This month national homage is being paid to John Dewey on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday; and it is with a sense of privilege that COMMENTARY presents here the distinguished philosopher’s challenging vision of the role that philosophy—the science of sciences—must play in the years ahead if it is to fulfill its responsibilities to its high mission and to our common human need. This essay embodies, in revised and expanded form, the message sent by Professor Dewey to the International Congress of Philosophy which met in Amsterdam in the summer of 1948.
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Few persons today would deny that philosophy has greatly declined in esteem and influence since the time when it was held to be the Science of Sciences and the Art of Arts. That its loss in repute and prestige has coincided with the transition from the medieval into the modern age would also be generally admitted. The decline of classic philosophy as science has kept even pace with the rise of the natural sciences of astronomy, physics, and physiology, which supplanted the metaphysical cosmology that prevailed before their rise and that provided the content of what was earlier taken to be science.
The falling off of philosophy as science does not compare, however, with its falling off as art. In the latter capacity it was once so supreme as to be in complete control of all the institutions of the Western world: not only the Church but politics and industry were subordinate to control by what, in effect, were sacred arts, consisting of regulations and prescriptions as to what was proper and right, proceeding, as they did, from those who claimed to speak with authority from on high. Following the scientific revolution came the industrial revolution, which in turn brought with it a large number of new arts which were profane as well as secular from the older standpoint.
The fine arts, as well as those of political and economic life, had indeed been so completely subordinated to religious-ecclesiastical arts that they seemed to be a part of the very order of nature. The new arts continually encroached on the old system until they crowded the authority of the sacred arts into a narrow place, where they became specialized and technical. The various divisions thereby created occasioned the dualisms that hold so prominent a place in modern philosophy. As matters of practical living, the divisions then created are now manifested in the present state of worldwide moral confusion and uncertainty.
The industrial overturn coincided with the series of events that constitute the political revolution of the past few centuries. We do not have the phrase “separation of industry and church” to parallel the expression “separation of church and state.” But for all practical purposes, the facts are identical in both cases. The word landlord, for example, was once full of the significance of the existing political order. Today it is rarely heard save in connection with keepers of hostels and owners of apartment houses. Moreover, replacement of the feudal overlord by the captain of industry speaks eloquently of the transition from the feudal age to the modern. Usury was once a sin; it now consists of those vast mechanisms for supplying credit without which the system of present industry and commerce would collapse into utter chaos.
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The change that has taken place in the arts of living has had an immensely greater impact upon the life of the masses than has the change in science. This latter change is, indeed, highly important as science. It transformed matter and motion, and, along with them, the quantitative measurement of change in space and time, into the foundations of natural science. Quite probably, this change is the greatest single intellectual alteration that has taken place since man appeared on earth. It represents a total inversion of standards previously employed in all matters of natural science. The subject matter of the science of Greece and of the Middle Ages was saturated with human and moral values. In substance, it was an organization of the materials of the commonsense world—a world impregnated throughout with aesthetic and moral values. The new physical sciences introduced a gulf between the “natural” and the human or “moral.” As an example, take the status of matter. In ancient science, matter was wholly passive; in the new scientific scheme it is positive and active, even, so to speak, aggressive.
In the classic system, change was of itself sure proof of lack of the immutability that belongs to things that “really” are. The central place of motion in the new science of Galileo and Newton displays the revolution that took place. In ancient science, nothing was less important than quantity. As a mere variation between more or less of something or other, it was a mark of the inherent vicissitude and infirmity of Being. Where would natural science be today without systematic use of measurement, direct and indirect?—But why continue? The cornerstones of classic Aristotelian “science” are precisely the things rejected by the constructors and developers of what has scientific standing today.
Nevertheless, while the intellectual revolution was extraordinarily vast, it was intellectual, and of prime concern only to members of the intellectual class; in contrast, the change in the arts of living came home to the mass of human beings right where they lived every day of their existence. The industrial revolution that followed the revolution in natural science altered the conditions under which human beings associate together. The change thus brought about was a change in the very order of institutions. The family, the home as center of moral education and industry, the school, the legislative hall, the relation of country and city, of people to people in both war and peace, underwent changes that were radical.
