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Social Consciousness : Renewed Theory in the Social Sciences R. E. Puhek Copyright 1971 & 1997 by R. E. Puhek All Rights Reserved Social Consciousness : Renewed Theory in the Social Sciences Contents PREFACE ....................................................... ......................6 INTRODUCTION: Humanizing .....................................8 The Collectivization of Thought The Objectivity of Science The Disappearance of Truth PART I. the Mind KNOWLEDGE 1. The Dualism of ...........................................14 Primary Knowing Secondary Knowing Reason and Symbol Four Ways 2. "Knowledge" as the ..............................27 Imposition of Partial Knowing Perception "Short-Circuiting" The Creation of Objects Symbols and Objects Value and Importance Danger Intensifying the Error Source of Knowing Error 3. Ego Established ....................................................... 41 Context of the Problematical Situation Creation of Self Self as Subject: Knowledge Self as Object: Society 4. Ego Overcome ....................................................... .50 Why Self? Control Survival Fear Issues and Answers 5. Impure Reason ....................................................... .60 A Priori Categories Synthetic and Analytic Judgments Logic Deduction Induction Dialectics and Existentialism PART II. EXPLANATION 6. Grasping the Shadows ...............................................68 Explanation as Instinct Linkage: The Instinct Satiated 7. Prediction ....................................................... .......75 The Use of Laws Corrupting Knowledge Part of a Part Causation Sense and Reason Understanding 8. Social Explanation in ........................................90 Contemporary Orientations Decay Mechanisms: Systems and Functions Reductionism: Economic and Psychological Combinations Failure of Past Orientations PART III. RENEWAL OF EXPLANATION 9. The Whole Arena .................................104 Separation, Unity, and Filters Five-fold Blindness The Object of Social Research of Awareness 10. Finding the Whole Arena ........................................117 Method of Renewal Realms of Light Realms of Darkness Dictatorship of Consciousness and Concrete Wholeness 11. Power and Society .................................................127 Power as Explanation Power as a Means and as an End The Tyranny of Means Power as an End in Itself Power as a Means to Rational Ends Power as No-Thing The Source of the Illusion of Power Conflict and Conscience Transcended Knowledge and Power Power as Utility or Mystery? Power as Concrete CONCLUSION: 12. The Need for Renewal .............................................145 Nihilism Young and Old Values Renewal ENDNOTES ....................................................... ................154 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................... ..........158 Preface As it has always been, knowledge today is threatened from two sides. It is threatened by those who wish to abandon it and return to the pre-conscious world of paradise and by those who would destroy it by enchaining it. The two sides, apparently contradictory, actually feed and thrive symbiotically upon each other. The victim of each is not the other but our life-blood: knowledge. Those professional intellectuals who on the surface today appear most to serve knowledge are the very ones who enchain it. Much in the same way as some medieval Popes claimed to be the “servants of the servants of God” and, by claiming that they were necessary servants, rather had made themselves into the masters of God’s servants thereby displacing God, so, too, modern professional “servants of knowledge” have made themselves its masters and the masters of all who would serve it. They have placed their chains around knowledge and forged them with resentment, jealousy, pretensions of pride, and hatred. The confinement of knowledge has compelled those who refuse to be enslaved to break from attempts to know and instead to soar in the illusion of freedom. Their abandonment of knowledge has only given them different chains. A new dark age is encroaching upon us and will overtake us unless knowledge can be freed from its chains and unless increasing numbers of us discover that the freedom of knowledge does not mean freedom from knowledge. Yet the chains grow tighter and tighter and flight from them more and more frequent. As dangerous to humanity as the freezing of knowledge in the physical sciences during the dark ages past might have been, in the dark age coming it will be evermore so. Now not only science but with it society will be completely frozen. In the past, however dark an age might have become, there was always a place “outside” society where thinkers could retreat with a lantern, criticizing, challenging, and finally changing what was established. Today the dark age confronts us with the possibility of an entirely closed system, a system that allows “criticism” perhaps but that utterly contains it, thereby negating it. The closed system might allow attacks upon parts of itself, but only on the basis of its own assumptions, values, and standards. We may even be at the opening stages of a dark age where freedom and criticism, and therefore, change, are not only contained but where the enslaving order actually lives off, needs, and fosters them in order overall to remain static. Confronting this problem, in no place it is more important to release knowledge from it chains than in the social sciences. During the past four decades, the movement in these sciences has been toward an ever more closed system of thought—allowing diversity and living off it, but only in the context of the established order. Unless social knowledge is freed from its chains, the flight of humanity will be away from knowledge and toward surrender to determinism. The need is urgent and the hour late. May we act to renew the freedom of knowledge now. In this work I have attempted to set forth an orientation to knowledge and explanation that stands as an alternative to current approaches. In discussing some of the major philosophical assumptions underpinning social science, I am seeking not to establish a philosophical system so much as to indicate the way that orientations color all of knowledge and the way that my orientation, simply because it is different, leads to a very different understanding of the nature of knowledge and explanation. A revolution is occurring in the social sciences, one that will be even more significant than the behavioral revolution that took place in some of the disciplines only a few decades ago. Consequently, I am writing with two audiences in mind: those who are already involved in moving with the change and those who recognize it but are not convinced that it is necessary, desirable, or even comprehensible. I write to suggest the necessity for renewal rather than “revolution” and, therefore, I call on the revolutionaries for integrity— for the new not as a replacement but as a fulfillment of the old; to the unpersuaded I hope to suggest the marvelous possibilities renewal may present for the solution of both perennial and peculiarly modern problems. The Introduction offers a general overview of the development of the social sciences illustrating the points where, when confronted with two equally valid paths, these sciences arbitrarily selected one. At the same time, it suggests how some of the generally accepted elements in the study of society, such as the sociology of knowledge, provide possible alternatives. The rest of the work consists of a way to renew the roots of the social sciences. .c. Introduction Humanizing the Mind Socially, personally, and mentally, we invent devices for coping with what is. Inevitably, the devices turn against us and become our own undoing. Our creations escape our control and instead control us. We make governments to serve us and, in the end, find ourselves serving rather than being served while the official “servants” of government tell us, “Ask not what your government can do for you but what you can do for your government”; we arrange ourselves for the efficient production of goods and gradually discover that the arrangements are first manipulated by special groups in their own interests and that eventually the arrangements take on a life of their own dominating everyone; we develop ways of relating toward one another personally, call these relations “roles,” then come to believe that the roles are really us and must be perpetuated lest an identity crisis should arise. These kinds of tragedies occur in every society and in every human being—the means, the invention, becomes the end and the reality. One of the most dangerous instances of this transmutation occurs in the realm of thought; there we create notions on the basis of our experience and from collections of those notions we build theories. The notions and theories are then adopted as reality thereby entrapping and enslaving creative thought, preventing it from coping with ongoing experiences. All this gives new meaning to the phrase, “the child is father to the man”—understood now not in the Freudian sense that the experience of the child determines the future psychological health of the adult. The offspring of the parents, the created, constitute their master. Concrete life is placed under the mastery of the object of past creativity. We can easily see that old ideas tend to dominate life expression; but we are blind to the domination of old ways of thought. Our minds find it nearly impossible to comprehend how the old patterns of thought bring death since our minds use these very patterns in trying to comprehend. For this reason, we must periodically suspend all rules of thought in order to discover whether our ways of thinking are in fact the true basis of the suffering we are constantly ascribing to specific ills or specific ideas and attitudes external to the thinking process. The scientific study of society has been guilty of encapsulating and enslaving minds and, consequently, has been equally guilty of the perpetuation of old social horrors as well as the establishment of new ones. While there is no doubt that individuals and society can be studied scientifically, faith in the scientific method of “behavioralism” misleads and is destructive of humanity. The Collectivization of Thought We usually imagine that the development of collective thought is evolutionary and progressive. Most of us automatically assume that patterns of thought have gradually become better and better. We believe that old patterns are discarded or adjusted only when they are found wanting and that, therefore, the outcome can only be gradual betterment. We offer, for example, great praise to the behavioral revolutionaries for freeing research into social reality from the prejudices of historical speculation much in the same way that social history freed thought from the confines of philosophical speculation. The historical approach allegedly liberated the study of society from biased value judgments. Students drawing conclusions from historical investigation were to seek out “the facts” themselves and to let those facts speak. Past indulgence in philosophical wool gathering led to the reaction of abandoning ideals for realities. Similarly, when social history deteriorated into historicism or into the unending gathering of data with little illumination and when it was seen that personal value judgments still crept in and clouded the investigators’ view of the “facts,” the movement to science occurred as a logical outcome of the original orientation to the objective facts. Something happened in the development of social thought, however, to lay the basis for the loss of what was most valuable in all earlier ways of approaching social reality. To characterize that change as succinctly as possible, thought became collectivized. The collectivization of labor during recent centuries has now been duplicated by the collectivization of thought. Industrialization collectivized labor by forcing workers to gather in large units and to specialize and simplify the functions of each worker. Similarly, the rise of the intellectual factory, the modern university, which has been indentured to the service of industry and even more so to that of technology, forces a concentration and a specialization of thought. The search for human truth has become the search for productively