Living Like a Humanist

Eupraxsophy is a term coined by Paul Kurtz in the late 1980s in an attempt to condense into one word the humanist ethic. Kurtz recognised the insufficiency of atheism; in particular its inability to create a positive humanist ethic in the wake of the discredited theologies and command moralities. But Kurtz did not want to make John Dewey’s mistake of speaking of humanism using the religious vocabulary of the past. Kurtz has gone to great lengths to demonstrate that humanist ethics are independent of theistic ethics. One can be awed by the beauty of the universe, love life to distraction, find fulfilment in other people and live openly and actively without being religious, and it is the intention of eupraxsophy to encapsulate that.

Eupraxsophy owes an intellectual debt to Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia, and yet it goes further in one crucial sense. Aristotle sees the final goal as the contemplative life, whereas Eupraxsophy seeks a dynamic fusion of contemplation and action. The nub of the question, Kurtz wrote, is not just to love wisdom, but to practice it. Here is where the debt to Dewey is a positive one, because eupraxsophy owes a lot to Dewey’s slogan of Intelligent action.

Eupraxsophy is an amalgam of eu (good, well), praxis (conduct, practice), and sophia (scientific and philosophic wisdom). Brought together, eupraxsophy stands for “a set of convictions and practices offering a cosmic outlook and an ethical guide to life.”

Kurtz is building on the truths we all know: it is not enough to be good without being active in the world. Neither is it enough to be active without being wise or wise without being active. We need to be good, wise and active.

A lot of people have worried about the word being too long and foreign-sounding to really catch on. And they are right that the word hasn’t caught on---more’s the pity. The irony about worrying about the complicated nature of the word is that it is reminiscent of another Greek word Aristotle used: Phronesis, which means ‘practical common sense’.

The phronimos was the man of practical wisdom and was a person capable of deliberating on those practical matters, as distinct from (though not opposed to) the more theoretical wisdom in the phrase sophia. The closest modern-day equivalent of this ideal can be found in Paul Kurtz’s notion of eupraxsophy. The word was initially spelled ‘eupraxophy’, but after some confusion about how the word should be pronounced, an “s” was added after the “x.” It is unlikely that doing this has helped.