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With respect to the future of philosophy, it is important to note the changes that have occurred from time to time in the esteem attending the new science. In the earliest period, the “conflict of science and religion” marked the low rank given to science. The opposition of the representatives of the Church to science gave way later to a kind of truce. The practical advantages deriving from inventions, which translated scientific discoveries into instruments of everyday living, resulted in a kind of tacit division of fields. The regulation of all spiritual—of moral and ideal concerns—was assigned to the old institutions and beliefs. Control of affairs regarded as material was assigned—or at least permitted—to the new science. In philosophy, the net result was the creation of dualisms that are the intellectual manifestations of the divisions in life between that which is judged low and that which is regarded as supreme in value. Even today this insulation prevails between the subject matter of economic theory and the subject matter of moral theory. It prevails in spite of the fact that most moral problems are now what they are because of the conditions and problems of our economic life.
A much higher rating was given to the natural sciences in the time known as the “Enlightenment.” It was an age in which science was hailed as the dawn of a new age in which reason would take charge of human affairs, and which, superseding the age of darkness, would be an epoch of freedom, harmony, and peace. In the 19th century the revolutionary temper of the 18th changed into an evolutionary approach. Towards the close of the 19th century, however, the increase of power in the hands of industrial and financial interests and arts attached the taint of materialism to natural science. The growth of class, national, and racial struggles tended to attach to it the threat of the revolutionary and the radical as well. The net outcome of the historical changes here summarized was to accentuate a sense of inherent difference between moral knowledge and that which is merely “natural.”
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II
A Striking statement of this change of attitude at the end of the 19th century is found in the following passage, which is quoted from a writer who ranks as one of the most distinguished sociologists of the last century. Max Weber wrote: “What did science mean to the men who stood at the threshold of modern times? To artistic experimenters of the type of Leonardo and the musical innovators, science meant passage to true art and that meant for them the path to true nature . . . . And today? Science as the way to nature would sound like blasphemy to youth. Today youth proclaims the opposite: redemption from the intellectualism of science in order to return to one’s own nature and thereby to nature in general.”
The author then goes on to speak of the time when it was believed that science would and should replace even theology as the only dependable source of knowledge “regarding the ways of God,” substituting a genuine revelation for one that had been found to be spurious. He then continued: “Who—aside from big children found in the natural sciences—still believes that the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry would teach us anything about the meaning of the world?” He pressed home the point with a quotation from Tolstoy, which the latter, he said, affirmed to be the “clearest answer” yet given to the question of the bearing of science on the meaning of life: “Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: what shall we do and how shall we live?”1
The wording of the first sentences of the above passage suggests the German romanticism; but the fact that the remarks about science came from those who had no interest in attacking science from a theological point of view renders it the more impressive. The passage stands as an expression of the transformation of the earlier optimism about science into fear and pessimism; and of late the mere disillusionment with science has passed into bitter hostility toward it. Science seems now to be held accountable for almost all the serious ills that afflict mankind. The earlier view that science was to replace theology as guide for human life has been changed into the view that the only way out of the present turmoil is return to the theological control of life embodied in the institutions of the Middle Ages. It is even held that, if evil is to be averted, natural science must be subjected to the authority of theology.
It would be an easy matter to mention facts which show that the attacks now made upon science are exaggerated and one-sided. Nevertheless, the point at issue cannot be disposed of by drawing up a balance sheet of items that are to the credit of science and those that belong on the debit side. Two facts of importance would still remain unsettled. One of them is that the methods developed and the conclusions reached in natural science constitute the most decisive factor in life as it is now lived all over the world. The other is that the consequences of the entrance of science into life are thoroughly ambiguous and double-faced. There is probably no case in which the good achieved by the intervention of science has not been offset by some evil; while, on the other side, it may be doubted if even the worst of these evils does not have an attendant benefit. Even if this statement of the two-facedness of the effects of science on life is extreme, it is still demonstrably correct that the consequences for good and evil that are wrought are complexly inter-wrought. A policy of either wholesale praise or blame is futile. And what is much more serious, the one question worth asking is evaded: how does this doubleness, this ambivalence, in human consequences come about, and what, if anything, can be done about it?
A convincing answer to the first part of this question was recently given in an address on the occasion of an event that not long ago would have been one of unmixed congratulation. The occasion was the installation of the most powerful instrument now in existence for the exploration of secrets of the stellar universe. Yet the speaker, a man who himself has been connected with an organization for the extension of science, spoke the following words: “Knowledge and destruction have joined in a grand alliance. There is no way of telling what particular kind of knowledge is divertable to destruction; no classifying of knowledge into safe and unsafe . . . all knowledge is power; there is no segment of knowledge that cannot ultimately be employed to the detriment of mankind if that is what we elect to do with it.”
