In the history of Western thought there is scarcely a single development of more significance than the separation of physical from social inquiry. Here, JOHN DEWEY, America’s distinguished philosopher, examines the profound implications of this separation for a liberal-democratic society.
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In the last year or so COMMENTARY has published a number of articles on recent work in the social sciences, under the heading “The Study of Man.” Although these articles deal with a variety of topics, I find it significant that they converge toward a common conclusion. This conclusion emerges both from their criticism of the basic defect they discern and in the constructive suggestions they make for improvement. The common element is a troubled awareness of a narrowness, a restraint, a constriction imposed upon the social sciences by their present “frame of reference,” i.e. the axioms, terms, and boundaries under which they function today.
Parenthetically, may I remark that while I shall use the phrase “social inquiry,” I would prefer the phrase “study of man” (and/or “inquiry into human relationships,” or into the “cultures of associated life”). These are better names; they do not prejudge the subject matter of study as does the name “social” in its present usage, with its weighty suggestion of something set over against “individual.”
In his “Government by Manipulation” (COMMENTARY, July 1946), Nathan Glazer raised the question whether it was appropriate for social study to intervene in the conduct of affairs merely as a “trouble-shooter” to reduce friction between groups (racial friction between Japanese and “whites” on the West Coast during the War, in the material dealt with), rather than with the broader objective of promoting “formulation and implementation of long-range goals.” Mr. Glazer’s title, “Government by Manipulation,” indicates the criticism of the standpoint and method of most of the studies upon which he reports. His reference to “long-range goals” indicates the nature of his suggestion of a better and more effective “frame of reference.”
Daniel Bell’s article “Adjusting Men to Machines” (COMMENTARY, January 1946) contains a detailed account of studies of human relationships in a different field, that of industry as seen in “the sociology of the factory.” It opens on a note similar to that of Mr. Glazer. “The resources of the social sciences are called upon more and more frequently to deal with the everyday problems of our society, particularly those arising from conflict and friction between groups”—in this case, that between workers on one side and employers and supervisors on the other side. The net outcome of his careful examination of a large number of such investigations is that those who have conducted the inquiries “operate as technicians, approaching the problem as it is given to them and keeping within the framework set by those who hire them“ (italics mine). Here criticism of current procedures as being restricted within a framework that is fixed prior to and outside of inquiry is clear. The nature of the suggestion as to the need of a wider and freer framework is found in such statements as: “There are under way few studies to see what kind of jobs can best stimulate the spontaneity and freedom of the worker and how we can best alter our industrial methods to assure such jobs.”
A second article by Mr. Glazer, “What is Sociology’s Job?” (COMMENTARY, January 1947), is also a survey of a specific field. It examines the papers read at the last annual meeting of the American Sociological Society, with the object of finding out the prevailing trends of sociological inquiry. The conclusion offered is that there is paucity of interest in the assumptions and hypotheses that are the “underpinning” of the inquiries carried on, while “practical” topics are the main subjects of research, “practical” meaning “crime, juvenile delinquency, divorce, race relations, absenteeism and restriction of output in industry.” Although the inquiry in this case is not restricted by conflicting interests between groups, here too there is nonetheless the definite conclusion that it is limited by extraneous considerations with the result that it is largely given over to “proving” the already obvious.
Finally, there is the highly suggestive article by Karl Polanyi, quite explicit in both criticism and constructive suggestion (COMMENTARY, February 1947). Its main title, significantly, is “Our Obsolete Market Mentality,” and its subtitle, also significantly, is “Civilization Must Find a New Thought Pattern.”
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Thus, all of these articles agree in finding the “framework of reference” of the current study of human affairs so restricted as to narrow its potential usefulness to human concerns. All of them, also, indicate the need and the desirability of a wider and freer range in inquiry. The following passage in Mr. Bell’s article is reasonably representative of their tenor: “Being scientists, they (that is, those who have conducted the inquiries in question) are concerned with ‘what is’ and are not inclined to involve themselves in questions of moral values or larger social issues.” In quoting this passage, I welcome the quotation marks around “what is.” For it is the supreme business of scientific inquiry to ask about and find out about what is. In what follows 1 shall accordingly show that the trouble with the inquiries in question is that they fail to be genuinely scientific precisely because, instead of taking what is, the facts of the case in human relationships as the subjects of their investigations, they start with a prejudgment as to what is: one that automatically limits the inquiries carried on. And I shall show that when this unscientific limitation is removed, “larger social issues” (and moral values as involved in these issues) are necessarily and inevitably an integral part of the subject matter of inquiry.