useful knowledge. Intellectual activity is now considered as “productivity.” The product of thought is the result of specialized, narrow, and yet intensely interdependent thinking. Even the major dilemmas of industry and thought are identical; for example, creative labor can only be the activity of a person—the outward expression of an interior state—and likewise creative thought must be personal because creative thought is the mind’s turning inward to personal experience. Just as the consumer has become king as far as material production is concerned and the productive worker has been enslaved, so, too, has the intellectual consumer become king and the thinker a slave—the creative element has been extinguished in both. At any rate, the collectivization of thought has established the intellectual “disciplines”—the equivalent of the bureaucratic departments of material industry. The truth is that thought cannot be collectivized or bureaucratized without irreparable damage being done to its essence. Creative thought is essentially the human mind’s attempting to grasp what is happening in experience. Since an experience cannot be wholly shared, collectivization requires that the unshareable element be relegated to the realm of the exclusively personal or to non-existence. Ironically, the cure for collectivization is likely to be denounced because it will sound like “collectivization” in the same way that labor and industry currently collectivized under so-called “Capitalism” fears Marxist “collectivization.” The consumers of ideas—the materially productive enterprises of economies and governments, their lackeys seeking jobs through education at the universities, and individual purchasers of goods—are regarded as most important. The servant of production has become the whole discipline of economics, or political science, or sociology, and so on, and the thinker has been made the servant of thought. Thinker is servant to thought, thought is servant to product, product is servant to consumer, and the consumer is enslaved by beliefs and thoughts that are either traditional or are produced mechanically by the demands of an abstract system purged of all human will. Thought used to be the servant of life; the thinker employed thought to serve life and its betterment. Now, life is enslaved to thought. The Objectivity of Science Even science cannot remain free by remaining objective. Its vaunted objectivity is in fact the very center of the corruption. To science, objectivity means the absence of the whole person from a judgment concerning reality. Although it may be well to eliminate personal prejudices from the investigator of society, the objectivity of science fails to remove prejudice; moreover, the price of its attempt to do so is the eclipse or elimination of part of human social reality since these things—such as the way that emotions are linked to external events or the meaning of love—are inaccessible to the collective discipline. Science may succeed in eliminating part of personal, prejudicial value judgments in investigation, but some personal value judgment are undeniably present at least as a basis of determining what is or is not a problem. No one can investigate something without believing the activity to contribute something worthwhile to life; therefore, selecting something as a problem entails a value judgment that affects the rest of the investigation. The same holds true for science itself. It may be possible to approach objectivity in minimizing the function of the person in investigation, but value judgments are also implicit in the notions of science itself and in the very identification of the various disciplines. Science is based on the belief that sense data gathered by mind can be the exclusive basis of truth—that we can discover a truth about human beings by empirical observation. This is a clear value judgment. Similarly, economics is constituted a discipline by a collective value judgment that the perspective of examining society as an “economy” is valid and valuable—that there is an economic reality, for example. A science may maximize internal objectivity—having made its assumptions, it may succeed in eliminating the values of the individual investigator, but it cannot achieve external objectivity—the collective process of making the scientific assumptions is a series of prejudiced value judgments. The important challenge to objectivity in the scientific study of society or of “nature,” then, is not internal or external. Science is built on assumptions that are not themselves objective. Once they have been accepted, objectivity can reign. These assumptions are not in the nature of prior scientific propositions openly asserted as applying to the nature of things. Rather they emanate from the epistemology of science. In other words, the kind of study and generalizing possible in science is based on a view of reality that is not objective. The assumption does not occur before an investigation begins so that it can be challenged, but rather the assumption pervades all of science from the foundation up to everyday research and operates like a filter the mind is required to look through. In error, then, is not the assertion that a scientist can be objective, but rather the claim that science is or can be objective. Although it is possible for scientists to extract themselves and their prejudices from their studies, this does not mean that their approach itself is objective in the sense of being a way of discovering a reality or truth lying outside assumptions and derived from objects. If looked at in this light, the objectivity of science turns out to be at best inter-subjective validity. Scientists cannot say, as a scientific generalization, that this room is warm because they feel warm. They objectify experience and say that this room has a temperature, measured on an objective, impersonal Fahrenheit scale of one hundred degrees. They can get away with this, however, only because statistically human beings in a room with a “temperature” of one hundred degrees will nearly always feel warm. What have the scientists done? They have turned a subjective experience into an objective one by a measuring tool that they say stands outside them. They have succeeded in extracting themselves, but their science has significance only because of the subjective and co-subjective impact of a condition they have noted. The ideal of objectivity depends upon the asserted existence of objects to be examined and the belief that scientists can extract in their studies everything from themselves except their scientific knowledge. In varying degrees, it is possible for them to do this, and they can assert the existence of external objects. Both of these steps, however—steps that are at the core of science and are pervasive within any study—may be attacked. While internally the scientific approach may be more immune from prejudice than most other approaches, externally, no way of knowing may be more prone to it. The Disappearance of Truth Faith in objectivity is connected with the loss of the search for truth. Even the most consistent follower of empiricism asserts that the facts are merely the outward sign of a theory and that it is the theory that brings us closer to understanding reality. Yet the empiricist would claim that the understanding deriving from theory consists only of the conjoining of a multitude of facts; the conjoining can be in error since it is an operation of human judgment, but the facts are never. This faith in facts must not go unchallenged. “Facts” themselves contain judgments and, therefore, a fact— while it might be “real” and accurate—is not true. Moreover, the judgments contained in simple “facts” or “observations” such as “the sky is blue” are based on a number of prejudices adopted by the knowers from the social situation that they are educated in. This situation is the basis of a belief in the relativity of truth. We have discovered that what is defined as true in our society may be defined as untrue in another; what is seen as a self-evident fact in ours is not rejected in another. So we come to accept cultural relativism—all is relative to the particular society we are born in. There is no truth beyond what our socialization allows us to accept and, driving the conclusion far enough, since everyone is socialized in a slightly different way, there is no absolute standard of truth aside from what I think is true. From the relativity of truth, we move to conclude first, the absolutism of society and social conditioning and, finally, to insist upon the absolutism of the immediate belief of the individual—since consensus or group truth is not truth if I fail to accede to it. That the absolutism of individual whim must end in chaos for the community is obvious. Absolute relativism is blatantly absurd. While everything is indeed related to everything else, everything cannot be relative. Relativism of good and evil or of truth itself is idiotic. Without independent standards no judgments could be made. The absurdity can be seen in the position of those who assert absolute relativism. They are saying: “I know everything is relative and that there is no standard of truth”—in other words: “the truth is that there is no truth.” Philosophy during the twentieth century has surrendered to fact or to empirical data. Distinctions pitting science against philosophy fell when belief in the existence of anything beyond fact or data collapsed. It is increasingly apparent that—with the exception of a few “mad” philosophers who still indulge in moral and ethical concerns or who fantasize about art and “feelings”—the surrender of the mind to science has been unconditional. Speculation of mind has taken a back seat. “Truth” is revealed by the facts in science, and philosophy must concern itself only with the communication of these facts, with analyzing language and other symbols. Language, some tell us, must be purified so that one word stands for one fact in reality—interpersonal communication as well as scientific communication will thereby be bettered. We are faced, in short, with nothing less than a total collapse of thought. We assert relativity on the one hand—telling anyone who challenges our lives, approaches, and disciplines that they have no right to criticize us because truth is relative --and on the other hand to insist upon the absolutism of ourselves, our society, or our discipline as judges of truth. For professional intellectuals, their science, their field, becomes the arbiter of truth. They must come to realize that goods and evils, truths and untruths are relative, but that they are not absolutely relative. The physical standard of goods and evils is the human organism—goods and evils are relative to it; the standard of truth and untruth is found in the human mind that reflects upon the whole of human existence. The human is a universal standard for humans—not me at this given moment in my passion but me as a whole historical and experiencing entity. Human good is relative to the human organism; truth about what is and what is good can only exist within the human mind and cannot exist within a discipline. Disciplines began as the communicators of truth from one mind to another, then they became the custodians of truth; now they hold truth in captivity— becoming mental contraceptives that prevent intellectual fertilization. The university is a home for truth; we have made it a market place of ideas. Pick and choose according to your preference, but take nothing too seriously for the open secret of this intellectual garden is that there is no truth. Where there is no whole human mind there can be no truth. Our minds must become whole, no longer compartmentalized into disciplines; they must remain personal, not collective; they must be devoted to truth, not to facts and things—in short, our minds must become human again. Chapter 1 The Dualism of Knowing Primary Knowing No problem for us is more complex, harder to confront, and yet more necessary to deal with than the existence of knowledge. The concept “knowledge” refers to a realm so vast, filled with so many colors, shades, and figures that even to use one term to encompass all of its diversity constitutes arrogance. While all of us, simply because we live, approach knowledge in some way, none of us has a greater obligation to understand for ourselves and explain to others what we mean by knowledge than we who presume to purvey it whether