During the last few years philosophers in the United States have been engaged in a profound searching of heart. They have been discussing the nature and justification of philosophy in our troubled world.
Among the causes for this current stocktaking may be mentioned a sense of futility among some philosophers about the relevance of technical philosophical issues to problems of war and peace. Even more decisive perhaps has been the demand from students, administrators, and other teachers for a philosophy by which human beings can intelligently live. They complain that there is no nourishment in chewing epistemological straw or in mastering the niceties of logical syntax. Finally, the reconstruction of the curriculum of liberal arts colleges throughout the country has brought the question of philosophy to the forefront. And so the discussion is on. Hegel defined philosophy as thinking about thought: a good deal of American philosophy can be described as thinking about what “philosophy” is.
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Some of the results of that thinking are conveniently summarized in the report of the Commission on the Function of Philosophy in Liberal Education, recently issued under the title of Philosophy in American Education (New York, Harper, 1945). The Commission, set up by the American Philosophical Association, was authorized to investigate “the function of philosophy in liberal education and in the development of a free and reflective life in the community.” The result of its deliberations, however, tells us very little about the relation of philosophy to the community. Its main emphasis falls on the justification of teaching philosophy in our colleges. (And here it does a workmanlike job: When it is properly taught, the study of philosophy gives a perspective, an integration, and an intellectual sophistication that no other subject in the curriculum can provide.) But on the main theme, the function of philosophy “in the development of a free and reflective life in the community,” very little is said except in a kind of weak minority report by one of the participants.
The chief reason for evading the problem flows from a failure among those professing philosophy to reach an agreement about the nature of their subject matter. The Commission’ report does not conceal this failure, but it seems baffled by it. And it cannot be denied that from the point of view of other disciplines, this is truly a scandalous situation. Philosophers vehemently disagree with each other concerning the nature of philosophy and, in consequence, rule one another out as genuine philosophers on the basis of their varying conceptions of philosophy. The spectacle of a convention of poets and artists who cannot agree about the nature of poetry and art—which the situation brings to mind—is innocent. Not so in the case of philosophers. For their vocation is to find truth, and without the possibility of some agreement there is no evidence of truth. Ultimately, “mind” must prove itself in a meeting of minds.
However, if one takes distance from the conflict of schools, the discovery will be made that—except for one group—there is a common subject matter for philosophy, in that most philosophers recognize this subject matter as falling within their concern, whatever else remains without. The genuine issue dividing them is not what does philosophy seek, but what methods are valid in finding out what it seeks.
The conception of philosophy common to all schools turns out to be the oldest of all conceptions. It is philosophy as a quest for wisdom. From Socrates to Dewey—with the possible exception of the extreme logical analysts in some of their extreme moments (Bertrand Russell perhaps)—insofar as philosophy can be distinguished from science, it has always been a survey of existence from the standpoint of value. And for all the mystifying talk about the nature of wisdom, when we attribute wisdom to any individual, we mean that he has authentic knowledge of the character, origins, and career of values. The really radical challenge to philosophy as a distinctive subject matter comes from those who deny that value-judgments are strictly meaningful, who assert that such judgments are no more than arbitrary expressions of personal feeling or wish.
The objection to this position is not that, if true, its consequences would be disastrous, but that those who hold it do not act as if they believe it to be true in the concrete value-judgments they make. Their scepticism makes their own behavior—even their language behavior—unintelligible. They do not act or talk as if they were giving vent merely to personal tastes and wishes when they condemn, say, the suppression of free philosophical inquiry in Germany or Russia, or approve the extension of scientific education.
These philosophers are in much the same position as those who deny that we have any justification for relying on the principle of induction, but who cannot take a step without using it. For all the intellectual ingenuity expended on it, such a position is not serious. Like all wholesale scepticisms, it fails to account for recognizable differences; it does not explain why some judgments are better grounded than others, why some actions will achieve desired results and not others.
