officer, first in the United States Army, then the U.S. Navy, and then the National Guard between 1916 and 1926. He served both in the Mexican Border Campaign and World War I. He began writing poetry during this period, which was published in such magazines as Poetry, The Dial, and The New Republic.
In 1916, he married Helena Maxwell, whom he later divorced.
From 1919-1920 Brownell was an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Idaho. Returning to Chicago in 1920, he worked until 1921 as an editorial writer for the Chicago Daily News.
[edit] 1920s
In 1921 Brownell joined the Northwestern University faculty as a lecturer in editorial writing. He taught journalism, contemporary thought, an philosophy, retiring in 1953 and becoming Emeritus Professor of Philosophy.
His second marriage was to Adelaide Howard in 1933, and they had one son, Eugene Howard Brownell, who was born on September 9, 1939.
Brownell’s course in Contemporary Thought, one of the first of its kind in the United States, was intended to help students organize fragments of their educational experience into an intelligible whole. It consisted of weekly lectures by prominent individuals with expertise in natural sciences, biology, psychology, sociology, history, economics, art, religion and philosophy. Brownell believed that the “human community” was breaking down in part because students and others did not understand that life itself was fragmented. By helping students integrate their educational experiences, Brownell believed he was helping to mitigate the demise of the small community. In 1926 Brownell published The New Universe, which enumerated his beliefs, and in 1929 he edited a twelve volume series entitled Man and His World, which included 60 lectures that had been given in his Contemporary Thought course.
[edit] 1930s
During the 1930's Brownell became acquainted with Arthur E. Morgan, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and edited Morgan’s book, The Small Community.
From 1936-1939 he served as an agricultural advisor to the United States Department of Agriculture. As a supervising editor for Harper & Brothers during the 1940's, he edited several books that were designed to integrate various fields of specialized knowledge.
In addition to his long and distinguished connection with Northwestern, Brownell was also a visiting lecturer at other universities including the University of Kansas City, the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin, and the Garrett Biblical Institute.
He traveled extensively. Among his trips were a tour of the Galapagos Islands and an expedition to Cocos Island as the guest of his friend Commander E.F. MacDonald Jr., the Chairman of the Zenith Corporation; a six month sojourn in the interior of Guatemala; a summer in Tahiti; a trip to Isle Royale, Michigan as a member of the Isle Royale Archeological Expedition; and various cruises in the Caribbean.
With Frank Lloyd Wright in 1937, he wrote Architecture and Modern Life, and in 1939 he wrote Art in Action, explaining his views about the humanities.
[edit] 1940s and 1950s
In 1941, he wrote The Philosopher in Chaos, which was an attempt to make head and tail of the modern world.
From 1944 to 1947, Brownell resided in Montana, where he directed a community service project, the Montana Study, which was jointly sponsored by the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation and the University of Montana, though initially financed by the Rockefeller Foundation. The Montana Study entailed a program of teaching and field studies in American culture that emphasized the western region of the United States. Brownell's book, The Human Community, published in 1950, is based upon the Montana Study. Brownell, supported by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and Northwestern University, continued his community service work in others areas until 1951.
Brownell also served as the first director of the Division of Area Services at Southern Illinois University from 1952-1954, and he organized the Department of Community Development at Southern Illinois, which was initiated to help revitalize many communities in southern Illinois. In 1958 Brownell published The Other Illinois, which was based upon his work at Southern Illinois University.
In 1951, asked by Warren Allen Smith as to his views on humanism, he responded:
- Humanism, I imagine, is a philosophy in which values are directional aspects of our behavior. Without going too far into this difficult problem, it can be said that values are characteristic of action and have no meaning apart from actions and their alternatives and problem situations. Values belong to men and men’s behavior. They are not transcendent fixations in an order somehow different from our own, nor is their authority necessarily absolute or supernatural. Thus, humanism first of all is a philosophy in which values are limited, human-centered, dynamic, or directional in action. They are within behavior, not beyond it. But humanism may also involve a notion as to the nature of human life that has important implications. Human life is not merely a succession of events; it is a pattern of events, a form or drama of behavior, with its own kind of unity or completeness. This at least is our working assumption in the activity of living. This configurational aspect of life is the seat of values and the source of our significance. It is organic in form as over against the mechanical; it is an order or priority of actions that comprehends not only the past but the projection or creation of the future. It includes not only the specific action and the proximate events on either side of it that we call the causal antecedent and consequent after the manner of strict science, it includes also a larger, organic configuration that we call the human community. This is known imaginatively, sometimes religiously. The human being so far as he knows purpose or freedom is within the configuration of the community. The community may be described as a group in which men know one another well, or in other words, a group where they are related to one another as whole people not merely as functional fragments. Human values cannot survive except in groups, necessarily small, in which the members are related to one another rather fully, familiarly, face to face. As communities of men tend to be replaced by wide-ranging organizations in which functions become more specialized and men are related to one another more and more narrowly, fragmentally and anonymously, civilization dies, moral responsibility declines, and external authority replaces inner initiative. This in modern times is illustrated by industrial urbanism. It is the enemy of humanism and of human beings. As a philosophy humanism is based on the morals of self-reliance - where self here means the human configuration of community. But humanism is also a philosophy of risk; it has no final norm or standard. It remains to be seen whether men can do without one.
In 1956, he added:
- Humanism to me means primarily a threshold for values. Thus the authority for values in the world, whatever that may involve, is solely in the human situation. It is not absolute, supernatural, or otherwise transcendent to living human beings except as those finalities may be an interpretive or poetic aspect of human life. What the human being himself is I do not fully know. He has great interpretive potentialities, for we can find in him a vast diversity of being, but I am confident that he is within the natural order, not above it. Values are oriented in him not by virtue of a unique status or superiority in the universe that he may have but by virtue of the fact that we who evaluate happen to be human. Our capacity to make evaluations is thus unique in this particular sense, but there is no indication that our values somehow escape the human limit and situation into a realm of outer absolutes. I suppose I fit best in the category of naturalistic humanism. But I am doubtful about categorizing so fluid a notion as humanism. Its fluidity indeed is one of its most significant characteristics. In several ways I probably do not fit in any one of the categories. I think I have been influenced less by specific writers than by the general climate of life which they may have helped to establish or make articulate. In college my teachers Santayana, Royce, and James Houghton Woods, different as they are, influenced me, always on the background of Plato and Meister Eckehart. After college the thrust of scientific ideology, James and especially Dewey, and the movement of human projects and events were most influential. This diversity of sources, if they are the sources, may seem hopelessly aggregative or eclectic. Still there are, as a fact, a great many things in the world, nor is there any certainty that they are all systematized, except perhaps in human behavior.
Brownell retired from academic and administrative work in 1954 but continued writing. He spent the remaining years of his life in Fairhope, Alabama, where he died on April 5, 1965.
[edit] Writings
- The New Universe, 1926
- Enough is Enough: An Essay on Religious Realism, 1933
- Architecture and Modern Life, (with Frank Lloyd Wright,) 1937
- Art is Action, 1939
- The Philosopher in Chaos, 1941
- Life in Montana, 1945
- The Human Community, 1950
- The College and the Community, 1952
- Life in Southern Illinois, (with Jo Ann Eblen) 1953
- The Other Illinois, 1958