we be scientist or philosopher. Much of the confusion arising in science and philosophy emanates from failure to differentiate between levels of knowing. Human beings, in the simplest acts of living, demonstrate an automatic disposition to confuse and interchange the two levels of knowledge: the core level and the sign/symbolic level. The core level of knowing is the direct, undivided connection or, or unity among, things. (See Figure 1) “Knowing” at this level is identical to “consciousness” or “experience.” In this sense, even animals may be said to know. Use of the term “knowing” in this way may strike some as strange and unacceptable, but if we refer to historical sources, we will find that the term has often been interchanged with “experience” or “consciousness.” Biblical usage is most striking. Simply glance at the reference to the “tree of knowledge of good and evil” that is taken most often by contemporaries to mean a different kind of knowledge but most clearly refers to the first experience of doing evil. Or, more significantly, consider the longestablished term for sex in the Bible that is carried over into contemporary life as “carnal knowledge.” “He knew her” most typically means in this context that “he experienced her sexually.” Remember the Christian Bible’s Mary; when told she is to be the mother of Christ, she replies “How is this to be since I do not know man?” This kind of evidence found in language makes it apparent that ancient peoples were aware of something that contemporary peoples are less and less aware of: that the basic level of knowledge is given in consciousness and experience. It is not insignificant either that most of these references to knowledge have sexual implications. Knowledge is connection and genital sex is one form of connection. Children, ideas, inventions, are all “conceived.” The are all manifestations of unification or copulation. If you would soar on wings of “spirit” to the height of scientific or philosophical abstraction, you cannot avoid confronting the core level of knowledge; you must be aware that a successful flight depends upon the flier’s awareness of its origin. Our discussion here, like this flight, must begin with origins—an examination of all assumptions. We find, however, that we cannot suspend all assumptions before we embark, but must depend on some, at least for the sake of initial analysis. We must start, therefore, with the minimal assumption and proceed critically from that point—from what we know by assumption—to what we know having made the assumption. Epistemology is enmeshed in a fundamental circularity—we cannot speak of how we know until we have first settled a minimal ontological question; we must assert the assumption of something before we can know, and, at the same time, we must know before we can assert. Until we are able to suspend the distinction between ontology and epistemology, there is no way out of this dilemma; but might we suspend the distinction? Certainly, we can minimize the threat to knowledge posed by ontological assumptions and, perhaps, we can negate the whole dichotomy by standing upon the absolutely minimal assumption possible. The minimal assumption, which contains the first level of knowledge, is that consciousness or “awareness” is. Like any and every word, “consciousness” is based on generalization. Some have suggested that since the concept “consciousness” or the concept “knowledge” or the concept “experience” is not immediately given, we are not justified in adopting it as a fundamental assumption—that since the notions are not concretely and immediately experienced, they are abstracted from existence. Humans live and participate in may kinds of actions and inter-actions; social convention has us divide the universal character of those actions from the particular. We perceive paper on a desk and a telephone and any number of other “things,” what makes these perceptions different is “what” they are; what they have in common is that they are experience or “consciousness.” To begin philosophy with the assumption of consciousness is, therefore, to prejudice reality by taking one part of primary awareness and not others. As powerful as this argument seems, two objections point to its ultimate invalidity in this context. First, it is based upon an excessive attachment to the word “consciousness,” to a specific definition of the word, and to the way that the word is derived rather than to the concrete reality in experience. Second, although we may doubt any part of the alleged “objects” of consciousness, we are absolutely unable to deny consciousness without denying any possibility of philosophy or knowledge. Indeed, our very denial of consciousness could not exist except that it is an expression of the very thing it denies. Consciousness is admittedly, therefore, an assumption, but a necessary and justifiable one. Similarly, it is possible to argue that consciousness is always “of” something and that we are, indeed, being very abstract when we ignore the content. While it is true that consciousness is a generalization, “consciousness” is an abstract generalization only if we suggest that “we are conscious” or “we have consciousness.” That is, as long as the idea of consciousness refers to the general possibility or a union transcending “self” and “thing,” it is not abstracted from the particular but is a generalization about the particular. Our assumption called “consciousness,” “awareness,” “knowledge,” or “experience” initially avoids the challenge thrown before all theories of knowledge since Hume and Kant. Arguing that “There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience,” (Kant, 1949, 24) Kant proceeds to suggest that it neither ends with nor contains only what is given by experience. What has happened in Kant and since Kant is confusion between the levels of knowing. Kant clearly speaks of the first level of knowing when he says that all knowledge comes from experience and, just as clearly, he speaks of the second way of knowing when he refers to going beyond experience or to the a priori in consciousness. The problem of the a priori enters only at the second level of knowing: the level of sign and symbolization. Unlike at the secondary level, which admits of multiplicity in forms of knowledge, at the primary level the three forms of knowing that emerge at the secondary level—sensing, reasoning, and believing—are one. When the “word” emerges, whether in the shape of “signs” or “symbols,” then and only then is the single act of knowing transformed into parts. At the primary level, belief (or knowledge without the support of sensed facts or logical reasoning) cannot be separated from sensation and logic does not exist. Two vital aspects of first level consciousness must be noted before we turn to the second level. The first and perhaps most startling point is that at this level there is no such thing as truth and falsity or error and correctness. What is in consciousness is. Were we hypothetically to suggest that perhaps it is not— something only we who stand in the second level could suggest, the response would be that the given in primary consciousness cannot be proven since proof requires an appeal to the tools available only at the second level where “facts” are sensed and thought applies “reason” to them that is built upon the first. Moreover, were there error at the primary level, we could never know it. Were error there, it would make no difference to us, and it would be wastefully useless for us to dwell on the possibility. The second point follows from the first. We can never escape the primary level. We may concentrate upon, and be entirely aware only of, the secondary level, but that level is built upon the primary. Without awareness of the primary, we are building knowledge castles without a clue of a blueprint to the foundations. Time and experience will destroy them. We, moreover, may be aware only of the secondary level (may speak and think only of it, for example), but we must, because of what we are, live in the primary level as well. For instance, I twist my hands. There is feeling, and messages flow to my mind. But I am unaware. My attention is elsewhere. I can become aware of the twisting by stopping the second level focus or suspending it. Refusal to recognize life on the primary level may bring both intellectual and personal tragedy. In intellectual history, this split has been the basis of torment between our higher and lower “natures,” animality and rationality, heaven and earth, mortality and immortality, and time and eternity. Former theories of knowledge have been unable to break through the ontological barrier. That is, they could not move into the realm of “what is.” The theory of knowledge, epistemology, could never get to “what is,” to ontology. This was because the theories enclosed themselves on the second level; all “knowledge” was defined as being second-level knowledge. There is, however, a realm for us where “what is” and “what is known” are one—this is the primary level. Discussing the primary realm is hard, first, because most philosophers are excessively attuned only to the secondary level and, second, because a sketch of its operation or even existence must be presented in second-level “language” for the sake of communication. Our statements concerning it are all made by means of tools such as words and symbols that are based on assumptions valid only on the second level. To express the first level, we might say that consciousness is full or that it is. First level knowledge is like the knowledge of being in love. It is known fully and well. It is immediately known, sensed, believed, and thought, simultaneously. Consciousness is like love when love is “known” on this level. It may well be that all most of us now have left of awareness at this level of knowledge is what we call our “emotions.” Joy. “What is it?” asks second-level me number one. “Well, your heart beats faster and other vital functions are speeded up,” second-level me number two replies. “But why does this happen and what does it mean?” “Do you know?” I only know it is. Second level is dumfounded into denial, repudiation, and embarrassment. Secondary Knowing 1. Reason and Symbol/Sign. By dividing knowledge into two levels, we hope to stress the enormous difference between them and particularly the way that this apparently theoretical distinction constitutes great differences in the actual quality of knowledge. Although symbolization is one of the significant activities of the second level, the symbol/sign is not it only or even its most important attribute. It is at this level that reason first enters as a mode of knowing; all the fundamental contradictions such as time and eternity arrive; logic comes, along with truth and error; and above all we have the emergence of consciousness aware of consciousness and consciousness differentiating among and getting caught up in confusion about the various ways of knowing. (See figure 2) The first and probably fundamental act of the second level is consciousness being aware of itself and the corollary, consciousness being aware of the fact that it is partial. To understand the rise of consciousness (not to be confused with self-consciousness), we must consider a simple, even mechanical, hypothesis as to the physical operation of consciousness on the first and second levels. Primary consciousness probably arises when electrical impulses pattern themselves through the brain. That is, “joy” may be pervasive (heart rate elevation, weather, sky, trees, etc.), but “it” is nothing until “it” continues “its” activity into the whole of nondifferentiated or simple (the amoeba, for example) biological units, or into the brain of differentiated or complex biological units. When this pattern in its last phases in the brain can be isolated and can repeat itself without the rest of the environment making its contribution to the pattern, memory emerges. It is likely that this isolation occurs first in the form of dreams (which many animals seem to share with us), and that when awake the pattern-preserving brain is involved in the whole pattern and not just its selfisolated part.1 (This is precisely why dreams are a key to unconsciousness—they connect the organism to the whole of what has happened.) But then along comes the human being, and for the first time isolated patterns are introduced into awake life perhaps still in the form of, and still