The most important philosophical difference of our time can be derived from different answers to the question: How are values known, tested, and judged as better or more valid (or true) than others? The pragmatic answer involves a wholehearted acceptance of the methods of scientific inquiry as applied to questions of value. From this point of view, the possibility of winning agreement depends upon an investigation into the causes, interrelations, and consequences of values in specific situations of trouble.
This approach is rejected by Thomists—who are still the strongest representatives of supernaturalism—on two grounds. First, such a method cannot do justice to man’ “supernatural” end—God, grace, and eternal life; second, it cannot do justice to his “natural” end—contemplation. For the detailed assurance of the character of the first ultimately depends upon revelation; the second, upon a rational intuition into the metaphysical nature of man. The difficulties of these views are well known. The basic questions concerning the nature and existence of supernatural ends, and of what constitutes and who possesses the appropriate authority to interpret these supernatural ends, are begged. No method is indicated by which to negotiate conflict of authorities. “Rational intuition of man’ nature” is a compound of arbitrary logical definition and parochial psychology. At best, man’ nature indicates the conditions ends must meet if they are to be adequate. It can rule out certain ends as irrelevant or impossible: it cannot uniquely determine that any specific end is desirable.
Those who reject the approach both of authoritarian metaphysics and scientific method seek to validate values by “reason,” operating with an independent philosophical method of its own. In traditional metaphysical idealism, this philosophical method reflects the ultimate nature of Being, or the Whole of Reality, whose structure becomes the ultimate warrant of all we can know. The great difficulty with this view is that it never becomes clear why the Whole justifies one particular value rather than another. It usually terminates with the consolatory view that the real and ideal are ultimately the same, which is not helpful in determining what part of the real is not ideal now and why. Sometimes these difficulties are avoided by extruding reference to the metaphysical ultimates, and merely describing the method of reason as it operates in the quest for what is better in any specific situation. However, in this case, the description reveals no significant difference from the pattern of scientific inquiry. If, in fact, it is assumed that all men “ultimately” have the same values—an assumption that an empiricist cannot make in advance—what more fruitful method can be followed in the case of value-differences than a disclosure of the empirical causes and consequences of those differences?
In that variety of metaphysics which eschews idealism, values are immediately grasped by rational intuition once again, or “authenticated” in some purely personal way. Introduced to preserve the objectivity of value-judgments, this method is an open invitation to relativize and subjectivize them, since the nature of man can be defined in various ways, and no controls are indicated which would enable us to distinguish between responsibly and irresponsibly made judgments.
Whatever the difficulties with the experimental (scientific) theory of value, it at least indicates procedure that can be followed to increase the area of agreement among men. Although charged with justifying “relativity,” it actually seeks to discover the objective connections and relations between values and things, involving, like scientific method in other fields, nothing private, concealed, or sacrosanct.
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This may explain why the central issue in Current philosophy involves a reconsideration of the nature of verification. The attack on the scientific theory of value seeks to bolster itself by making out a case for the validity of a purely introspective method which yields knowledge of personal events that are in principle directly and indirectly inaccessible to verification by others.
In W. H. Sheldon’ criticism of the collective volume Naturalism and The Human Spirit (edited by Yervant H. Krikorian, New York, Columbia, 1944) in the Journal of Philosophy (May 10, 1945) entitled “Critique of Naturalism,” a strong plea is made for truths that are beyond any possibility of public confirmation. It is claimed that to put one’ trust in scientific method as the sole means of warranting assertions is to embrace a materialism that has no place for man and his values, not to speak of disembodied spirits like God and the angels. In a reply to Professor Sheldon by Professors Dewey, Nagel, and Hook (Journal of Philosophy, September 13, 1945), “Are Naturalists Materialists?” an attempt is made to show that naturalists would be unfaithful to their own method if they denied the presence of any event or quality which is actually found in experience. It is insisted, however, that there is a distinction between propositions asserting that the event or quality is experienced, and propositions that are confirmed by the experienced event or quality. The privileged position of the introspective observer in many instances is admitted, but this does not in principle preclude the confirmability by others of what the individual has experienced.
