by Charly Mann

While Chapel Hill is proud of the athletic glory of past UNC sporting teams, famed musicians who once called the town home, and its magnificent setting and beauty, it is the large number of great minds that have inhabited the town that make it so extraordinary. While these individuals have not received the wide spread adulation and celebrity status of other residents, Chapel Hill Memories will try to rectify this oversight by occasionally profiling some of these people.

Growing up in Chapel Hill I was privileged to meet and get to know a wide array of distinguished professors, university administrators, writers and playwrights. One of these individuals was the greatly admired UNC professor of philosophy Maynard Adams. He and his family lived near me when I was young, and he first attracted my attention by hand digging with a pick ax, shovel, and wheel barrel a large bomb shelter under his house on Old Mill Road in 1962. As I grew older and got to read some of his books, as well as letters he would often write to my father, I gained an appreciation this man's intellect.

Maynard Adams in 1962, the year he built a  bomb shelter under his house

The following was written by Maynard Adams in 1996 (Adams lived from 1919 to 2003) 

Death simply terminates one's life, but death on the horizon takes on meaning; it forces one to try to wrap up one's life and bring it to a fuller and richer completion. My pending death, although frightening, especially when first confronted, has become an important part of my life. It keeps my life in clearer focus. Every day becomes more precious and I hope more fully lived. My consciousness has been raised and my love deepened; the world has taken on a new splendor. While all of this makes life more attractive and whets my appetite for more time, it makes death a source of meaning that redeems it somewhat.

Of course the devil is in the dying, and the wrenching and tearing of the lives closely woven with one's own.  There are blessings to be found even in the dying and the loss of a loved one, if we are open to them.

The following is a condensed version of a 13 page typed memoir Maynard Adams wrote in 1994 that I found stuck in one of my files.

I grew up on a family farm in Halifax County in south/central Virginia. My early life revolved around the farm, the local Baptist church, and the school. Both the church and the school drew me like magnets, for to me they were gateways to a higher reality and a wider world. My family and most of my neighbors had only a limited education, but they were religious people and had a profound respect for education. We had daily family Bible reading and prayer in my home. My father always said a good education was something you would never lose and nobody could take it away from you. By the time I was twelve years old I was committed to being a Baptist minister and planned to attend the University of Richmond as a ministerial student upon graduation from high school.

Even in high school I began to feel a tension between the simple orthodox religion of my home and church and my studies in school. By the end of my first year at the University of Richmond, my intellectual cramps were severe. I turned to philosophy in trying find a way to deal with them. In the fall of my sophomore year I wrote my mother that I was engrossed with certain philosophy books that I had to force myself to do the assignments in my courses and to go to bed at night. At that point I had not taken a philosophy course, but I went on to major in philosophy with the hope of resolving the tension between my religion and the culture dominant in my education. During this time, although deeply troubled, I worked in several churches in the Richmond area. In fact, I was pastor of two churches during my last two years of college. I expected to find a solution to my intellectual problems that would allow me to continue as a minister.

Maynard Adams in 1951 shortly after starting his career as a philosophy professor at the University of North Carolina 

Upon graduating from Richmond I chose Colgate Rochester Divinity School because I understood that it offered an approach that would reconcile Christianity and modern ways of thought; and I began that summer a M.A. program in philosophy and literature at the University of Richmond, which I hoped to complete in summer sessions while enrolled at Rochester. At Rochester I took to my studies eagerly, doing far more work in each course than was expected. The longest paper I wrote was over 500 pages in a course, and most of my papers ranged from 50 to 100 pages. I did this amount of work because of the hunger I had for understanding the subject matter. After receiving an M.A. from Rochester, I enrolled in Harvard University in 1944 to do more graduate work in philosophy. At Harvard I received another M. A. and a Ph D.