called, “dreams” existing “out of time” and manifesting themselves as “art” or “creativity” to us. From that point on the struggle still going on today began—the struggle between the use of the awake state of dreaming for connecting back into the environment or the use of the environment to perpetuate awake dreaming. Henri Bergson’s ideas are most relevant here. Bergson sees memory or mind-operations as not significantly different from actions of the body. He indicates that “there is only a difference of degree, not of kind, between the so-called perceptive faculties of the brain and the reflex functions of the spinal cord.” (Bergson, 1962, 299) This position substantiates the belief that all externally observed bodily operations are instruments to consciousness. Later he points out that the process of memory is one where consciousness thrusts itself into a position permitting the brain and body to move forward toward “external” actions but stops such actions at the last moment. (Bergson, 1962, 319) This indicates the importance of the concept of the “replay mechanism” in explaining human knowledge. At any rate, from primary knowledge or consciousness we move to secondary by means of memory, and, it must be noted, not just accidental memory that we may fall into like a dream, but memory that can be deliberately stimulated. Once this act of memory occurs so too does the awareness of the partiality of consciousness. We become “aware” and turn into “fallen” creatures” when we start to comprehend how limited our knowledge is; the limitation is created by deliberate control, and we become aware of it when we can deliberately evoke different patterns of knowledge. We can recall a situation for ourselves when we were less or at least differently knowledgeable than we were in another situation. The existence of partial consciousness is established by memory and its deliberate control. The central factor is the possibility of attention. Like most of the attributes of second level consciousness, attention has roots going far back into primary consciousness. Undifferentiated awareness means the world is too much with us, and the process of evolution seems to be one constantly moving to filter out more and more “environment” in a way that makes possible for us to focus our attention more independently from it. The development appears continual, but difference in kind and not just degree emerges to identify second level consciousness. The Problem is that intentional attention brings us to scrutinize the parts ever more minutely, but the more we concentrate, the more what we seek to know disappears and the less there is to see. We begin to see “patterns” in our actions. Before, we “knew” them by doing, by being involved and co-terminus with them. The process of increasing knowledge on this level had to be very slow since connecting a new action with an old one could only begin as an accident. If we look at ourselves today we can still find the problem that attention presented to the expansions of our primitive ancestors’ knowledge. Today, as then, it is hard for us to do two “things” at the same time; a typical example is turning our hands in opposite directions. We can put ourselves into or “know” only one thing at a time. We can, however, learn the trick (deliberately only today) of doing two at once by making the two operations one—by discovering how they fit together into one continuous motion. When memory can be evoked at will, we can see, first that our awareness is partial (in the beginning, we can see we can do things we could not do before) and, second, that memory patterns can be juxta-positioned at will as action patterns might. By putting memory patterns together, we start to think. Until after another huge step, however, we are able to do this only on a very simple level; we can combine our memory “sun” with memory “fire” and develop the relations with fire for warmth and light. What is gradually emerging in this process is, of course, the power of abstraction—the ability not only to remember, to “replay,” prior primary knowledge but also to cut it apart from other pieces of our memory and put it together with others. Thus comes abstraction and communicable abstraction—sign/symbolic abstraction— and along with both comes time. Awareness that primary knowledge is partial in the sense that sometimes it is there and sometimes it is not brings time. The eternal present is lost as is the exclusiveness of primary knowledge; we decreasingly, but still occasionally, catch glimpses of the lost eternity when we put ourselves completely into actions. Time is discovered, but eternity still reveals itself in two places. The first is when time is lost in the midst of action—the loss is increasingly limited to religious ceremonies of ecstasy but also occurs in the many tasks we completely commit ourselves to (some kinds of work, sex, food, etc.). The second is the transcending of time through memory itself and through memories highest act, the Name. We are now aware that our actions occur in time and even that our memory patterns are in time. But from these actions and patterns we can isolate similarities; from each primary knowing of trees, we can have a memory, can put all connected aspects together, name them “tree,” and thus “create” an eternal tree. Or we can abstract all the common attributes of humans and call the abstraction “human,” or we can abstract all the pleasing elements of each of these and call them “goods” or “gods,” or we can take all things, see commonalty in their existence (our consciousness) and create the abstract of all existence ("I am who am"), God. We can do, as Plato is alleged to have done, leave “the world of the senses” and venture “out beyond it on the wings of the ideas, into the empty spaces of pure intellect.” (Kant, 1949, 29) Western religions have tended to emphasize the eternal-transcendent god while eastern religions have emphasized the eternal-present god. Nearly all religions have contained some combination, and religions claiming and attempting to achieve a universal appeal have had to find a balancing combination. Christianity has suggested that the goal is the transcending of time in eternity but has stipulated that this is to come only after proper development of each of us toward the central concreteuniversal, the “good-man” or the “god-man.” It is most important that we be clear about what we have just concluded concerning first and second level knowledge. The primary level places the organism in complete unity with the environment—in fact, the distinction between thing and environment is impossible. The emergence of the second level can be seen both in ancient humans and in some isolated cultures still today. “Primitive” knowing contains to an extraordinary degree the sense of “participation” in the whole. The movement of second level knowing and second level living, living contained within memory, is one that gradually destroys that participation. Even prior to the amoeba, the being “knows” its environment because it is its environment. The complexifying of life and thought is a process of enlarging nonparticipation. The cell develops a membrane and the mind develops similarly: they both increasingly filter out environment and thereby allow for increasingly concentrated attention. Second level consciousness allows us to connect ourselves more and more tightly not to the whole but only to pieces of the whole. In other words, the price of second-level consciousness is division, a turning away from part of life and consciousness and instead paying attention to and living and knowing only another part. Consequently, second-level consciousness establishes and creates unconsciousness. But we still must live on the first level. Until now, theories of knowledge have been excessively concerned with “knowledge” or “consciousness” alone—and by those terms have meant almost exclusively only the second level consciousness and knowledge. Since the “unknown” on the second level can be the “known” on the first level, however, theories of knowledge must pay more attention to the unknown or to unconsciousness. They have been too concerned with issues such as the nature of second level knowledge alone or with the constituents of that knowledge, and have been too little concerned with the nature of first-level consciousness. The second great stage in second-level knowing arises when we move from historical memory and word to their concrete forms. For our early ancestors and for early second-level knowing, memory is primarily of the historical empirical event and names evoke this historical event. (Levy-Bruhl, 1926, 108-109) When we today look at how our ancestors used memory and especially written names, we see through eyes that project our own prejudices. We may charge them with being extremely “spirit"-oriented. In fact, however, the very spiritualism we see is an extreme empiricism. During an ancient dance when a dancer puts on the mask of a dead ancestor, that symbolic visage evokes the historical empirical presence of the ancestor. The exterior is all. The mask evokes, not “spirit,” but the historical presence.2 This tendency differentiates the early stages of second-level knowing from the later stages. In subsequent stages, memory and word become abstract. One the basis of abstraction only do we develop “spirits". Most importantly, we develop belief in essences. The impression that “things” are permanent despite their external transitory appearance becomes possible only then. An analogy from the animal world may be instructive here. It has been noted that apes, as inventive as they are, will be frightened away from something they like very much when it is presented to them under an unusual appearance. They seem to delight in eating bananas, snatch them and peel them when presented whole; but if the banana is half-peeled before it is handed to them, many retreat from it in fear. (Scheler, 1962, 43) They have not been able to abstract “food” or “banana” or even “good” from the surface appearance. Similarly, when I, as an ancient, suddenly see my good friend become angry, I say that a new being (evil) is present—the surface changed and, therefore, the whole changed. The discovery of evil as opposed to non-good, which is really nothingness, occurs when I expect a good (my friend, for example) but an absence of that good appears where the good friend should have been. The break into the abstract symbolic universe seems to have been perfected first by the Greeks, reaching its highest point in, and continuing from, Aristotle. With the Greeks we find the development of name and memory not of the concrete but of the abstract. This seems to take two paths: the “artistic” dramatic way of using words to refer to the abstraction from the whole of experience on the internal side (beauty, truth, justice) and the “scientific” way of using names to refer to the abstraction from the whole of experience on the external side (measurement, causation, sensation). The difference between the Greek and the earlier use of names appears to be that the earlier humans used names to connect themselves to the historical whole while the artistic Greeks employed names to the historical part (historical but abstracted from the whole); and the scientific Greeks tended to use names to refer to the abstract alone. The word throws the earlier humans back to the concrete whole of their ancestors, for example; it flips them wholly out of time into a timeless realm by means of repetition of an heroic life or era. The Greek symbol, expressed in the form of sculpture, for example, throws the human back to the concrete feeling of part of what is and was; earlier Egyptian sculpture, by contrast, seeks to represent the real—the whole human including both shoulders—while Greek art is the first to represent abstract beauty. Symbol for the scientific followers or interpreters of Aristotle tends to throw us back not to the historical part or whole but to the entirely abstract. “Beauty” begins to lose all historical referent.3 2. The Four Forms of Secondary Knowledge. The end product of all this as far as problems of knowing are concerned is that the primary knowledge, which was in essence one and unerring, becomes secondary knowledge, which is multiple and, therefore, liable to mistakes. Four distinct forms of knowledge emerge. The first is “belief” or acceptance as known of what is not known by any of the other three. The second and third