Background
Edgar Sheffield Brightman was born on September 20, 1884 in Holbrook, Massachussets, the son of George Edgar Brightman, a Methodist minister, and Mary Charlotte Sheffield.
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This book is the fruit of the 1945 Fondren Lectures of the Southern Methodist University. It is an attempt to help the reader to understand some of the issues in this great struggle, and to see the grounds for a thoroughgoing personalism. The problem of nature and values has been translated by events into that of atomic bombs and personal responsibility.
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Contributing Authors Elmer A. Leslie, Francis J. McConnell, Carroll DeWitt Hildebrand, And Many Others.
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Edgar Sheffield Brightman was born on September 20, 1884 in Holbrook, Massachussets, the son of George Edgar Brightman, a Methodist minister, and Mary Charlotte Sheffield.
Brightman's vigorous moral, regligious, and intellectual life took root in his father's parsonage and blossomed at Brown University, from which he received the B. A. degree in 1906 and the M. A. degree in 1908, studying with the philosophers Alexander Meiklejohn and W. G. Everett.
In 1908 Brightman began his theological studies at Boston University School of Theology, where he came under the influence of Borden Parker Bowne, the founder of personalism--the world view that Brightman explored, expanded, and reinforced as a distinctive perspective both in the United States and elsewhere.
Receiving the S. T. B. degree in 1910, Brightman pursued his studies (1910 - 1911) at the universities of Berlin and Marburg (under Adolf von Harnack and P. G. Natorp, among others); he completed his doctoral studies at Boston University in 1912.
In 1925 Edgar Brightman became first incumbent of the Borden Parker Bowne chair of philosophy in Boston University. Between 1925 and 1953 Brightman expounded his views in fourteen books and more than 200 articles and 300 book reviews dealing with metaphysics, religion, ethics, and education. He was secretary of the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy (1927), secretary to the American Theological Society (1934), president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association (1936), president of the National Association of Biblical Instructors (1941 - 1943), and a member of a number of other professional societies.
At the time of his death, in Newton, Massachussets, Brightman was engaged in writing the systematic account of his personalistic idealism that was posthumously published as Person and Reality.
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Although his first book was The Sources of the Hexateuch (1918) and although he was always a strong Methodist churchman, he was ecumenical in outlook and his approach to religious issues was philosophical.
In his involvement with the Methodist Church in America, Brightman joined the Methodist Federation for Social Action. He also supported conscientious objectors in war, was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and also the Committee on Peace through Justice.
Brightman followed in the footsteps of Bowne, but his own influence was more far-reaching than Bowne's because of his sympathy with a wider variety of historical and contemporary philosophies. His highly self-disciplined teaching, scholarship, and civic life inspired a number of his students, including Martin Luther King.
He was, moreover, relentless in his concern that his pupils be capable of responsible and independent philosophizing.
Brightman was attracted to Bowne's personalistic idealism and theism because Bowne had unified the ideas of Josiah Royce and William James--Brightman's earlier influences--by stating that philosophical formulations must first and foremost be reasonable interpretations of what is directly given to, and within, human experience.
In particular, moral and religious experience must not be entirely subordinated to either empiricism or logic, since all immediate experiences, sensory or nonsensory, must be related to each other in personal experience. In short, reason must, without breaking the laws of logic, be employed in integrating all forms of experience into a meaningful whole. Brightman was actually more thoroughgoing than Bowne in requiring that no dimension of experience dictated the meaning of any other, for Bowne, in the end, depended on the "catholic [religious] sentiments of the race" to solve as thorny a question as the problem of evil. And although he agreed with his teacher that the person is the key to Reality and that Reality cannot be understood as nonmental and purposeless, he revised the theistic idealism he had learned so that it would be more consistently and thoroughly experimental.