I became a modern naturalist, but I remained troubled about how and why the classical framework of thought that defined a value-and meaning-saturated world had been transformed into our modern scientific perspective that presents us with a purely factual world devoid of inherent structures of value and meaning. I have carried on a running philosophical critique of modern naturalism while I developed and argued for a full-fledged humanistic view of the culture and the world. The great revolution in Western civilization was occasioned; I contend, by a shift in our culture-generating stance toward the world. The classical stance was the humanistic perspective, which was defined by such questions as: Who are we? What does reality require of us? What is it that we ought to become and ought to do? and How can we understand the world and ourselves in a way that will further the human enterprise conceived in these terms?

2009 book Maynard Adams : Southern Philosopher of Civilization by Glenn Blackburn on the philosophy of Maynard Adams  (1919 - 2003)

On the other hand, modern Western civilization is defined by such questions as: How can we get what we want? How can we impose our will on the world and exploit it for our purposes? and How can we understand the world in a way that will give us manipulatory power over our environment? This shift led to the progressive elimination of humanistic concepts (especially the concepts of meaning and value). This, I contend, is what gave rise to subjectivistic theories of the humanistic dimension of the culture, including the language of lived experience, morality, politics, and religion. Furthermore it is what pushes contemporary thinkers towards the total cultural subjectivism that is proclaimed by the self- labeled postmodernists.

Although I tried for ten years to find a way of integrating the culture and of developing a unified worldview on naturalistic terms, I was forced to conclude that the culture and the world can be made whole again only within the humanistic perspective and in humanistic categories. My four major books taken together make this case against modern scientific naturalism and for a realistic humanism. They are Ethical Naturalism and the Modern Worldview (1960, 1973, 1985), Philosophy and the Modern Mind: A Philosophical Critique of Modern Western Civilization (1975, 1985) , The Metaphysics of Self and World: Toward a Humanistic Philosophy (1991), and Religion and Cultural Freedom (1993).

The other books I have published along the way are The Fundamentals of General Logic (1954), Logic Problems (1954), (with others) The Language of Value (1957), Commonsense Realism (1966), and The Idea of America (1977). In addition, I have published about 100 articles and reviews in professional journals, encyclopedias, and books; and I have written newspaper columns for many years on topics of public interest from an ethical or philosophical point of view. In addition, I produced and participated in twelve educational films; and I produced and participated in six one-hour television programs on The Idea of America.

Book by Chapel Hill philosopher and professor Maynard Adams

My primary work has been teaching and participating in the life of the universities where I have taught. I was a graduate assistant in philosophy at Harvard from 1944 to 1946 and a teaching fellow and freshman adviser in 1946 to 47. I was an assistant professor of philosophy at Ohio University in 1947-48, but I moved on to The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1948, where I remained on the faculty for forty- two years, retiring in 1990. I have been a visiting professor at the University of Southern California, the State University of New York at Albany, and the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. I have lectured widely in universities and in public forums.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been a good place for me to do my work. I always wanted my career to be in my native South. And The University has been good to me. I moved smoothly through the academic ranks, becoming a full professor in 1958, and was elected to a coveted Kenan professorship in 1971. I was chairman of my department from 1960 to 1965: director of the Curriculum on Peace, War, and Defense 1970-72, and chairman of The University faculty 1976-79. I served on numerous hoards and committees through the years.

I have been active in professional organizations. I help found and was president of the North Carolina Philosophical Society; I was president of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology; and I served on the executive committee and was chairman of the program committee of the American Philosophical Association. In addition to having helped establish and having served as director of the Curriculum on Peace, War, and Defense: I helped establish and was director of the Free World Institute in The University in the early 1950s to conduct a state-wide program to counter the McCarthy-like mentality in the Cold War. I was one of the co-founders (with a group of business and institutional leaders) , and served as a member of the Board of Directors, of the Tanglewood Center for the Study of Human Values in the 1970s. I proposed and was instrumental in establishing the Program in the Humanities and Human Values in The University in 1979; and I had a guiding role in the development and running of it for more than ten years. It is a program of weekend and week-long seminars for people from all across the region. I worked for eight years with, and was chairman of, the North Carolina Humanities Council. In the 1980s, I was chairman of the Governor's Taskforce on Science, Technology, and Human Values. And I have worked with local churches and schools in various capacities. In connection with the civil rights movement in the 1960s, I proposed and was chairman of Chapel Hill Community Action, Inc., which was one of the first such organizations in the nation. It was expanded into The Orange Economic Opportunity Commission, Inc. , and then into the Joint Orange/Chatham Community Action, Inc., which I chaired in its early years. It is still a functioning institution