That shrewd industrialists engage trained experts to study and report upon the conditions that create friction and lower efficiency and profits, proves only that they are shrewd in conducting their business. That the experts who are engaged employ techniques that have proved efficacious in inquiries that are conducted scientifically without predetermined limitations (particularly those of a monetary kind), is also easily understandable. But that inquiries are scientific which are carried on under conditions of an outlook, standpoint, and aim extraneous to scientific inquiry, is, to state the matter baldly, a delusion. And in the case of “social” inquiry it is a dangerous delusion.
For instead of resulting in liberation from conditions previously fixed (which is the fruit of genuine scientific inquiry) it tends to give scientific warrant, barring minor changes, to the status quo—or the established order—a matter especially injurious in the case of economic inquiry. Accordingly, in the governmental and industrial studies reported upon by Glazer and Bell, it is not possible to justify their claim to be “scientific” save on the pertinent ground that they borrow and use some techniques that have proved effective in inquiries carried on free of predetermination in outlook, selection of problems, and methods of procedure.
In genuine scientific inquiry, as may be noted by observation of the more advanced forms, the frame of reference is a working matter. It is a product of previous knowings as well as a directive of further inquiries. But in the “social” studies reported upon, the reverse is the case. The frame within which the studies proceed is taken as fixed prior to and outside of inquiry. That fact is exemplified in the seemingly innocent, but actually harmful, use of the adjective “existing” when prefixed to the words “social and/or economic order.” The word “existing” is used in a way which excludes from critical examination the very order that is the nominal subject of investigation; for it confines the subject matter investigated within an arbitrarily narrowed local segment and short-time span of “existence.”
The case of the existing economic order is peculiarly instructive. Were it stated that the subject of study is the present industrial, commercial, and financial order, as that is determined by considerations that are largely those of pecuniary success, the scientific limitation would at least be brought out into the open. But the use of “existing,” in the cases reported, is conditioned and confined by two assumptions. It is assumed in the first place that “economic” subject matter is so complete on its own account and of itself, inherently, and, as used to be said, “essentially,” that it can be scientifically studied in independence of all other social (human) facts. In the second place, it is assumed that what has “existed”—between whatever date is set between the beginning of the present state of industry, business, and finance and the year 1947 as limits—can be treated as a scientific sample or representative of the economic order without any reference to its antecedents or its consequences.
The two things mentioned are, however, two faces of one and the same fact. It is only by treating the economic order as complete in isolation, in itself, that a limited local and temporal segment can be treated as complete, as fixed and final, for scientific purposes, in its arbitrarily cut-off “existence,” and vice versa.1
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Summing up what has been said, its import is that much “study of man,” as that taking place in sociological science, proceeds upon a fallacious assumption. This assumption is that a study can be scientific apart from a temporal and spatial extension which places given local segments and temporal sectors within that larger stretch of events which includes conditioning antecedents and the consequences which are the inevitable outcome of what is locally and immediately at hand. Were inquiry carried on by the “intellect” in terms of pure logic, the monstrosity of this assumption would be apparent. But even when “pure” is taken in the sense of full and intrinsic exemption from the influence exerted by institutional traditions, occupations, and interests, there is no such thing as pure economics. Such “purity” as is found in the more advanced aspects of scientific inquiry constitutes an historic achievement by which such inquiry has itself become enough of an institutional tradition and interest on its own account to dictate, to a considerable extent (probably never completely, even in mathematics), the conditions under which it is practiced.2 Physical inquiry, and to considerable but lesser extent, physiological inquiry are examples of fields that have largely achieved this emancipation and consequent “purity.” In this respect they hold up a model to be striven for in the backward “social” subjects that are still so largely held in subordination to institutional and other aims and conditions that are alien to the business of inquiry.
In this connection it is worthwhile and, in view of current prejudices, probably necessary to say something about the relation of inquiry to practice and “practical” consequences. In spite of the fact that physical inquiry has, through the medium of technological applications, transformed to an almost revolutionary extent the everyday practices of the larger portion of mankind, the idea still prevails that there is some sort of gulf fixed between science (dignified with the name of “theory” in its classic quasi-godlike sense) and practice. But in the case of the study of man, of “social” studies, it should be obvious that the subject matter studied consists of human practices or activities; that the study of them is itself one variety of human activity or practice, and that its conclusions always intervene in the preexisting body of human practices in one direction or another. Physical inquiry has now itself attained the status of an institution, and, using the word descriptively, without disparaging connotation, of a vested institutional interest, while the present state of sociological inquiry as reported, shows that it still proceeds in subordination to alien institutional interests, instead of being conducted as an institutional interest in its own behalf.