are, respectively, knowledge in the form of external sensation and knowledge in the form of internal sensation or “feelings.” The fourth is what we have already been discussing, knowledge in the form of thought, which consists both of memories held in the form of names or words and the process of using them to think or to “reason.” What is given to us in each of these modes is given directly and unerringly. What we receive as “consciousness,” “experience,” or “knowledge” can be intercepted in faulty ways. Knowing as belief is the most disputed and confused of the four. As usual, a principle source of the confusion and disagreement is different definitions of what constitutes belief. Charles Pierce suggested that readiness “to act in a certain way under given circumstances and when activated by a given motive is a habit; and a deliberate, or self-controlled, habit is precisely a belief.” (Pierce, 1960, 480) John Dewey hinted that belief was the end of inquiry; when one could “remove the need for doubt, he had fulfilled his scientific enterprise—he had produced a belief.” (Dewey, 1966, 253-255) If we consider belief as a way of knowing, we avoid many of the problems of the pragmatists. Pierce’s understanding of belief induced him to try to connect action with self-control under the term “habit.” He, therefore, concluded that there was some kind of knowing agency called “self” standing above belief and deciding whether or not to assert it by voluntarily pursuing a habit. Pierce misses by this the reality of the unwilling believer—when we feel compelled to assert a belief whether we wish to or not. Pierce indicates by his position an attitude that is not a way of knowing given to the believer but a habit concocted by the knower who derives his knowledge elsewhere. The quotation from John Dewey asserts the existence of a single place for belief in science; his position is dangerous because it leads to a method of inquiry producing principles of belief—if the goal of science is to end in satisfied minds and belief, then science can well be stultifying to free research. But, more important, if belief is likely to be involved at the end of research, it is only because it was present at the beginning as well. Belief is merely the acceptance of what is not know by any other way of knowing. Therefore, we believe in the existence of consciousness—and scientists do too, but we and they cannot sense, feel, or reason that consciousness exists since belief precedes sensing, feeling, or reasoning as ways of knowledge. Belief lies not at the end but at the core of any scientific study. It is, in fact, different from all the other ways of knowing because it is the bridge between the primary level of knowledge and the secondary. All the other forms have to be rooted in the primary for their validity; belief is the expression of the trunk of the tree of knowledge that links the three major branches with the primary ground they rest on. Very similar to belief as far as the function attributed to it by pragmatists is intuition. Intuition seems best characterized as a direct slip into primary consciousness but one that then comes back and expresses itself in terms appropriate to secondary knowledge. Moreover, belief seems close to the demands of general reason while intuition seems closer to the nature of particular sensations; it occurs when the outer senses and feelings slip into their pre-defined ground. Thus, as under primary knowledge, I might suggest that I know by intuition that I am loved and I realize quite clearly that this is different from saying that I know by belief that I am loved. Indeed, someone is likely to indicate that love merely believed in is love deceived. Empiricists both in and out of the social sciences have attempted to sidestep the issue of intuition. They have done this in a variety of ingenious ways, but most often they suggest that we use intuition in a leap of discovery and then apply science to gain knowledge of what we first “guessed.” To characterize intuition as an imaginative leap or a wild guess about the nature of things or the solution of a general problem, however, is misleading. Although intuitive judgments may take the form of accidental guesses handmaiden to empirical research, when experienced, intuition is more than a guess; it is a knowing. Moreover, confining intuition to the role of an aid to empirical research loses sight of the claim made by those employing intuition that it constitutes understanding of realities not knowable in any other way. For example, I find myself suddenly docile in the presence of a court of law; the positivist might explain my docility by referring to fear of what might happen to me; but even though I am convinced that there is no danger to me, I may still be reverent. This feeling may well be the essence of my relationship to the court and yet the positivist is unable to understand it. I have an intuitive grasp of being controlled, but neither empirical fact nor “subjective” emotions can account for it. The existence of the mode of secondary knowing called sensation is hardly challenged anymore though grave questions can be raised about its nature. Knowledge does come via sensation, but what is the nature of the knowledge thus achieved? Usually, we assume that sensation somehow brings a sensing unit into contact with something else. A number of questions immediately confront us. The central issue in each concerns the dividing line between the sensed and the sensor in sensation. An assumption long held had been that sensation was of something outside the sensing ego, but Hume pointed out, on the contrary, that the sensing ego somehow imposed categories upon what was sensed—there was an interplay between sensed and sensor in the act of sensation and the dividing line between them could not be neatly drawn. Kant attempted to set up some sort of line. We today have increasingly ignored the issue, taking sensation as a given without being concerned about the extent of participation by either side. This has led to disputes over the accuracy of sensation since sensation was used to learn about and control what we assumed for convenience’s sake to be external objects. The dispute over external object and internal subject in sensation is still not over, but Bergson is illuminating when he declares that the sensor is neither the perception’s “cause, nor its effect, nor in any sense its duplicate; it merely continues it.” (Bergson, 1962, 307) Of all the modes, reason is the most characteristic of the secondary level of knowing. Pure intuition, sensation, and belief experience “knowns” as immediate givens. Reason interferes with what is given. Although, unlike the primary level since error is possible when division into the secondary modes occurs, the knowledge in the other second level modes is direct and given. Reason as a mode of knowing, however, is indirect and the product of activity. It can arise only out of the givens of sense, intuition, and belief, and it must be labored after by means of processes of abstraction, naming, conjunction, and division. Confusion over their nature often leads to dispute over the other ways of knowing, but no mode is more confused and debated than is reason. The act of reason we have in mind here is the one we have already referred to—the act that abstracts from particular sensations, intuitions, and beliefs and through names creates universals—the act that, therefore, compares the particulars and finds similarities and differences. Knowledge derived from the mode called “reason” abstracts or isolates parts of what is directly knowing and may consider these parts as “essences.” A related and more dangerous confusion is that of considering “knowledge” not only as exclusively the domain of “reason” but also as coming through the process of verification to a position of acceptance in society. Thus, knowledge is seen as the end product of long investigations under guidance of reason and its processes. This position, of course, reverses the order of things; it places the knowing firmly on the foundation of the unknown. We have already indicated our hypothesis of how thought or reason emerges. The primary level of knowledge becomes conceptual and makes separation into sensation, intuition, and belief possible only when consciousness remembers and replays primary knowing through the instrumentality of the body-brain. The replaying of the primary experiences makes comparisons possible and comparisons permit abstractions and, along with as well as permitting abstraction, the abstract name/symbol appears. The abstract symbol or its systemization in language “is so intimately connected with the products of our intelligence that the Greeks used the same word to designate both language and reason,” (Cournot, 1956, 307) and many, including Susanne Langer, have concluded that the “essential act of thought is symbolization.” (Langer, 1951, 27) The symbol is the world-body-brain expression of the commonalty noted in the abstraction from primary experience. The symbol is always metaphoric; and, since it is, all thought and, therefore all science and philosophy is no more than metaphor. It is the expression in a form knowable on the primary level of the universal abstraction. The speaking of any word is the materialization of abstraction. Every word is a symbol; every word is a universal not a particular. The symbol is developed by “individuals” but only within the context of society. The development of the human individual recapitulates that of the human race, but, unlike with regard to most other animals, this recapitulation occurs less within the biological individual than within the group since much of human development involves the creation and transference of symbols. The key to the development—the rapid development, or, as some like to call it, the superordinate progress—of the human race has rested not only in the growth of abstraction and symbolization but also in the necessary diversity and contradictions ingrained into the human individual because the learning of symbols comes from a large number of diverse sources. Vast diversity is possible because of symbolization, but also whatever tiny diversity exists within the smallest of groups is introduced into the single human individual because of symbolic learning. If the key to biological “evolution” or “progress” is physical contradiction, the key to human evolution or progress is symbolic contradiction. This is precisely why the contemporary era has made tremendous leaps and why the generation gaps loom so large—because communications on the general level have exploded in our time and have drawn together huge, contradictory symbolic systems. The progress of the whole now depends on the integration of these contradictions; upon achieving integration, the progress of the whole will eventually slow—and perhaps slow drastically unless symbolic creativity can be increasingly fostered among us. The problem of future generations is likely to be not the dangers of world diversity and conflict but the horrors world unity and consensus. Chapter 2 “Knowledge” as the Source of Error With all the diverse tools of knowledge at our disposal—mind, outer senses, inner senses, and belief— it seems strange that we should be so vulnerable to fundamental error. Yet we know we do err—that one day we accept one truth and the next adopt its opposite. Paradoxically, the source of error resides in the very instruments developed to avoid error. One thing must be made clear before we undertake an exploration of error. It may have seemed that somehow the senses and belief could be relegated to the position of the primary level of knowing and reason could be enthroned exclusively on the second level. Although there is a distinct difference between thought and the other three modes of knowing in as much as thought is indirect or deliberative in process and the others are direct, once the secondary level emerges through abstract universals, all knowing is decisively transformed. Thought as abstract universalizing constitutes a fall we can never fully return from. Never more can knowing be pure; thought darkens—even as it enlightens—it all. Paradise lost cannot become paradise regained, but through the renewal of knowledge the differentiated world can become a good world, a redeemed world—a new heaven and a new earth. The fall into abstraction definitively alters knowledge in two ways. First, by differentiating