It would be hard to find a more definite or a more sobering statement of what I called the ambiguity, the two-facedness, of science with respect to good and evil in human life. It would seem, however, as if the speaker might have been expected to go on to point out that since science now plays the decisive part in life, the only way to reduce its destructive consequences, and to further the advantageous ones, would be to bend every effort to obtain the kind of knowledge still lacking. It would seem as if the one thing needful would be to arrive at a knowledge that would enable us to foresee to some reasonable degree what will come to pass when we put our now internally shaken and confused store of knowledge to actual use.
For one would suppose it to be a mere commonplace that without ability to foresee the consequences of our acts, we are unable to direct and guide the activities we perform. What possibility is there of making wise choices and conducting ourselves intelligently, instead of blindly, unless we can anticipate the results of what we do?
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We can hardly pick up a serious magazine today without finding a complaint that our technical knowledge has far outrun our human knowledge. Nevertheless, there are in existence two established institutions that claim to be in possession of the kind of knowledge needed, and they are more than willing to put this knowledge into effect when given the opportunity. Representatives of the Bolshevist Left claim that natural science of a kind so “natural” as to be materialistic needs only to be put systematically into effect, and that the source of existing evils is the existence of institutions that hold another faith. Representatives of the Catholic Right claim that they possess the supra-natural knowledge that is needed, and that the trouble is the evil will of human beings who refuse to submit to the guidance of that institutionally embodied knowledge.
It is to be expected that the representatives of these institutions should take the stand they do. But it is surprising that those who call themselves “liberals” should fail to see that the absence of a knowledge genuinely humane is a great source of our remediable troubles, and that its active presence is needed in order to translate the articles of their faith into works.
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III
The bearing upon philosophy and its future of what has been said is not difficult to perceive. A hiatus exists within scientific inquiry, and it is intimately connected with our present disturbed and unsettled state. It is for the philosophers today to encourage and further methods of inquiry into human and moral subjects similar to those their predecessors in their day encouraged and furthered in the physical and physiological sciences: in short, to bring into existence a kind of knowledge which, by being thoroughly humane, is entitled to the name moral. Its absence seems to explain the prevailing worldwide state of uncertainty, suspense, discontent, and strife. It would also seem to indicate with startling clearness that the one thing of prime importance today is development of methods of scientific inquiry to supply us with the humane or moral knowledge now conspicuously lacking. The work needs to be done. It is not of urgent importance that it be done by philosophers, or by any other special group of intellectuals. It is, however, in harmony with the claim of philosophers to deal with what is comprehensive and fundamental that they take a hand, perhaps a leading one, in promoting methods that will result in the understanding that is now absent. This type of activity at least seems to be the only way to halt the decline of philosophy in influence and in public esteem and bring about something like restoration.
The problem is certainly not that of putting scientific inquiry under the control of some external institution, whether it be that of the Right or Left. The first step is to recognize that scientific inquiry is still so recent as to be immature and inchoate. It is to recognize that to arrest the development of scientific inquiry at the present stage is, in effect, to guarantee that insecurity, confusion, and strife will perpetuate themselves. What has been accomplished in the development of methods of inquiry in physiological and physical science now cries out for extension into humane and moral subjects.
Some twenty-five hundred years ago the forerunner and martyr of European philosophy declared that artisans had knowledge of the material processes and the ends of the activities they carried on. In consequence of this knowledge they were enabled to act intelligently within a very limited sphere. A shoemaker, for example, possessed the knowledge which enabled him to tell whether what was offered as a shoe was a real shoe or one only in appearance. He knew this because he knew the purpose for which shoes were made, and, in addition, knew the materials, the tools, and the processes by which leather or any other material could be made to serve the end in view. In short, in his one limited field he knew what was good and what was bad. The larger and more comprehensive knowledge required by man for the conduct of his more important affairs was not provided by a limited type of knowledge. The existing knowledge served a man as a cobbler but not a man as a member of a community of free men.
Search for the kind of understanding that was lacking in Athens, Socrates termed philosophy, the love of wisdom. It was to be the Science of Sciences, because the knowledge sought for was so comprehensive that it would enable specialized and technical ways of knowing to be put to use in behalf of a common and shared good.
The similarity of our present situation to that in which Socrates propounded the need for philosophy as a search for a knowledge that was lacking should, it seems to me, be reasonably obvious. The difference between the situations in width and depth is great and obvious. The present world is rather a group of external associations than a community; nevertheless, it repeats on a vast scale the human conditions from which the Socrates of old derived his plea for a devoted search for a knowledge out of which would issue an art that would do for man as man what the lesser arts did for man in minor, because technical, ways. Those philosophers who are now subjected to criticism from their fellow-professionals on the ground that concern with the needs, troubles, and problems of man is not “philosophical,” may, if they feel it necessary, draw support and courage from the fact that they are following, however imperfectly, in the path initiated by the man to whom is due the very term philosophy.