1963 lecture by UNC philosophy professor Maynard Adams entitled Where is Religion in Philosophy?

My work with students, The University, the profession, the community, and the state has been most gratifying. The problems I have taken on in my philosophical writing and teaching are so large and so deeply situated in our culture that it is difficult to know whether I have had any effect, except with my own students and some others who may study my written work. But I have had some good students, both undergraduate and graduate. I have former Ph.D. students who are professors and administrators in universities all across the United States and a few in Canada and other countries. I am encouraged by the thought that one can never know what fruit one's ideas may hear.

While I hesitate to mention honors I have received, this memoir would be incomplete if I left them out. Perhaps the one that I have cherished most was election to the Kenan Distinguished Professorship in 1971. That same year I received The Thomas Jefferson Award from the McConnell Foundation, an Outstanding Educator of America Award for "'contributions to higher education and service to the community" from a national foundation, and the undergraduates at UNC-CH made me an honorary member of the Golden Fleece, their highest honorary society. In 1976, my book Philosophy and the Modern Mind was selected for inclusion in a series of "Contemporary Classics" for translation into several languages and distribution in many parts of the world by the U.S. State Department. In 1985, my book Ethical Naturalism and the Modern Worldview was selected for republication in a series of "classic works in their field" by the Greenwood Press: A division of Congressional Information Service, Inc. In 1988 I was given The North Carolina Adult Education Association's Special Award in recognition of "outstanding contributions to continuing education in North Carolina." In 1989, Wake Forest University gave me the honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree. Also in 1989, I was presented with a volume of essays on my work by sixteen philosophers from around the country, edited by one of me former students on the faculty at Williams College; it is entitled Mind, Value and Culture: Essays in Honor of E. M. Adams. In 1992, the University of Richmond gave me the honorary Doctor of Humanities degree. Also in 1992, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill established an endowed distinguished professorship that bears my name. All of this was totally unexpected in each case and all the more gratifying for that reason.

The Philosopher of Chapel Hill, Maynard Adams

My Dad, William Robert Mann who was a UNC professor of mathematics, and Maynard Adams were great friends and loved talking about philosophy and religion. Later in life they would go on long hikes in the Blue Ridge Mountains and engage in stimulating conversation along the trail. Fortunately many of their conversations have been preserved in writing, and the Wilson Library even has several audio recordings of their conversations in their archives.

The following is a letter my father wrote to Maynard when my father was 78.

Fall of 1998

Dear Maynard,

Since our lunch this past Monday I have been reading alternatively your Society Fit for Human Beings and Sokal's Fashionable Nonsense. I find much to admire in the former, and much to ponder in the latter.

The Age of Science, which dominated our youth, was a peak of intellectual achievement. The cloud of post modernism which is now sitting over us creates a pit of anti-intellectual darkness. We are in a state of free fall from the sublime to the ridiculous. Today underneath the glitter of scientific brilliance is a gestating growth of the most muddleheaded irrationality to be found in history. The nonsense spreading under the name of post modernism is not a blight rising from the swamps of illiteracy, but it is descending upon us from the highest levels of educational snobbery.

How can an age of such brilliance decline so quickly into irrational darkness? I think Chesterton answered that question when he said; "When men stop believing in God, they will believe in anything."

Bob Mann

Maynard Adams inscription to my Dad, Bob Mann, in his book A Society Fit for Human Beings

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