Background

Paul Carus was born on July 18, 1852, in Ilsenburg, Germany. He is the son of Gustav and Laura (Krueger) Carus.

Education

Paul Carus was educated at Gymnasium at Stettin, then studied philosophy, classical philology, and natural science at the University of Strassburg, at the University of Greifswald and graduated from the University of Tübingen with a Doctor of Philosophy in 1876.

Career

After receiving a doctorate at Tübingen in 1876 and completing military service, Paul Carus next was an instructor at the military academy in Dresden, but he was forced to leave because of religious views he had expressed in pamphlets.

Carus went to England for a while and eventually moved to New York, where he published "Monism and Meliorism" in 1885. This book aroused the interest of Edward Carl Hegeler, a German chemist in La Salle, Illinois. He had founded a periodical called "The Open Court" in 1887 and invited Carus to become its editor.

In 1888 another and more technical journal, to be devoted to the philosophy of science, "Monist," was founded and Carus became the editor of this as well.

Paul Carus also published philosophical and scientific classics, including Ernst Mach’s "Science of Mechanics," that are still widely used. In 1888 he married Hegeler’s daughter Mary, who assisted him in editing the two journals and, after Paul's death, continued to edit them until her death in 1936. Their daughter continued to operate the "Open Court Publishing Company," which published the Carus lectures, given by distinguished philosophers at meetings of the American Philosophical Association. The Carus family operated the "Open Court Publishing Company" until 1996. Carus was also the leader of the United States group of the "Mahabodhi Society."

Achievements

• Paul Carus has been listed as a notable editor, author by Marquis Who's Who.
  
  Carus attended the World’s Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893, where he befriended a number of the Buddhist delegates including Shaku Soyen, abbot of Engakuji monastery in Kamakura.
  
  Carus' contribution to the acceptance of Buddhism in America was considerable: not only did he vigorously argue the Buddhist case in print, but he was a major influence on the intellectual development and career of that pioneer of Zen Buddhism in the West, D. T. Suzuki.
  
  Paul Carus is the author and contributor to more than 70 books and around 1500 articles.

Works

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  • The Surd of Metaphysics

    (The subject discussed in this book is one of the most imp...)

    1903
  • Nietzsche and Other Exponents of Individualism

    (The American philosopher and theologian Paul Carus wrote ...)

    1914
  • The History of the Devil

    (A pioneer in the promotion of interfaith dialogue, Paul C...)

    1900
  • God: An Enquiry Into the Nature of Man's Highest Ideal and a Solution of the Problem from the Standpoint of Science

    (Carus called himself "an atheist who loved God," and here...)

    1908
  • The Foundations of Mathematics

    (In this brief treatise, Carus traces the roots of his bel...)

    1908
  • The Gospel of Buddha

    (This work soon became a worldwide bestseller, completely ...)

    1894
  • The Philosopher's Martyrdom: A Satire

    (Excerpt from The Philosopher's Martyrdom: A Satire Hedoni...)

    1908
  • Kant's Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics

    (Immanuel Kant - Author, Paul Carus - Translator.)

    1902
  • The Open Court, 1877-88

    (It seems that there are such principles. And one of the f...)

    1887
  • The Ethical Probleme

    (Republished in 2005.)

    1899
  • The Rise of Man: A Sketch of the Origin of the Human Race

    (Republished in 2004.)