among, and in a sense creating, the separate modes of knowledge and, second, by delivering error into knowledge. Both differentiation and error arise when time and consciousness of consciousness emerge. Time is a development of second level knowing. Deliberate memory creates time by comparing the not-known with the known: “First I knew not; then I knew; then I knew that I knew not.” Now reflecting upon itself, consciousness questions how it knows and the answer echoes: “It is just accepted” (by belief), or “It is just known and cannot be doubted” (intuition), or “It is given by what is standing in front of me” (sensations), or “It is known by comparing two or more other knowns” (reason). Thus, change and time establish error and accuracy; not only is consciousness aware that it was filled with what it was not before (change and time), it is also aware that it is filled with the opposite of what it was before—not only did nothingness become something, but also something become something else. How can we account for this contradiction? Not by time but by error. We need to deal with two kinds of error separately even though they are very much related and the distinction is often ignored by contemporary scientific philosophers. First, we shall deal with error in what we have taken to be the more direct modes of knowledge (sensations and belief) and then we shall discuss error in the less direct process of symbolic/verbal separation and joining (thought and logic). Error as Imposition of Partial Knowing Error in sensations and beliefs is nothing more nor less than the mistake of confusing one mode of knowledge with another. This occurs through the instrumentality of thought. Basically, error consists in taking or, rather, mistaking the part for the whole in experience, knowing, or consciousness. It is possible because of the second level of knowing and the capacities intrinsic to that level: universalizing and reasoning by means of symbols/words. In other words, consciousness is potentially full of a situation when consciousness is primary, but secondary consciousness isolates part of the fullness, directs itself toward it, and relegates all else to the realm of nonconsciousness. I walk in the garden, but only part of the potential consciousness is present; I experience or am conscious of “tree,” but unless I make an effort to overcome non-consciousness, once I have identified at a very low level of awareness “tree"-as-idea, I ignore the rest of potential experience or consciousness my sense organs are open to as I walk there. If we regard memory and thought as the replay of neural movements that were part of a whole direct consciousness, then it is easy to see how we may shut off the direct consciousness and exist increasingly at the secondary level, the level that is replaying the neural parts without the rest. It is likewise easy to see how we may take the replay instead of the whole and assume we are conscious of the whole. As you walk down a street, the “body” is part of a greenish environment; before you are conscious of the whole situation, the neural patterns in the body stimulate the memoryexperience or consciousness, not of the whole, but of the concept-pattern “tree.” Experience and consciousness are, therefore, short-circuited; you are liable to error. William James said each “thinker,” but it seems more accurate to say that each “knower” has “dominant habits of attention; and these practically elect from the various worlds one to be for him the world of ultimate realities.” (James, 1890, 293-294) This is just one of the ways of stating the problem of perceptual error. It is, strictly speaking, incorrect to say that a sensation or belief is false; sensations are neither true nor false, or they are true or false only in as much as they mistake for sensation what is not of the senses but of reason such as the concept “tree” that joins with the pure senses in every act of second-level perception. 1. Error in Perception. The source of at least fifty percent of our ills lies here. Because of our fall into thought, errors in knowing become possible. We come to depend on our particular schema of defining reality so that we can live securely within it, and end by fighting, killing, and destroying those who challenge them. Two kinds of problems seem to be involved with this core error in knowing. The first, usually referred to as “errors of perception,” can constitute extreme danger for an individual. Most typically these errors are illustrated by various sensual illusions; the optical illusion, for example, of “seeing” a bent stick but discovering later that the stick was straight and appeared bent only because one half was immersed in a pool of water that bent the light reflecting the stick to the eye. Were we to point out that this was an error not in sensation but in judgment, we might get an argument from the perceiver that no judgment was made: “I saw a bent stick.” The point only goes to demonstrate the extreme intertwining between the “pure” sensation (as on a primary level of knowing) and the “concept” “straight stick.” Much of the argument may be resolved, however, if we proceed to explain that not just the bend but also the “perceived object” is itself partly a creation of the symbolizing thought process. At any rate, these errors may well cause innumerable serious accidents. Such accidents even in contemporary jargon are referred to as caused by “errors in judgment.” The automobile crushed into the tree because the driver erred in judgment. In this case nothing could be more obvious than that the driver was not going through the “mental process” “tree ahead,” “tree is thin” (when it was thick), “tree is far enough away for car to squeak by” (when it was not). Rather what is meant by judgment here is much closer to the act of “perception” itself. It is only after the accident that the aspect of rational judgment emerges, “But the tree seemed farther away.” Such errors arise because of a lack not of “rational knowledge but of practice driving an automobile near trees and they may be stimulated when attitude (not judgment) says “I am confident of my driving skill.” 2. The Error of Short-Circuiting. Besides these “errors in perception,” another category of errors is dangerous to us—the category of errors arising when we who live, as we must, with pieces of reality formed by symbol/names discover the possibility of shortcircuiting awareness of them. “We aim at the real thing; but everything is real as experience; we substitute the definition for the experience, and then experience the definition.” (Eliot, 1964, 167) Karl Mannheim referred to such situations in his Ideology and Utopia; “knowledge,” he writes, “is distorted and ideological when it fails to take account of the new realities applying to a situation, and when it attempts to conceal them by thinking of them in categories which are inappropriate.” (Mannheim, 1953, 86) A couple of points are significant. First, we could describe what Mannheim called “ideology” as the symbolic/name concepts that intertwine with the various senses thus confusing them but also permitting thought. And, second, we must note that there is likely to be extensive resistance to changing these names in perception despite their uncomfortable consequences, and we are likely to fight to destroy others who use a linguistic perception system different from, and therefore threatening to, our own. We can see in all this the great power of thought and the ability to name/symbolize. Their impact, however, is dual. On the one hand, abstraction and naming are basic to our liberation but, on the other hand, they are equally basic to our confinement and enslavement. The most important discovery of linguistic analysis concerning the problem of knowledge is denied by many analysts in the field and at most only hinted at by those who seem fully aware of it and of its significance. That discovery points to the fundamental benefit as well as the fundamental problem in the naming process. We can handle reality intellectually only if we turn it into discrete things. By doing so, we have constructed a world, but the edifice is crumbling. 3. The Creation of Things. Linguistic analysts, along with some empiricists and positivists, have discovered with wonder that, quite to the contrary of earlier views, words and language, rather than merely name and describe, actually create objects.1 Some readers have been puzzled by the Biblical emphasis on how God granted Adam the power to name all the animals and everything else around him; the tremendous significance of naming is not just that by virtue of it Adam discovers a word for things but that he actually completes the creation of animals and objects by the act of naming them. The naming of a human infant similarly commences the human, as opposed to the natural, creation of people. The lack of awareness on the part of very young children of separate things as objects likewise takes on a new significance when we realize that symbols and especially names create the objects as objects rather than leaving them as patterns of infinite experience. The process giving rise to abstract symbols or language is still insufficiently understood and mysterious. How concrete symbols gave rise to language seems slightly clearer. Sounds, very intimate since they are in my throat, are part of my whole experience as a child. The replaying of these sounds without the whole experience permits the sensation that these are a part of and connected intimately to the experience but also the sensation that they can be separated from it. The sound itself is then translated as a written figure, and the process of learning to read is the connecting of the word-sound symbol with the word-sight symbol. The earliest stages of this process can be seen in very small babies. Some sounds appear automatically from the body—apparently the same around the world— under certain situations. A baby’s early response to the world seems to be “da” or “ta” ("dad” or “that” in English) and to its mother appears to be a simultaneous attempt to express “ta” ("that”—the world) and to suck so that it comes out “ma.” The contrary efforts of inhaling and breathing out may induce the stutter “mama.” The ability to replay such sounds without, and even because of the absence of, the whole referent environment may induce the establishment of words standing for the concrete experience. In this way the name creates and establishes the existence of the particular object (mother or father or world), and at the same time points to the intimate connection between knower and known, between idea and reality, between word and thing. These observations can illustrate how it may be quite true that an object ceases to exist when it is no longer known. The knowing constitutes the object as object. This in no way means, however, that the rest of what was is no longer there just because one intrinsic part of it (object/knower) has disappeared. As is indicated with regard to Adam’s naming things, “ideas,” “concepts,” or “symbols” do not precede “things” nor do “things” precede them. The two exist together. Adam and the human race generally are called to an act of co-creation and not merely to discover things that exist independently of us. We do not “discover"; we create. This is the validity at the hidden core of the pragmatic notion that doctrines, thinking, ideas, and words are not discoveries but inventions. The poet does not tell us about objects or environments but creates them—and without touching them physically. And He said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. Direct knowing and, certainly, first level knowing are continuous operations; the processes of abstracting and symbolizing the generalizations abstracted divides the act. William James distinguishes “percept” from “concept” in that percepts are continuous while concepts are discrete. (James, 1911) The process is most intriguing. First comes amorphous knowing or “percept"; then arrive memory replays; then generalizations are possible by comparing and contrasting replays and singling out common aspects; then come symbolizing generalizations where we turn the simple, single symbol back upon the percept and so divide it into parts; and finally, we can take those parts as the object-given in knowledge. We take the abstracted part for the real even though we know we should not. We know that nothing can be a line or have only one dimension; we