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IV
At all events, and in short, we are here presented with the conditions for finding an answer to the question, “Has philosophy a future?” We are supplied with the conditions, but not with the answer itself. The advance made by science in a comparatively short time is tremendous, but it is partial and out of balance. Its ambivalence with respect to good and evil, to construction and destruction, follows directly from its partial and one-sided estate. I have referred to the complaints now common which are made about the scantiness of our present knowledge about human beings and human affairs in comparison with what is known about distant galaxies of stars and about the equally remote constitution of atoms. What is held in view by the complainants is clear. But there is something in the use of the word “backwardness” that may account for the futility of these complaints. For they seem to suggest that all that is needed is to travel further on the road that natural science has already taken; while others claim that all that is necessary is to subject the uses we make of the scientific knowledge now in our possession to control by the “moral” knowledge we already possess.
The assumption that this latter knowledge is adequate now and here to the present strains man labors under is reflected in the appeal to “anchor science to morals” found in the address quoted. If our present store of moral knowledge does not enable us to foresee the consequences. for good and evil that will issue from what, after all, is the most widely and deeply determining of all factors now operative in human life, the anchorage it can provide for science (the very science, by the way, that accounts for the need of anchorage) seems to be a shoal of sifting sands.
For how can the best moral will in the world provide secure anchorage for its good intentions if those intentions can be put into effect only through the medium of conditions, means, and instrumentalities which may—and which, it is admitted, in many cases actually do—pervert them from constructive to destructive purposes?
The situation at the very least offers to those who profess love of wisdom a reminder that in matters technical, physical, and now physiological, knowledge gives guidance that can be depended upon in forming policies of action in limited areas. This reminder may well be forcible enough to remind them also that their predecessors did a definite, a needed work, positively—and negatively against entrenched institutional opposition—and that without this work physiological inquiry could not have been brought to its present prosperous technical estate.
If this reminder does not suggest that they, as philosophers, have a certain responsibility under the present conditions, it should at least notify them that scientific inquiry is still only partial, one-sided, immature in its development, and that a highly important work in science remains to be done.
In its detail, the work they must do will be harder and slower than that already done. But the obstacles to be met in initiating the task are not as entrenched as were those met and conquered by their predecessors. The obstacles now to be met are mainly sluggishness, inertia, discouragement, exhaustion: a statement that applies both without and within philosophy. For while the opposition from institutional sources is vigorous and, temporarily at least, aggressive, its efficacy is not intrinsic, but is derived rather from the absence of organized active opposition on the part of those who might be engaged in the endeavor to rectify the existing enormous imbalance between that understanding which gives direction in technical matters and that which is absent just where it is vitally needed.
It is barely conceivable that the existing store of knowledge will undergo throughout the whole world the fate of slavish subjection to external power that it is already undergoing in countries under Bolshevist control. It is not conceivable that the course of physical and physiological knowing will be turned backward in any other way than by some such institutional distortion. What is most to be feared is a continuation of the policy of indifference to the extension, to the development of methods of inquiry into human conditions—methods2 so basic that their results (and only these) merit the name moral. The fact that the professed and professional guardians of morals continue to assert the adequacy of moral standards and points of view that were framed in a society upon which competent understanding of the physical and physiological conditions of human life had not dawned, is one of the obstacles in the way of what needs to be done.
The force of a movement that in its own day and place had a claim to regard itself as “liberal” and as humanly progressive is also obstructive to what needs to be done. For it asserted that all that was necessary was to permit “Nature” to do its own beneficent work. It worked to get rid of some institutional customs and laws that had become humanly oppressive. But it was also a policy of systematic abnegation of the intelligence as a regulative factor in human affairs.
The obvious bad consequences of the policy of drift that ensued resulted in what the unthinking regard as revolutionary: a renewed strengthening of political power to offset the inhuman results of leaving to nature the work of man as man. For the one dependable factor in any policy is an intelligent grasp of the factors involved—an end not to be attained without systematic effort to complete the present one-sided, unbalanced state of “science.”