The dialectical thrusts of Professor Sheldon are shown to be valid only against a species of materialistic thought which naturalists themselves have been most active in criticizing, viz., that all events and all qualities of experience are wholly definable in terms of the physical. This is the doctrine of reductive materialism. In his rejoinder (Journal of Philosophy, April 11, 1946) Professor Sheldon denies that the issue is one of reductive or non-reductive materialism. The question, as he sees it, is whether the postulate of public confirmability can be upheld. The occurrences of private mental events, according to him, are in principle forever beyond the possibility of direct observation, and are therefore intrinsically inaccessible to scientific knowledge. But since we are convinced “that some introspections give surer knowledge than any publicly confirmed statement,” there is knowledge that is not scientific. Presumably knowledge of values is of this kind.
One might question whether science requires that the existence of things in principle be established by direct observation. Indirect observation is often sufficient. Some scientists have maintained that there are entities which, because of the effects produced by our measuring instruments, cannot possibly be directly observed. It may be granted that it is incumbent upon materialists to develop more convincingly the behavioral procedures by which men know or note the nature of things and self. This view of mind as “minding” goes as far back as Aristole, as J. H. Randall, Jr., following the lead of Dewey and Woodbridge, indicates in his pertly entitled counter-rejoinder, “A Note on Mr. Sheldon’ Mind” (Journal of Philosophy, April 18, 1946). But it is clear that insofar as establishing the objective validity of values is concerned, any view of verification which cuts off the mind, conceived as an immaterial substance, from its connections and continuities with nature and society, and which grounds values in a direct feeling of incommunicable certainty that cannot be controlled by any publicly verifiable effects or consequences, does not offer a firm foundation for making our world and life more valuable. In effect, it is indistinguishable from the doctrine which asserts that human values are nothing but private conceits.
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In General, one observes a much more militant attitude toward science and scientific method by philosophers and theologians than has been evident since the turn of the century. It is a source of legitimate pride that American philosophers have been completely cold to the plague of irrationalisms that have been hatched in Europe since the First World War. “Existentialism,” the latest hat from Paris, is being worn only by a few philosophical innocents in Greenwich Village. Nonetheless, a certain mood of agony and despair is observable among philosophers, and for the next few years it is safe to predict that the scientific attitude in philosophy will be on the defensive unless marked changes towards stability and mutual confidence appear on the domestic and international scene.
Symptomatic of this mood of disillusionment with scientific method and humanism is Professor E. A. Burtt’ article “Does Humanism Understand Man?” (The Humanist, Autumn 1945) in which it is argued that the scientific approach to man and social institutions is radically unable to understand the problem of “sin.” The problem of sin is not presented in the terms of traditional theology, but rather in terms of modern politics and psychology. Professor Burtt maintains that there is a fatal inadequacy in regarding the wickedness of man as a consequence of failure to train character, and to organize impulses into a pattern of rational habits. This view is often allied to the idea that the most dependable way to meet social evils is to reform the social and educational institutions under which human beings come to maturity. Together they express the optimism of the typical social progressive.
Such optimism, according to Professor Burtt, is extremely superficial. It founders on the fact that tremendously powerful “primitive antisocial impulses” can use social intelligence for their purposes long before they can themselves be softened. He points to the findings of psychoanalysis, according to which it has been “definitely and incontrovertibly” established “how deep-rooted in feeling and controlling in action our blind emotions and anti-social desires are.”
The intellectual force of these criticisms, which reflect the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr, is hard to gauge, particularly since Professor Burtt, eschewing prayer, outlines no alternative method of dealing with natural and human intractabilities. One would imagine that in any specific context, to say that a judgment about the use of intelligence or a specific social reform is over-optimistic is equivalent to saying that the judgment is unwarranted, and to that extent unscientific. To continue to reason with a man who refuses to listen is not reasonable. One would imagine that the cure for over-optimism in any situation is less optimism.