know that nothing can be a plane or have only two dimensions; we know that nothing can be a solid or have only three dimensions; we know that the fourth dimension of time must also be there. Despite our knowing this, we see things as lines, triangles, and cubes. Even more important than taking all four dimensions (and we should consider that there may be more) into account, however, we must remember that our interference divided “what is” into these kinds of parts and that it is impossible for us to perceive “what is” as a composite relating these parts to each other; what is can only be comprehended as an inherent unity. The linguistic effort that started by attempting to demonstrate the overwhelming importance of words ended as well in demonstrating their danger. Suzanne Langer proclaimed that “our primary world of reality is a verbal one,” (Langer, 1951, 126) and that “all at once, the edifice of human knowledge stands before us, not as a vast collection of sense reports, but as a structure of facts that are symbols and laws that are their meaning. (Langer, 1951, 21) Although she was seeking to show just how important language and symbols are by suggesting that they lie at the very core of the reality we know, she succeeded even more in alarming us of the flimsiness of our reality. By illustrating that every object we know is an abstraction, she succeeded, in demonstrating, not the all-embracing importance of abstractions and symbols, but the dubious character of “objective” knowledge. Symbols and Objects 1. The Value of Symbols and Objects. Neither symbols nor their concomitant “objects” and “objective” knowledge are, of course, to be rejected even in part simply because the one depends upon the other. The value of symbol and object must not be forgotten. Generalization is absolutely essential for thought, and symbol and object are essential for communicable thought. In this is the sum of their value. Generalization, expressed in terms of words/symbols, first and above all allows us to master knowledge. By ordering, categorizing, and defining experience, generalization permits the known or conscious to become understandable. It permits us to assign the known a place in the regular order of things that resides in memory. By establishing a number of abstract generalizations created through memory and by their imposition on it, we give new experience, consciousness, or knowledge a content. No two events can be exactly the same, and “yet if we are to understand the nature of the real world, we must act and think as though these events are repeated and as if objects do have properties that remain constant for some period of time, however short.” If we refuse to make these assumptions, we cannot attain understanding. (Blalock, 1964, 7) Because they are necessary for this purpose, we make them. Almost echoing Suzanne Langer, Peter Berger suggests that the “reality of everyday life is not only filled with objectifications; it is possible only because of them.”Berger, 1966,33) Even though we may be forced to doubt reality based upon objectifications, they make what nearly all of us have taken to be the reality of everyday life possible and understandable. On that basis alone, we can justify the utility of symbols and objects. Symbols are metaphors standing for the abstraction of generalization from experience. Like any metaphor, as well as the abstracted generalization alone, symbols and concepts have the added value of pointing out things that partial knowledge might have missed. In brief, they tend to point out those parts of potential knowledge that are relevant and useful to us (ignore tree, but see tiger in tree). What is relevant and useful to us has been discerned by our predecessors and expressed and made available to us through language. The abstract symbol’s importance is therefore twofold: first, it permits not just understanding but a pooled human understanding passed from generation to generation and, second, it ties together the human community by permitting inter-human language that originate in private generalizations. The symbol permits not only “individuals” but also “groups” to hold onto objects they find important. Yet common symbol and language is significant not primarily as a tool that permits interchange of generalizations useful to the group, but most of all as the core of the group itself. All groups are made groups by a symbolic tie linking the members together. Primitive kinship groups, for example, occur as distinct from “biological” age or sex groups when symbols for kinship and its various degrees are created. (Berger, 1966, 108) Berger has taken his idea of the symbolic core of the community far. The symbolic universe, he suggests, permits us the security of regularity. One of us living alone in nature might have a symbolic system to make the environment understandable and secure, but we live in a social milieu where we need social regularity as well as natural regularity for security. That sense of regularity and security is achieved and maintained through symbols. For example, Berger points out, the man in a social environment symbolically designated or role-defined as “husband” and “worker” finds his security and “self” re-confirmed by small insignificant statements that imply the continuity of understandability in the social universe. His wife tells him to have a good day at the office, dear, and, by virtue of her few words, his role as father, worker, and lover is confirmed and secured. (Berger, 1966, 140) Because of symbols, we live not just in a way different from the other animals but in a different dimension—the dimension of “reality.” And if linguistic positivists are not persuaded that because the “thinglanguage” works, the “thing-world” is confirmed, at least most seem to believe that because the “thinglanguage” works, the “thing-language” ought to be adopted. (Carnap, 1950, 24) 2. The Danger of Symbol and Object. The central problem with regard to the process of generalization, symbolization, and objectification is that it not only permits the rise of, but also actually fosters, error. Although generalization and symbol make possible a regular and understandable world, they do it by interfering with experience or knowledge. We can walk down the street, ignore the trees, and rather direct our attention elsewhere only because we are permitted to identify, understand, and remember the “tree,” only because we can now experience being surrounded by “trees” rather than experience the fullness of them possible to us. The error is twofold. It consists of taking the concept for the experience and of taking a part of the experience for the whole. Instead of experiencing fullness, I experience the memoryconstruct “tree"; instead of remaining open to the rest of the experience, I conclude I have the whole of experience when I have “tree.” The error linguistic analysts and positivists in social science tend to fall into is the very error they warn others against—the reification of abstractions. In political science, behavioralists especially have condemned traditional studies for dealing with the “state” as if it were an entity, an object, real in and of itself. When others have suggested that even to treat such “things” as the human body as real is equally to reify abstractions, the bantering response has been that if the body is an abstraction reified, biological, as well as social, scientists should deal with activity and process rather than with “things.” (Van Dyke, Janvier 1950, 24) In truth, any and every word or symbol stands for an abstraction, and to treat them as things is to reify the abstract; “the governing process” is no less of an abstraction and based on reified abstractions such as “voters” and “senators” than “the government”—perhaps a different kind of abstraction, but no less an abstraction. Where traditionalists in social science reified abstractions, the positivists have deified them. A second problem derived from generalization and symbol can be seen if you look more closely at the value these two perform by providing the basis for group and society. The most important kind of control and perhaps the only kind ultimately (this is a point political scientists most need to be aware of) is control by manipulation of the symbolic universe. Church, state, educational system, and other institutions have had an influence in shaping the symbolic universe of the past. In our time, the state triumphed even while tolerating minor challenges to itself. Even these challenges have gradually disappeared and so has the non-deliberate aspect of control. Those interested in control are increasingly aware of the true basis of all control, the symbolic universe, and increasingly able to manipulate it. We need merely conjure up images in our own recent past that illustrate the possibility of changing “reality” by changing the symbolic universe. It was not madness or irrationality that Hitler brought to Germany but an alternative symbolic universe, adopted because primary or direct elements of knowledge to the German people negated the old symbolic universe whereby they knew reality previously and whereby they had been controlled. It is not, moreover, least important that the mass means of communication create the mass society or that the recurring rebellion of youth is always first a rebellion in language, a symbolic rebellion. I have suggested that we can comprehend experience or knowledge if we are able to isolate parts of it, generalize from the similar parts, symbolize the generalization, and thereby objectify consciousness. We must assume objects and their constancy. Not only does objectification permit understanding, but it also allows knowledge by description; what we cannot ourselves know directly, we can receive from others. But as these operations occur and we understand more and more because we can distance our awareness from what is irrelevant to survival or use, we increasingly distance ourselves from life so that we make of our consciousness (which is really all we have) a tool. Once all of it is focussed on the useful, we attain a highly used and useful reality, and we direct our attention at satisfying ourselves through that reality. In the end, however, at this last stage we start to recognize because of the ever-present existence and insistence of primary or direct knowing and consciousness that we are empty—we have emptied consciousness into the object for its usefulness and found that all we have left is the objective consciousness that may be useful but neither enjoyable nor meaningful. We pursued the useful, but now we find ourselves used and abused by it. So again I would suggest here that much of the abyss between generations and most of the demands of the young for renewal arise because of leaps in the symbolic universe. The “generation gap” has always been with us since the symbolic universe is constantly changing, but the vast alterations occurring in it because of a world wide communications system and because of much, much broader and longer education patterns has made the gap unbridgeable by second level understanding. The older cannot possible know the symbolic reality of the youth, and the young cannot possibly know the symbolic universe of their elders. Eventually, the new reality will dominate as the symbolic universe directs attention to a different part of consciousness. Both groups and other symbolic universe divisions in the reality of experience can gain tolerance of the others only by accepting the core of primary or direct knowledge. This seems to be what the most aware of the younger and older always argue for, although usually with inadequate doses of humility on the part of both. If intergroup problems within a society are created by divergences among symbolic universes of reality, still less soluble problems are created by the symbolic divergences between cultures and societies, though the saving grace of such divergences so far has been the physical distance between them. If the reality seen and the objects perceived are creations of symbols, then these realities can easily vary from culture to culture and fail to provide a common basis for communication and understanding. “Users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammar toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation.” (Worf, 1952, 4) To attempt to escape this kind of limit by using the allegedly “universal” language of mathematics is merely to agree