Felix Adler was the directing leader of the Ethical Movement during his lifetime and is spoken of as its founder, though he attributed that role to Julius Rosenbaum, who organized the Sunday lecture series, with an inaugural meeting in May, 1876 and ongoing lectures, with music, in the fall of that year, leading to the incorporation of the New York Society for Ethical Culture in February, 1877. We remain indebted to the profound philosophical and ethical insights that Adler distilled in his lectures and into such books as The Religion of Duty (1906), An Ethical Philosophy of Life ( 1918), and The Reconstruction of the Spiritual Ideal (1925).
What was the central issue that Adler set out to address within his historical context? He stated it thus:
To understand the Ethical Movement it is indispensable to bear in mind the evils which it seeks to counteract. These evils are chiefly materialism and moral skepticism, a skepticism which, nourished by the crumbling of ancient creeds, has attacked the very springs of moral endeavor, has produced in the minds of many, a feeling as if there were nothing great any more worth living for, and as if life had been utterly emptied of all its nobler content.-- Ethical Record, Vol.1, p.2
To state that positively: Adler set out to produce the feeling that there is something great worth living for, rich in nobler content. That great thing lay in the ethical disposition of humanity as a clue to the nature of reality:
I affirm the real and irreducible existence of the essential self. or rather, as my last act, I affirm that the ideal of perfection which my mind inevitably conceives has its counterpart in the ultimate reality of things, is the truest reading of that reality whereof man is capable. I turn away from the thought of the self, even the essential self, as if that could be my chief concern, toward the vaster infinite whole in which the self is integrally preserved. -- Ethical Philosophy, pp.359-360
If we seek to unpack this confession, which has elements of strangeness to our ears 72 years later, we shall come upon some of the central concepts with which Adler processed the data of human experience. Against moral skepticism, he brought to bear an ethical certainty; against materialism, he brought to bear the vision of a spiritual reality. That ethical certainty and that spiritual vision were for Adler emergent from the frustrations he wrestled with and they were inexorably linked with the intellectual agnosticism (Ethical Philosophy, p. 357) that dispensed with the notions of both "creation" and "immortality" as inadequate attempts to bridge the gap between the finite and the infinite. The only "translucent" point in the screen between finite and infinite lay in the ethical experience of humanity. in processing that ethical experience Adler focused on certain themes that became the central planks in his philosophical platform.
The "task of humanity" as Adler saw it was to gain an "ethical footing," make an "ethical imprint," upon the empirical substratum of developing life. It was to ethicize human relations. And to accomplish this, one needs to follow the supreme ethical rule: Namely, to elicit the best in oneself and others by drawing out the unique difference that constitutes each self. This rule was premised, not on the sometimes scarce evidence of goodness in persons, but on "attribution" of a unique and normative worth to every person.
The task went beyond the individual to embrace the whole of life and involved the recognition that each of us serves a vocation committed to the transformation of society by the consecration of all life to the spiritual and ethical ideal. Moral experience is the central arena of all human endeavor, which must face and overcome the three "shadows" of sickness, sorrow, and sin. From that arena and back to that arena all concept building proceeds -- hence "deed before creed."
Two major concepts that gave perspective on the human task were, for Adler, those of the "reality-producing functions of the mind" and the "ethical manifold." Both were concepts that Adler learned from Kant and made his own. To attempt to translate what Adler meant by "reality-producing functions of the mind," we may use an analogy and point out that our human mind is capable of producing a mathematical series -- the Fibonacci series -- to represent the distribution of seeds in the flower of the sunflower. We can represent that reality out there because the structure of our minds has been shaped by the same forces that produced the sunflower. In similar fashion, Adler felt that our sense of the diversity and the unity of the universe and of the relational (and so ethical) nature of human experience were reflections of a larger reality that he termed "transcendent." The mind could read off that reality because it was structured to be "reality-producing." The ideal we conceive has its counterpart in an ultimate reality just as the empirical world of the flower has its counterpart in a mathematical concept in the human mind. For Kant, as for Adler, the transcendent was that which ordered and gave understanding to the empirical data of the senses. It was to be distinguished from the "supernatural," a concept which Adler also rejected.
However philosophically we assess this notion today (there are thinkers who still see the mind as transcendent to the brain and others who see the mind as only an activity of the bran), it undoubtedly gave Adler the sense of conviction, the ethical assurance, the moral courage to launch a movement and answer the skepticism he faced.
A Design for Human Relationships
That the mind is driven to perceive the world in terms of a diversity held together in a unity produced the other concept, that of the "ethical manifold." (Manifold literally means of many parts or folds.) For Adler, the ultimate social reality is a many-folded unity, in which the multiplicity of individual units and the unity of their connectedness receive equal respect and development. In place of nirvana or the Kingdom of God as the goal of religion -- both conditioned by the social and political realities of their day -- Adler substituted the design of an ideal democracy: "a universe of spiritual beings interacting in infinite harmony" (as he put it, Ethical Philosophy, p.126).
However we assess the metaphysical status of that universe of spiritual beings (and Adler himself refused to speculate about it), the vision of it was for Adler a design for human relationships on this planet here and now. We may sum it up:
To each of us an attribution of worth; from each of us our unique contributions and for all of us a community of mutual respect, justice, and care.
The human task, undergirded by these philosophical constructs, is simply stated: It is "the acquisition of ethical personality." (Ethical Philosophy, p.261.) Informing that human task are the three "reverences": Respect for those above us in moral development whether the outstanding teachers of the past or the preeminent among us today; appreciating the differences of others equal to us and contributing our differences; and reverencing and cultivating the potential of those still young or disabled in any way. Characteristic of the ethical attitude is the painting, and constant retouching, of ideal portraits of our fellow humans and ourselves (Ethical Philosophy, p.23 1.), and acting toward them, and ourselves, in accordance with those portraits.
This is something of the legacy Adler left to us.
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