ACADEMIA Letters The Utopian Horizon of Objective Human Values Glen T. Martin During the 20th and early 21st centuries human beings have been emerging out of an era that began with early modern science. There has been a fundamental paradigm-shift from the “materialistic” cosmology implicit in early modern science to a “holistic” cosmology implicit in the work of Einstein and subsequent quantum theory. Early modern science, culminating in the “Newtonian Paradigm” conceived of the world in mechanistic terms, as “bodies in motion.” It assumed that laws of gravitation, universal causal determinism, and atomistic composition of all matter gave us a complete account of the “reality” of the universe. 1 These assumptions about the universe allowed no place for mind. Generally speaking, either mind was something entirely different from the materialistic universe, a different kind of “substance” as Descartes held, or it was merely an epiphenomenon of matter in which tiny atoms collided within the brain to produce the desires and feelings that we associate with human subjectivity, as Thomas Hobbes asserted. In either case mind appeared as an orphan within this mechanistic world, and especially within the Empiricist tradition, human values, that is human moral imperatives, appeared as “merely subjective.” Such was the famous con- clusion of David Hume in the 18th century: “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” 2 A way into the holism of contemporary thought was formulated by Immanuel Kant who was awakened from his self-described “dogmatic slumber” by Hume’s skepticism concerning both knowledge and values. Kant emphasized the organizational structures that the human mind brings to its perception of the world, structures that make possible having any knowledge of the world at all. In his thought mind is no longer an orphan in a materialistic universe but 1 Harris, Errol E. Apocalypse and Paradigm: Science and Everyday Thinking. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000. 2 Hume, David. Treatise on Human Nature: Volume II. New York: E.P Dutton & Co., 1949,Book II, Section II, Part III. Academia Letters, December 2020 Corresponding Author: Glen T. Martin, gmartin@radford.edu Citation: Martin, G.T. (2020). The Utopian Horizon of Objective Human Values. Academia Letters, Article 107. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL107. 1 ©2020 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0