In Religious Values (1925), Brightman stated his own notion of the religious and moral experience of values, in contrast to the more revelational theism of his personalistic colleagues. For Brightman the person was an irreducible, complex unity of active consciousness, self-identifying, rather than unchangingly identical. The Cosmic Person, then, if he is indeed immanent in a changing world, cannot be unchanging. Both finite and cosmic Person are unified but "temporal, " so that God is omnitemporal, rather than eternally unchanging in every respect. Furthermore--and here he met considerable resistance among classical theists and personalistic idealists--Brightman concluded that God cannot be considered both omnipotent and omnibenevolent in light of the suffering evident in the evolution of both species and person.
In order to explain such nondisciplinary evil, Brightman hypothesized, in The Problem of God (1930), that the creator-Person must contend with a recalcitrant, nonrational Given within his own nature that limits the full realization of his will-to-good. This nonrational Given has not kept God from creating and sustaining the orderly world in which free persons may search for personal and social fulfillment. Brightman developed this conception of the highest good for responsible men in a system of ethical principles which he set out in Moral Laws (1933).
Brightman's view of the person-God cannot be understood apart from his idealistic conception of the natural world in its relation to God. As a personalistic idealist, he held that there are no beings or events that are not aspects of the human and cosmic personal mind in interaction. Brightman's personalistic, idealistic theism, unlike traditional theism, finds the notion of nonmental being unconfirmed in actual experience; in any case, Brightman considered the relation of a nonmental realm of beings to a mental Being unnecessarily opaque since at best nonmental beings are hypothetical entities postulated to explain what persons experience in consciousness. In Nature and Value (1945), Brightman attempted to show that the naturalism of his day could not yield an adequately reasoned account of man's experience of value. He also challenged the assumption that if the realm of Nature is held to be mental, the order of Nature will not be stable and predictable; finite minds, he pointed out, are stable as well as changing, and they are notable for their purposeful intelligence.
A cosmic Person's will would therefore be all the more orderly in its controlled manifestation in Nature. Accordingly, Brightman suggested that since men actually never experience purely nonmental order, there is no need of a "physical order" as a guarantee for stability. The whole realm of "physical" Nature may reasonably be conceived of as the energizing of a cosmic (beneficent) Will, whose purposes govern the ultimate order and variety of creation. Science requires a uniform--rather than a nonmental--realm, and this is best understood as the dynamic activity of a cosmic Mind who purposes, among other ends, the kind of order that persons actually discover in practical, theoretical, moral, and religious ventures.
There is, moreover, no one-to-one correspondence between what human beings know as Nature and the Nature that is the cosmic Person's energizing. Thus, all beings in space and time, including human bodies, are, in Brightman's view, not real exactly as men see them, but neither are they purely human products. They are joint products of the interaction of the finite and the cosmic Mind in that dimension of their being that constitutes the phenomenal world.
The "world of Nature" therefore represents the reasoned organization of sensory experience and its refractory order as imposed by the cosmic Mind; the orderly world is the human formulation of the cosmic Person's energizing as it interacts with men. And since the "natural" world is at the same time the persistent ground of, and challenge to, man's theoretical and moral effort and growth it may reasonably be considered as the working of a cosmic Person whose will is guided by goodness. When the theoretical and the moral efforts and achievements of persons are seen in coordination with their religious experience, the same cosmic Person who is the ground of orderly Nature and the ultimate source of goodness can also be seen as the ultimate inspiration of human and divine community. The Person is still worthy of worship, although he is not the "perfect God" of traditional or absolutistic theism--that is, unchanging and complete in every respect.
He is affected in the quality of his being by the changes in Nature for which he is responsible; his joy in creativity and goodness is mixed with the tragedy resulting from unwanted and unpurposed evils in evolution and from the abuse of the freedom and creativity delegated to free persons, his cocreators, as part of the total evolutionary advance.
While at Brown, Brightman was a member of the Kappa Sigma Fraternity.
On July 1, 1912, Brightman married Charlotte Hulsen; they had a son. She died three years later, in May 1915, and on June 8, 1918, he married Irma Baker Fall; they had two children.