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II
Another statement in the first of Mr. Glazer’s two articles. He pointed out that the revolution in the method and results of physical inquiry (beginning, be it recalled, only a short three or four centuries ago) has had momentous human consequences:—nothing less, in fact, than the transformation of the feudal social order into the bourgeois social order. He suggests that development of social inquiry may be followed by an equally extensive transformation of the now and here “existing” order. The remark is pertinent to what has been said about the arbitrary cutting off of the present from its human past and its equally inevitable human future.
But it is equally pertinent in its direct bearing upon the origin or source of the present solid wall that divides physical from human inquiry: a wall that also separates the different aspects of human inquiry from one another, and thereby cuts economics, politics, and morals out from the single and inclusive cultural whole in which their subject matters are indissolubly bound together. The effect on science of the divisions thus instituted is effectively to prevent cross-fertilization of methods and results, so that physical inquiry has a one-sided restricted human application, while human inquiry is kept shut up in the region of opinion, class struggle, and dogmatic “authority.”
The story of physical inquiry up to the pressent time presents two outstanding features. One of them is familiar; it achieved its present measure of emancipation from alien traditional and institutional interests only by means of a severe struggle between church and science, so severe that it commonly bears the name of “warfare.” The other feature, though outstanding in its human consequences, is commonly ignored. The victory won was not clear-cut and complete. It was a compromise. In this compromise, the world, including man, even beginning with man, was cut into two separate parts. One of them was awarded to natural inquiry under the name of physical science. The other was kept in possession in fee simple by the “higher” and finally “authoritative” domain—and dominion—of the “moral” and “spiritual.” In this compromise, each part was free to go its own way provided it refrained from trespassing upon and interfering with the territory made over to the opposed division.
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The course of philosophy from the 16th and 17th centuries can be understood only in terms of efforts to deal with the many “dualisms” mirroring the cleavages this established. But even this is not so important as is the fact that the “victory” won by physical inquiry was one of expediency rather than of principle. The liberation achieved was due in the main to the obvious increase of ease, comfort, and power that followed in the wake of the new science rather than to any grasp of its profound and systematic moral and intellectual import. It is not then a matter of surprise that of late the official representatives of the “spiritual” domain—claiming dominion—have assumed the aggressive. Today they are blaming the serious troubles of the world on physical science, proclaiming that the sole way to salvation is a return to the age when “natural” knowledge was held in strict subjection to the authority (and power) of “spiritual” institutions. Under one condition, this change from suppressed to open conflict is to be welcomed. It is all to the good to have the conflict occur in the light of intelligence rather than in the heat of accusation and counter-accusation.
For once a conflict is adequately brought within the field of intelligent scrutiny, it presents itself as a problem: and where there is a problem there are alternative possibilities to be systematically viewed, no longer a mere clash of blind forces. The alternative to subordination of natural inquiry to supernatural authority (more correctly, human authority based on extra-natural grounds) is the development of natural inquiry itself to a point where it is capable of dealing with the troubled difficulties of our social-moral order.3
The actual issue is whether inquiry into social-moral issues can be effectively promoted in any other way than by using the methods that have won notable triumphs in the physical field, together with use of the specific conclusions that have been thereby attained. Utilization for the new purpose involves of necessity whatever developments are required in former procedures to render them fruitfully applicable to the new purpose they serve. We need “one world” of intelligence and understanding if we are to obtain one world in other forms of human activity.
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It is in this connection that the alternative of subjection of natural inquiry to external “authority” becomes ominously significant. It means either the establishment of a particular institution having the physical power to enforce its alleged “spiritual” authority, or it means dumping our actual human problems into the lap of the least developed, the most immature, of all of our modes of knowing: politics and ethics. If we take the former path, we find that its influence, in the form in which it flourishes in academic circles in democratic cultures, is slight, while in the form in which it is potent in actual affairs, it is not a “science” but an ideological reflection and “rationalization” of contentious and contending practical policies.
In this contention, the democratic policy has, from the standpoint of inquiry, at least the advantage that it tolerates and, within limits, encourages free inquiry into specific problems as against suppression of discussion in the totalitarian type. But if we confine ourselves to the side of systematic intellectual formulation, we find that the quasi-official doctrine, traditional “liberalism,” is based upon acceptance of an economic “individualism” which was humanly significant in the earlier stage of the industrial revolution but that is now non-existent save as a defense of one set of economic institutions. On the totalitarian side, the setting of standards and ends is so predetermined that it is socially treasonable and dangerous to subject them to inquiry.