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V
The obstacles are great; but as the two matters just cited indicate, they are those of inertia rather than of vitality; and in any case philosophers are not called upon to conduct that specific work of scientific inquiry upon which depends the ability of human beings to conduct human affairs with foresight and intelligence. Their predecessors did not execute the inquiries in physics that built up knowledge in that area to the point where that knowledge became its own adequate impetus. Their predecessors did however take the lead in attacking traditional factors that blocked the way. They contributed positively in no mean measure to development of standpoints and attitudes that passed, in the course of use, into more or less standardized instrumentalities of inquiry. Above all, their communications to the public furthered an intellectual climate which was unfavorable to old traditions and which welcomed with increasing eagerness the new scientific enterprise. Without such a cultural climate even the most important undertakings are born out of due season; they fade and die.
To mankind in general it makes little difference what group does the needed work; and, in any case, the work itself is much too large to be restricted to the members of any one calling. To philosophers, however, it is a vital matter that they have an active share in developing points of view and outlooks which will further recognition of what is humanly at stake and of how the necessary work may be initiated. What is called a climate of belief designates conditions so widely extended that they are no longer matters of book knowledge or the exclusive property of an intellectual class. The history of physical science demonstrates the large part that has to be played by cultural conditions which transfer what is called “knowledge” from a theoretical or intellectual possession into habitual, taken-for-granted, working attitudes of everyday use. There has of course to be willingness to hear and absorb, but that willingness is of a radically different sort from a conscious act of “will.” Campaigns of persuasion and education carried on by those of ardent faith are intrinsic parts of the effective initiation of any new movement.
The philosophers who promoted the new movement in physical inquiry did not find it necessary to disown or conceal their ardent belief that the success of that movement was of high human importance. I do not know why their successors are called upon to behave differently in a matter that directly, not in a roundabout way, concerns on one side the future of human welfare and, on the other, the continuance of misery, uncertainty, instability, and strife. When knowledge possesses men instead of being something held in possession by them, its passage into activity is a matter of course. And knowledge does not possess men until it is heavily charged with that emotive faith in its value which impels action. Generous imagination and wide and liberal sympathies are needed to carry on the required activities. But what are these attributes save those which the adventurous thinkers of the past have claimed to belong to philosophy as a supremely liberal pursuit?
There is rife a peculiar notion that to suggest that philosophers have a specifically human office to perform is to propose that they be detached from the intellectual activity appropriate to them and converted into social reformers. The notion is so peculiar that it looks as if those who put it forth are moved by a covert defense-reaction in behalf of the human remoteness of the sort of philosophical discussion in which they are personally engaged. For the work that needs to be done is at the present juncture primarily intellectual; while the subject matter involved is of such supreme importance that it—and, I submit, it alone—satisfies that claim to universality or comprehensiveness of scope which was made when philosophy was a vital factor in life. This subject matter is not something factitiously added by the zeal of those occupied with it; it is that which is important to man as man. The fact of its crucial human importance does not detract from its status as intellectual; it does add to its power to move to action, once it is appreciated for what it is.
Even were there space for a consideration of what philosophy will specifically consist of in the future, it would contradict what has been said to attempt even to list its articles of doctrine. What has been said is not said in the interest of any existing variety or brand of philosophical doctrine—though it is likely that some among contemporary forms of thought are further on the way and therefore more promising than others. What is at stake is a definite change in the direction of philosophical inquiry; and it is in the interest of the future of philosophy that the present discussion is conducted. What is said is said in behalf of a future for philosophy as broad and as penetrating as that claimed by metaphysical and theological systems in their days of utmost vigor; but a philosophy that is to be fully relevant to a new age in which issues flow from natural science, and not from a supra-natural world or from a philosophy purporting to deal with what is super-mundane and super-human.
The position here taken is not hostile to systems of the past in so far as they were humanly relevant in their own days; it is hostile to them in so far as it is now attempted, in the interest of some particular institution, to blow their dying embers into a transient glow. For the sparks thereby emitted will give neither light by which to see nor heat by which to convert what is seen into conduct that refers to the well-being of man.
Can philosophers hope for a more arduous task or for a more inspiring cause to which to devote their intellectual efforts than the intellectual struggle lying ahead?
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1 Cited from Max Weber’s Essays in Sociology, pp. 141-42, translated and edited by Gerth and Mills. New York, 1944.
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2 The word “methods” is italicized as a precaution against a possible misunderstanding which would be contrary to what is intended. What is needed is not the carrying over of procedures that have approved themselves in physical science, but new methods as adapted to human issues and problems, as methods already in scientific use have shown themselves to be in physical subject matter.