But how does this invalidate scientific method as an approach to understanding and controlling man and society? I find the psychoanalytic discoveries reported by Burtt far from “definite and incontrovertible.” Were they facts and not myths, all this would amount to is the realization that social reform and the use of intelligence is much more difficult than had been assumed. But who assumed that these things were going to be easy? That to change the world intelligently would be easier than to change it some other way? After all, even the sociology of Marxism, which prided itself on its scientific character, at the same time contended that class interests were so deep-rooted that they could never—or hardly ever!—be transformed from fatally antagonistic forces into mutually cooperative ones. And although Dewey has trenchantly criticized the orthodox Marxist doctrine for its unscientific character and its belief in the inevitability of violence in all fundamental social changes, he has himself indicated the conditions under which a revolution could be justifiable, i.e., sanctioned and undertaken intelligently.
That the scientific approach to social affairs and human evil is not necessarily optimistic is often overlooked by current critics of the humanist movement, which seeks to wed the scientific spirit and democratic ethos in a common faith. Yet there is in existence a huge and impressive corpus of writings, stemming from Pareto and other Machiavellians, which claims to be nothing if not scientific, and which reaches very pessimistic conclusions about the prospects of democracy. These conclusions are based on allegedly scientific analyses of man’ intelligence, his emotional drives, and the nature of all social organization. This is not the place to evaluate the evidence, but I cite it as an illustration of the possibility that a scientific approach to social affairs may lead to the conclusion that something believed desirable is in fact extremely improbable of achievement. If that is true, it is a gain to know it.
It is not a question of who is right or wrong here, but of the rational procedure in determining right and wrong. It may be perfectly true that this or that method of social reform will fail to cure this or that evil. Perhaps some other method of social reform will. Perhaps only a social revolution will. But until Professor Burtt says: “Here we have a social evil (war or what not) that can never be cured; it is an inalienable part of the heritage of man, etc.,” what else is open to him but the experimental quest for a more scientific program for coping with it?
What, indeed, are the alternative procedures of handling recognized social or personal evils? On the plane of experience we know what they are: routine, authority, drift, improvisation, and outburst. Professor Burtt recommends none of them, of course. Are there any others? Despite all the large claims made for the principles of metaphysics and theology, no one has been able to show that they provide concrete principles for the direction of social change.
Logically and historically any attempt to derive a social philosophy from a transcendent supernatural Being is self-defeating. The arguments and evidence have been presented over and over again but are persistently ignored by those who, having lost faith in a political religion, seek the same comfort in a religion of more orthodox character. Disillusion with curlent attempts to improve the world is often replaced by a new illusion that our ideals, because they are too good for the world, must be God’ own. But a Divine Power can never serve as the source of moral authority until we have endowed him with moral attributes. And our judgment of what is a moral attribute is logically prior to the discovery that the Divine Fower possesses it. Otherwise how could we distinguish between the voice of God and the voice of Satan?
The fratricidal social strife during the last two thousand years between believers in the same God testifies to the fact that theological beliefs are compatible with mutually contradictory social philosophies, that each party reads back its own social ideals into the Power it invokes in its support, and that the surest way of extending and intensifying social differences among men is to make these differences questions of theological truth or error.
It may seem like a wild paradox to those unfamiliar with or indifferent to the natural history of thought, yet it may be contended fairly that the resolution to apply scientific method to the problem of man and society is, in a way, an outgrowth of the tragic sense of life. This tragic sense of life is born of the insight that the conditions of human existence are such that man is always beset not by the problem of evil, but by problems of evils, some more stubborn and enduring than others, but all constituting a specific challenge to human courage and intelligence. The tragic sense of life is the realization that the human estate consists of a succession of problems, penalty for refusing to face which is often death; that not all problems can be solved at once; and that there is no guarantee that any problem will be solved.