If we turn to ethics or morals as an intellectual discipline, we find ourselves faced with a sorry spectacle. There is no general consensus as to standards of judgment or ends of action. There is also a minimum of agreement as to the methods and “organs” by which standards and aims should be determined. Indeed, for at least the last two hundred years there has been steady deterioration in ethical theory as to these issues. One of the most serious aspects of this situation is that the subject matter of moral inquiry has been increasingly pushed out of the range of the concrete problems of economic and political inquiry. In consequence, there has taken place a reduction by which, in popular attitudes, discussion is “moral” in the degree in which it consists of complaints about what exists and exhortations about what should, or “ought” to, exist. In fact, the state of moral inquiry at present is a striking exhibition of the division of social inquiry into a number of independent, water-tight, non-communicating compartments, which embody the net outcome of the cleavages that have their source mainly in the isolation of the physical from the distinctively human.
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III
I know of no more effective way of calling attention to the source and nature of the cleavages that now exist between the “material” on one side and the spiritual and moral on the other, than to quote from a semi-official document and avowed proclamation of the cleavage. The passage in question is the opening sentence of the extensive article on “Economics” in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (Vol. 5, p. 344). It reads:
“Economics deals with the social phenomena centering about provision for the material needs of individuals and groups.” Even if the word “material” had been italicized, I doubt if many readers would have been given pause, in spite of its use as the differentiating criterion of one class of “social phenomena” from other classes, presumably those of a moral and “spiritual” kind. For this division of the facts of human relations into two separate kinds, one low (low in the sense of base and also in that of basic), the other high, authoritative, and moral, is so deeply entrenched in institutional practices and in traditions established through long centuries that its explicit use as the standard frame of reference for inquiry into “social” facts occasions no protest. It is so familiarly inbred in our intellectual standpoints as to be “natural.”
It goes along with a number of other familiar cleavages: body and soul, flesh and spirit, appetite which is animal and conscience which is superimposed as a warning and restraining factor, sense and reason, and, on a more intellectually refined level, the internal and the external, the subjective and the objective. These are cleavages distilled and precipitated in the distinction between the natural and the supernatural which has long held a central and dominating position in the moral history of the Western world.4 I doubt whether a more momentous moral fact can be found in all human history than just this separation of the moral from other human interests and attitudes, especially from the “economic.”
I referred earlier, in another connection, to the assumption that economic phenomena form such an independent and self-enclosed compartment of social facts that they can be scientifically treated in complete isolation from their human antecedents and consequences. In view of the determining role exerted by industrial, commercial, and financial factors in all phases—scientific, artistic, political, domestic, and international—of the present world, the practically universal passive acceptance of this position would be unaccountable , did we not understand its source in the historic institutional background of our culture. There is no need to argue in favor of the thesis that economic facts are so far from being an isolated self-enclosed field that, on one side, they are the offspring of the new physical science, and that, on the other side, they affect, through their consequence, the human values of the whole world with ever-increasing intensity. It is enough to face facts with eyes open.5
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It would require volumes to present anything like a full exposition of the cultural background of the identification of “economic” with “material” which has so disastrously cut the economic off from wider and larger human values—those called moral. Two periods of human history, however, are so representative as to have typical significance. One of them dates from ancient Greece, whose economy was a slave economy, and where artisans and laborers, even those not technically slaves, were completely excluded from community membership—which in Athens meant not only political citizenship but participation in all the things that are worthwhile in art, knowledge, and human companionship.
These facts were acutely noted and comprehensively formulated by Aristotle. On their basis as they then and there “existed,” he made a sharp separation between some forms of activity as means and means only, and other modes of activity that were, by their inherent nature, or essence, ends-in-themselves.6 Economic activity fell completely into the former division. And this is only the beginning of the story. The science and cosmology of the time, as they also received acute and comprehensive formulation by Aristotle, treated the universe as a hierarchical scheme whose parts were graded on the basis of the place held by what was called “matter,” with pure matter at the base (in every sense of the word “base”) and with the divine, wholly free from any contact with matter, at the apex. Moreover, on the one side change and mutability were strictly conjoined with “matter,” and fixity and immutability with self-sustained Being, on the other side. This view persisted in control of what was accepted as natural science until the scientific revolution gave despised motion a central place and “matter” gained “energy,” losing that complete passivity which made it the victim of every external “force.”