    1907
  • Monism and Meliorism, a Philosophical Essay on Causality and Ethics 1885
  • Fundamental Problems: The Method of Philosophy as a Systematic Arrangement of Knowledge 1889
  • The Soul Of Man: An Investigation Of The Facts Of Physiological And Experimental Psychology 1891
  • Homilies of Science 1892
  • The Religion of Science 1893
  • Truth In Fiction: Twelve Tales With A Moral 1893
  • The Philosophy Of The Tool 1893
  • Buddhism and its Christian Critics 1894
  • Primer of Philosophy 1896
  • Eros and Psyche: a fairy-tale of ancient Greece, retold after Apuleius 1900
  • Whence and Whither 1903
  • The Nature Of The State 1904
  • Kant and Spencer: A Study of the Fallacies of Agnosticism 1904
  • Karma: A Story of Buddhist Ethics 1903
  • The Story of Samson and its Place in the Religious Development of Mankind 1907
  • The Bride of Christ: A Study in Christian Legend Lore 1908
  • Godward: A Record of Religious Progress 1908
  • The Pleroma 1909
  • Philosophy as a Science: A Synopsis of the Writings of Paul Carus 1909
  • The Philosophy of Form 1911
  • Truth on Trial 1911
  • The Mechanistic Principle and the Non-Mechanical: An Inquiry Into Fundamentals, With Extracts from Representatives of Either Side 1913
  • The Principle of Relativity in the Light of the Philosophy of Science 1913
  • Goethe: With Special Consideration of His Philosophy 1915

Religion

Carus wasn't a Buddhist but he was convinced that Buddhism was the religious tradition closest in spirit to his own philosophy.

Politics

Carus’s slip into obscurity was hastened as world events prompted him to enunciate his political philosophy, the details of which came as a shock to many of his admirers. The First World War brought out his nationalist and racist tendencies, and he alienated many of his most faithful readers with his staunch denunciations of the English and his supremacy of the German race. In fact, Carus’s outspoken support of Germany brought him more than simply bad press - the Bureau of Investigation (forerunner of the FBI) engaged in a protracted undercover investigation of Carus. In the end, the investigation revealed nothing more than the obvious fact that he held unpopular views.

Views

Carus' mission in all his writing was to conciliate science and religion. Between 1890 and 1900 he elaborated a philosophy that he sometimes called “monism” and at other times “religion of science” He was convinced that science provided the key to all human problems. Religion was in a state of change, in which it would overcome its superstitions and find a solid foundation in the scientific Weltanschauung.

The key tool for constructing this “religion of science” was provided by the German mathematician Hermann Grassmann, who developed vector analysis. He had created a general science of pure forms that, unlike the empirical sciences, was not limited by the three-dimensional spatial world. His vector geometry could be expanded to unlimited dimensions. Carus’s account of the nature of the world and our knowledge of it is a generalization of this method of geometry. There are forms in the world that belong to everything. The form is the quality not only of mind but of all reality. There is a one-to-one correspondence between knowledge and the external world because all elements of objective reality are inseparably united with the corresponding elements of subjective reality. According to his monism, all things are one by virtue of certain eternal laws that exist in things and are discovered by the inquirer. Such laws of nature are dependent on a single law - God.

Carus rejected Kant’s position that the laws of nature depend on the mind of the knower; knowledge is the grasping of forms that are in the world. Hence Carus may be called a realist. He repudiated not only idealism but also materialism, claiming that every part of the world is both material (and acts according to the laws of matter) and spiritual (and acts according to the laws of mind). Thus he avoided the bifurcation of nature into minds and bodies in a way that is suggestive of Whitehead, who developed his process philosophy some years later. Human minds and souls differ from the rest of the world only in degree, not in kind. Carus’ monism regarded the world as a living actuality that in its evolution from lower to higher forms naturally evolved ever-higher souls and, accordingly, raised the subjectivity of atomic life to the intellectuality of a human being.

Carus was somewhat disturbed by Einstein’s relativity, not because it destroyed classical notions of absolute space, time, and motion but because the language of relativity sounded too much like the language of paradox and even of mysticism. This new physics, he thought, manifested a subjectivist tendency. It even implied the relativity of truth itself, as had the philosophies and théories of Bergson, Freud, Nietzsche, and the pragmatists.

Membership

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  American Philosophical Association , United States

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  Paul Carus was the leader of the United States group of the Mahabodhi Society.

  Mahabodhi Society

Connections

Paul Carus married Mary Hegeler on March 29, 1888.

Father:

Gustav Carus

Mother:

Laura (Krueger) Carus

father-in-law:

Edward Carl Hegeler

Wife:

Mary Hegeler

colleague:

Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki

colleague:

Soen Shaku