It is the religious, not the scientific, attitude toward the world which demands either a guarantee that problems will be solved, or consolation for failure to solve them. Scientific method knows its failures in every historical period, but its failures have been dwarfed by its successes on the fields where it has been followed. This does not gainsay the fact that the triumphs of scientific method in studying nature have produced the greatest crises of our time in the area of political and social life. But only in social magnitude and dramatic import is the crisis new. In essentials, it is implicit whenever we sharply separate techniques from human purposes and ends, and overlook the fact that the moral problem is continuous with the social problem. Before rejecting the adequacy of the scientific approach to social change, we must at least use it.
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This distrust of the scientific attitude is especicially striking in the field of social philosophy. In his “Limitations of Science and the Problem of Social Planning” (Ethics, April 1944) and “The Scientific Solution of Social Conflicts” (Approaches to National Unity, New York, Harper, 1945), Professor Hans Morgenthau of the University of Chicago goes as far as to assert that the insistence upon the use of scientific intelligence in approaching problems of social conflict “retards rather than furthers man’ mastery over the social world.” This is a consequence of scientific intelligence’ threefold failure to understand the nature of man, the nature of society, and the nature of intelligence. Problems of the natural world may be solved by scientific method, but not problems of men. “Social problems, such as marriage, education, poverty, freedom, authority, peace, are of a different type. Growing out not from temporary insufficiencies of intellectual capacity, but from the wickedness which is of the very essence of man, they are never solved definitely. They must be solved every day anew. There is no scientific formula which could relieve us from this never-finished task” [my italics].
These and similar passages crystallize in a model form some typical misunderstandings of what is involved in the enterprise of scientific thinking and action in human affairs. No reputable advocate of scientific method has ever contended that a formula is a solution to a problem. Solutions involve commitment to a course of action. Action transforms situations; it literally re-solves them by eliminating the specific difficulties that provoke inquiry. The resolved situation may of course become problematic in turn. But by what canons of logic or common sense does it follow that because one problem is followed by a second we cannot intelligibly speak of having solved the first? A physician does not promise to cure his patient once and for all time by a specific form of therapy. The problem of health must be solved every day anew. Shall we therefore deny that a physician has cured an illness because his patient later falls victim to another? Cure-alls are for quacks, not for scientists.
What shall we substitute for scientific method, as inadequate as it presently is in furthering man’ mastery of the social world? No new method is indicated, but only a new way of speaking about them. What illumination is gained by speaking of social problems as resulting from the wickedness of man? For wickedness is not the cause of these problems: it is a name by which certain human phenomena are identified as evils whose challenge must be met. Let men be as wicked as you please, the problem is: what “causes” wickedness, what can be done about it, and how? Those who think like Professor Morgenthau dogmatically affirm that “wickedness” has no natural causes in any empirical sense of the term: it is a brute metaphysical datum. Those who think scientifically postulate, on the grounds of its historical fruitfulness, that “wickedness” is caused by determinate factors that are accessible to inquiry, and that knowledge so won is the beginning of doing something intelligent about it. All this without guarantees that “wickedness” will disappear.
Sufficient unto the day are the solutions thereof. Once the “problem of poverty,” to take one of Professor Morgenthau’ illustrations of “wickedness,” is given a specific formulation, so that it is actually recognized as a problem and not as a vague lament, it can certainly be solved by a system of minimum wage or unemployment insurance. But why must this solution also be a solution to tomorrow’ “problem of poverty,” which on analysis may turn out to be quite a different problem altogether? The first is a problem involving actual hunger: the second may involve questions of social and cultural equality.
Professor Morgenthau’ wisdom consists in lumping all problems together—those that have been solved, those that have not been solved, and those that have not yet arisen—insisting on the truism that there will always be problems, and then declaring that scientific method is helpless before this fact. What he overlooks is that it is of the very “essence” of scientific method that its solutions are piecemeal and successive, and that although piecemeal, it can, when the problem warrants it, take a large-sized bite. The very virtue of scientific method, the source of its greatest strength, is presented as if it were a deficiency. “Total solutions” are promised only by doctrines of salvation, and scientific method in this respect is not a rival to theology.