In consequence, the class that was occupied with production, whether in the field or in the shop, was “by nature”—i.e., universally, eternally, and of necessity—menial, servile, embodying only the animal and fleshly part of man, and cut off from all knowledge that was not concerned with the material and mutable. Since Aristotle lived a long time ago, and since at best his metaphysical cosmology appealed to but a small intellectual elite, these doctrines might have faded into insignificance were it not for another imposing historical event. This latter event, which involved the adoption of the substance of the doctrines of Aristotle into the reigning religion, left a mark on the culture of the world which, in spite of other immense changes, is as yet almost indelible.
This other event was the spread of Christian faith throughout Europe. The supremacy of the Church in the Middle Ages extended far beyond what today is usually called “religion.” It was supreme and authoritative in political, economic, artistic, and educational matters. It officially accepted the cosmology and science of Aristotle as the framework of its own intellectual structure in everything “natural” and in everything amenable to human reason. What might otherwise have been a transitory incident was thereby so firmly embedded in the religious culture of the Western world that even the progressive secularization of both knowledge and the dominant everyday interests of the mass of mankind did not seriously shake its hold with respect to the fixed separation of the material from the spiritual and ideal. The severance of the economic from the moral, making each for the purposes of inquiry an independent self-enclosed field, must be understood as one chapter in this story.
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IV
The backwardness of inquiry into human affairs, that is, of the “social” subjects, is an integral part of the record. Social inquiry still clings obstinately to the kind of frame of reference that once controlled physical inquiry, but which was abandoned when systematic scientific advance began. Since the 16th century physical inquiry has shown an ever-growing respect for change; for the process of change, to indulge in a pleonasm. Until recently, this respect was limited by the Newtonian framework according to which change took place in changeless space and time, which accordingly were independent of each other. Now physical inquiry has liberated itself (through what, not very happily from the standpoint of popular understanding, is called “relativity”) from this limitation.
But the more physical inquiry has developed and fructified through acknowledgment of change and process, the more obstinately orthodox moral inquiry has clung to fixed “first” principles and immutable final or last “ends.” The very principle which has transformed physical inquiry from a stagnant condition to one of steady advance is rejected by professed representatives of moral inquiry as the sure road to disorder and chaos. In consequence, the progressive practical application of the method and conclusions of physical inquiry to human affairs has been so unbalanced as to sustain and widen the very splits and cleavages that now disturb our life. They reinforce the use of pre-scientific, pre-technological morals to support, in the name of what is spiritual, the very conditions which are the source of so much of our moral confusion.
There is another difference in the frame of reference in the two cases that is allied to that just mentioned. The “natural” world, the cosmos with which physical scientific inquiry is operationally concerned, reveals its meanings in the course of that inquiry. It is not something fixed and permanently behind and beneath that progressive inquiry, even though it be baptized by such eulogistic terms as Universe, Reality, etc., and the course taken by inquiry is not determined by some fixed predetermined standard, whatever high metaphysical names be given it. Inquiry is determined by the conclusions reached in the previous course of its own developing methods of observation and test. The unanswered questions, the problems, which have emerged in this course provide its next, immediate directives. The strong points in conclusions already attained provide the resources with which to attack the weaknesses, the deficiencies, and conflicts that form weak points in its present state.
In consequence, inquiry in its most developed and accomplished form has no traffic with absolute generalizations. Its best theories are working hypotheses to be tested through their use in application in new fields. The devotion of official moral inquiry to absolutes, instead of being evidence and source of strength, is evidence and source of its comparatively stagnant estate. It contributes only to maintain that estate. Its absolutes are formal and empty. Everybody gives allegiance to them even where in concrete situations their interests and practice are worlds away. These formal absolutes are largely accountable for the sharp division now existing between economic and moral standpoints.7 Inquiry—because of its practical disesteem of fixed generalizations (even though they be called “laws”)—in its most developed form can engage freely in a high degree of specification, of “specialization,” with the assurance that its results, instead of having an unfavorable impact upon the total body or system of what is known, will serve to solidify and extend the latter. While detailed specialization is carried far beyond anything found in “social” inquiry, it is exempt from the fixed non-communicating divisions which are such a prominent feature of the latter.8
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We are faced, as a net outcome, with the necessity of abandoning that alternative which proposes, in effect if not in so many words, to subordinate scientific inquiry to predetermined ends. Instead of that we should adopt, positively and constructively, the exactly opposite alternative. If we break down the underlying attitudes, interests, and convictions which maintain the walls of division that now effectively prevent cross-fertilization and use of the resources at our command, we shall live in a freer and larger world. If and when we surrender the intellectual habits that have come to us as a heritage from the past and use freely the resources that are within our command (because of the development of the frames of reference and the conclusions in physical and physiological matters), we shall find their use does not imprison human inquiry within a fixed physical and “material” framework, but releases and expands methods and conclusions, so that they will lift the heavy weight that now depresses and confines “social” (including moral) subjects.
