Catalyst for Controversy: Paul Carus of Open Court
Catalyst for Controversy: Paul Carus of Open Court
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争议的催化剂：公开法庭的保罗·卡鲁斯
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发表时间：
1993
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通讯作者：
H. Henderson
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作者：
H. Henderson
“我不是一个普通的无神论者；我是一个热爱上帝的无神论者。” 保罗·卡鲁斯，“科学之神”，1904年 1880年夏天，保罗·卡鲁斯在德累斯顿萨克森皇家立宪民主党军事学院任教时，出版了一本简短的小册子，否认圣经的字面真理，并将《圣经》描述为一部可与《奥德赛》相媲美的伟大文学作品。卡鲁斯在广泛的知识航行中迈出了第一步，他穿越了哲学、科学、宗教、数学、历史、音乐、文学以及社会和政治问题。卡鲁斯后来报告说，皇家军团发现他发表的观点“与基督教精神不符，而立宪民主党人军团的训练和教育应遵循基督教精神”。因此，军团为这位年轻教师提供了选择：“最谦卑地请求宽恕，因为我敢于提出自己的观点并表达出来，甚至可能承诺不再发表有关宗教问题的文章，或者放弃我的职位。我选择了后者……因此，我别无选择，只能移民，并相信自己的力量，为自己建立一个新家。”他的辞职于 1881 年复活节星期日生效。卡鲁斯游览了莱茵河，在比利时短暂居住过，并在英国的一所军事学院任教，以便学好英语，以便“在美国蓬勃发展”。 1884 年底或 1885 年初，他踏上了前往新大陆的旅程。事实证明，在美国的发展比在英国要困难得多，但在 1885 年结束之前，他用英语出版了第一本哲学著作《一元论与向善论》。这本书并没有被广泛阅读，但它确实传到了伊利诺伊州拉萨尔的锌加工商爱德华·C·黑格尔 (Edward C. Hegeler) 手中，他成为了他的岳父以及他的思想和经济支持者。卡鲁斯在拉萨尔成立后，开始了使他跻身美国杰出人物行列的工作。使 Open Court Publishing Company 成为哲学、科学和宗教书籍的领先出版商。他编辑了《开放法庭》和《一元论》，提供了当时在西方可用的东方思想和宗教的最佳观点，并试图建立第二次世界宗教议会，但没有成功。他结识了物理学家兼哲学家恩斯特·马赫。他聘用铃木大拙十一年，铃木大拙后来成为一位伟大的禅宗佛教导师。他在《一元论》中发表的查尔斯·S·皮尔士（现在被视为世界上最伟大的哲学家之一）的文章比任何其他出版物都多。传记作家哈罗德·亨德森总结了他对这位杰出人物的研究：“每当有人被一个想法所激发而迫不及待地想把它写下来时，保罗·卡鲁斯的精神就如他所希望的那样活跃在世界上。”
"I am not a common atheist; I am an atheist who loves God."Paul Carus, "The God of Science," 1904In the summer of 1880, while teaching at the military academy of the Royal Corps of Cadets of Saxony in Dresden, Paul Carus published a brief pamphlet denying the literal truth of scripture and describing the Bible as a great literary work comparable to the "Odyssey."This unremarkable document was Carus s first step in a wide-ranging intellectual voyage in which he traversed philosophy, science, religion, mathematics, history, music, literature, and social and political issues. The Royal Corps, Carus later reported, found his published views "not in harmony with the Christian spirit, in accordance with which the training and education of the Corps of Cadets should be conducted." And so the corps offered the young teacher the choice of asking "most humbly for forgiveness for daring to have an opinion of my own and to express it, perhaps even promise to publish nothing more on religious matters, or to give up my post. I chose the latter. . . . There was thus no other choice for me but to emigrate and, trusting in my own powers, to establish for myself a new home." His resignation was effective on Easter Sunday, 1881.Carus toured the Rhine, lived briefly in Belgium, and taught in a military college in England to learn English well enough to "thrive in the United States." By late 1884 or early 1885 he was on his way to the New World. Thriving in the United States proved more difficult than it had in England, but before 1885 ended he had published his first philosophical work in English, "Monism and Meliorism. "The book was not widely read, but it did reach Edward C. Hegeler, a La Salle, Illinois, zinc processor who became his father-in-law as well as his ideological and financial backer.Established in La Salle, Carus began the work that would place him among the prominent American philosophers of his day and make the Open Court Publishing Company a leading publisher of philosophical, scientific, and religious books. He edited "The Open Court" and "The Monist, "offering the finest view of Oriental thought and religion then available in the West, and sought unsuccessfully to bring about a second World Parliament of Religions. He befriended physicist-philosopher Ernst Mach. For eleven years he employed D. T. Suzuki, who later became a great Zen Buddhist teacher. He published more articles by Charles S. Peirce, now viewed as one of the great world philosophers, in "The Monist "than appeared in any other publication.Biographer Harold Henderson concludes his study of this remarkable man: "Whenever anyone is so fired with an idea that he or she can t wait to write it down, there the spirit of Paul Carus remains, as he would have wished, active in the world.""