As the resources that are available are released and expanded, their application in the intelligent clarification of the existing actual and “practical” confusion will follow surely if slowly. The dream of a well-ordered transformation of human affairs as extensive as that which followed change in physical inquiry, but tempered and balanced as that was not, will cease to be a dream.
But we must first get rid of those assumptions, rooted in institutional conditions, from which physical inquiry at its best has freed itself. To do this we need a clarified view of what physical inquiry is—that is, of what it does and how it does it. The misrepresentation that is still current is well illustrated in the following quotation from a recent publication. The text reads as follows:
“All of the sciences have contributed to the belief that man is the victim of a mechanist world and is anything but the captain of his soul. Physics and chemistry have described the universe as a machine operating by immutable laws of cause and effect. Man is but a cog in this machine. Astronomy has revealed an infinite universe of wheels within wheels held together by the force of gravity. In this great system man is an infinitesimal dot of little consequence, etc., etc.” If “science” had revealed these things as facts, it is difficult to see why there should be so much emotional heat displayed because they have been found out. But as a matter of fact the passage quoted doesn’t attain the level of even the “popular” science of fifty years ago.
The type of sweeping generalization here attributed to physics and astronomy is so unscientific that it now flourishes mainly in what is labeled, unfortunately, moral theory. Instead of enslaving man to a fixed and finished structure, the progress of science has been accompanied at every step by an expansion of man’s practical freedom, enabling him to use natural energies as agencies, first liberating his aims and then providing him with means for realizing them. It is true that this emancipation is still one-sided. But it is this very unbalanced condition that should give us the strongest possible stimulus for extending the scientific standpoint and procedure to fields which still remain under the control of opinion, prejudice, and physical force, and which are still potent only because pre-scientific attitudes and interests have endowed them with institutional authority in the name of morals and religion.
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1 Something is said later about the scientific legitimacy of partial or specialized inquiries provided they are undertaken in such a way that they can be restored, as need arises, to the total complex of subject matter within which they fall.
2 By one of those curious distortions so over-frequent in philosophical discussions, my use of the word “instrumental” in previous writings has been often represented and criticized as if it signified that “knowing” must be limited to some predetermined specific end. What I have said, time and again, is precisely to the opposite effect. It is that scientific knowing is the only general way in our possession of getting free from customary ends and of opening up vistas of new and freer ends.
3 The idea that the alternative is reduction of the human order to the terms of the physical order is no alternative at all. It is only a repetition of that assumption of two separate “dominions” which underlies our present confusion.
4 The present revival of the notion of the inherent sinfulness of man as explanation of the troubled state of the world (an explanation which strangely enough is a source of comfort to many persons) is contemporary evidence of how deeply these cleavages are entrenched in our culture. See the article of Dr. Sidney Hook on “Intelligence and Evil in Human History” (COMMENTARY, March 1947) for a searching examination of this current revival.
5 Critics of the “materialistic” interpretation of history which is attributed to Marx do not seem to notice that this “materialism” was simply an acceptance of the orthodox view of economics, combined with acute observation of its human consequences. To be effective, the criticisms have to be directed at the basic assumption of the isolation and independence of the “economic.”
6 Unfortunately, the example of Aristotle in taking a local segment and sector of life activities as universal and necessary, because “natural,” has been widely adopted in philosophical discourse—even by those who revolt at this special instance.
7 Since the word “moral” is used freely in the above, it may fend off misunderstanding if I say explicitly that, as the word is used, it stands for the human or “social” in its most inclusive reach, not for any special region or segment. I venture to add that the word “law” commonly added to the word moral supplies striking illustration of the rigidities due to this frame.
8 This is not to impeach the many valid and valuable inquiries carried on by working economists. The criticism is directed against the assumptions regarding the frame of reference that is the theoretical underpinning, which now stand in the way, practically, of a broader human use of their conclusions in guidance of human affairs.
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