to accept a common symbolic system that naturally will reveal a common reality. Although disagreement on some questions may be overcome by use of a common symbolic system, others (especially social questions) may not be, and at any rate, the prejudices of the mathematical symbolic system do not preclude error or positions that run contrary to primary or direct knowledge. Nor will mere increased “communication” solve the conflicts—indeed, it is the increase in contact that worsens the situation. A number of philosophical problems have their source in the use of a symbolic system to create a “reality” of “objects.” One long-standing philosophical problem that cannot be “solved” but may be transcended by awareness of the role of symbol in creating objective reality is the problem of change—certainly an issue plaguing Western philosophy since its Greek inception. Only things change, events happen. The idea and problem of change hinge on the assumption that there are things we perceive. We know we sense differences in our experience; how did the problem of these differences arise? It arises only because consciousness creates “real objects” and then notices that there are some differences in them. Some ancient philosophers went even so far as to claim that no two things are ever the same but that all things are flux. Plato is said to have concluded, on the contrary, that all change was illusion and that reality resided in the universals abstracted from the historical. Aristotle indicated that what was most real about things was their essence (comparable to this universal abstraction of the things held by consciousness) and that the changeable was less real or was “accidental” to the thing. Modern sciences still bind themselves to Aristotle, praising science as “the last step in man’s mental development and the highest and most characteristic attainment of human culture.” Ernest Cassirer, a leading philosopher of science, proclaims this and continues, “it is science that gives us the assurance of a constant world.” (Cassirer, 1944, 205) That assurance is given, however, only by ignoring much; increasingly we have become aware of the artificial, abstracted nature of essences and of the danger of living with them. Therefore, the problem of change that Aristotle “solved” returns to haunt us. It will continue to haunt us until the chimerical “world of objects” is unmasked. The fall into abstraction occurred because humans “wanted” or “needed” to control or change the world. In order to do that, we first had to separate ourselves from the world and, after having separated ourselves, to attempt to see how we related to it as a part. Only then could we know to act upon it. Abstraction alone has made “things” or “objects” possible; it alone has moved us to the goal of mastery over them all. As good and useful as this is, mastery may in the end turn out to be an illusion and the cost of abstraction and objects has already been monstrously high. We start by making objects out of the world and we have ended by making ourselves objects to ourselves. Of all that has happened, this is the most fearsome. We are deluded by considering ourselves to be mere objects and by considering others that way too. Conceiving of ourselves as objects confines us and closes us in; we must understand that we surpass ourselves as object. The center we objectify others from cannot itself be objectified. The illusion of the defined “known” and abstracted self is the greatest illusion and in it lies the greatest unhappiness and lack of fulfillment. Intensifying the Error As I indicated at the beginning, twentieth century positivists, empiricists, and “scientists” have made the risk of surrendering to these errors and falling into these problems much greater. This by no means is to cast aspersions upon the intent and integrity of positivists and empiricists nor does it fail to recognize the tremendous service they performed in turning us away from some categories of past symbolobject illusions. Still, a number of the attitudes either held by empiricists or created by them in others are likely to lead to disaster. Perhaps the most dangerous act performed by the empiricists, positivists, and scientists is not just to study only “object-reality” but most of all to insist that “object-reality” is either all there is or at least all there is that can be known. Experience, primary knowledge, or consciousness is filled with what many would refer to as “illusions,” dreams, hallucinations, and mistake.” (Lewis, 1923,174) These, the empiricists would insist, must be rooted out if we are to have knowledge of “reality.” The empirical scientist must report the facts and nothing but the facts, but, as we have just pointed out, the “facts” and “objects” are constructs of consciousness created by a symbolic and theoretical element. The most striking aspect of science today is its deliberate concentration upon only that part of experience “which can be dealt with in terms of uniform behavior.” (Hyde, 1948, 38) The philosophical linguist’s reaction to all of this is not very satisfying either, for, in view of the involvement with objects created by symbol, recent philosophical schools have suggested that “symbols are not epiphenomena; they are the phenomena of social investigation.” (Gunnell, 1968, 185) While it is erroneous enough for the “scientist” to pursue object investigation, it is even worse to insist that objectknowledge is the only kind we can have. It is not just that scientists leave out part of knowledge or consciousness but more that they believe and even insist that they have the whole and that no one else should entertain non-object knowledge. Again, haughty pride is demonstrated by positivists such as Reichenbach who declares that philosophy or unscientific language may be acceptable before a means to scientific analysis is possible but that once scientific language is applicable “picture language” must be abandoned. (Reichenbach, 1954, 25) Reichenbach claims that there is a “picture” or metaphor language and a scientific or precise language; he fails to perceive that all language, from mathematical to picturesque, is metaphor—it is constituted of symbols standing for generalizations from partial experience. The attitude is dangerous because it clips off the mind from fullness, because it viciously disregards insights other than its own, and for one more reason. It is destructive to scientific or empirical principles themselves. Because of refusal to recognize the projection of symbol upon consciousness, positivists have argued that they are not defining reality but simply taking it as it is commonly understood. (Schlick, 1959), 97) Rather than challenge what is given in society to personal consciousness, the positivists accept constraints of convention; allegedly free-wheeling investigators suddenly reveal themselves for what they are: timid reactionaries following preordained ways of thinking. A most frightening situation for science thereby emerges. One positivist illustrates the danger by sketching his position most succinctly: “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth; and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality.” (Pierce, 1960, 268) Again, the danger of timid kowtowing to the opinion of “all” becomes the positivist criterion of truth and reality. With conventional reality so enthroned, it is no wonder that “heretics” such as Velikovsky are sacrificed on the high altar of the intellectual establishment. By accepting symbol and object so completely, Western thought has fostered the domination of two modes of second-level consciousness; sensation and reason have come to the fore, and feeling and belief, let alone intuition, have been relegated to the position of incommunicability and to the realm of mysticism. The Western mind has found intuition, feeling, and belief modes of knowledge too difficult to be burdened with and, therefore, has concentrated on the simpler modes— the sensuous and the rational. Naturally, in the movement of Western history there was no deliberate decision to neglect intuition, feeling, and belief, but, once introduced, certain factors built barriers against them. Not least of these revolves around the complexity of these other modes of knowing. This alone pushed for relegating them to the personal or idiosyncratic. Since intuition, feeling, and belief were “individual”—a conclusion affirmed by the separation of church and state—they were entrusted to the exclusive competence of the private dimension of consciousness. The separation of church and state is quite significant in the emergent dominance of sensation. Our ancestors had been brought to war and extreme conflict because of differences in defining beliefs and intuitions; therefore, to forestall further disaster these were deprived of social significance. On the other hand, all in a given society could agree on what their senses told them and logic reinforced. So the basis of the political order became practices not of intuition and belief but only of the senses and reason devoted to the pursuit of economic and political “interests.” Naturally, since consciousness in fact was partially intuition and belief and since it relied on feelings of patriotism, the state could never quite be described in sensual-rational terms—such as economic benefit, military security, and political interests—but the attempt to define it in terms of “consent” and other weird conceptualizations continued. In replacing religion, science itself becomes a religion more rigid than any we have known before. It rigidity is linked to its symbols. Religion has symbols too—often unchanging symbols—but there are many interpretations of religious symbols since their meaning is derived only from an inwardly verifiable reality. Scientific symbols are, in the name of precision, required to have but one interpretation and an interpretation not verifiable save through prejudicial investigatory processes. Scientific symbols are, therefore, properly called “signs” to distinguish them from the richer symbols that we use in myth and in paradoxical logic. The present era is in crisis because it has persisted in the error of trying to understand and explain “what is” in terms of sensation and reason—of science—alone. Indeed, it can be and has been argued that the Second World War was basically caused by a reaction against scientific reason. The Germany of Hitler was a religious-intuitive nation and, as such, Germany went to war without reason or at least in a way that subjugated and used reason. If this is so, Germany’s becoming a religious intuitive nation was only a predictable reaction to a formerly extremely strong sense-rational German state. Moreover, the explanation of Germany as a religious-intuitive society points to the share of the responsibility that must be borne by Germany’s enemies. Because the intellectuals of Western civilization had emphasized sensation and reason, they could not perceive the significance of the religiointuitive reaction engulfing Germany and within their own nations. They did not understand what intuition and belief meant in both places because they had performed self-mutilating brain surgery on them selves by denying that they could gain genuine knowledge on the basis of intuition-belief. Not using this formulation they blinded themselves. This interpretation of modern civilization also helps explain how American government leaders could so massively miscalculate the nationalist tenacity of the Vietnamese and their willingness to keep fighting beyond all “reasonable” motives. It also accounts for how unprepared they were for events in the Middle East from the “fanaticism” of the Islamic revolution in Iran to the “irrational” decision of Hussein to invade Kuwait. By contrast, American leaders saw great differences between themselves and the “Communists” of the Soviet Union. They, therefore, miscalculated in their expectations of “irrationality.” The Soviets subscribed, in fact, to sensation-rationalism as much as the “West” and, indeed, the Soviets in some cases acted even more on the basis of a sharp division between sense-reason and belief-intuition. Soviet “socialism” not only agreed with the “West” on the separation between reason and belief-intuitiion but also relegated it to the realm of non-being or epiphenomena that merely reflects an economic base though at the same time founded the appeal of Marxism on realities known only by belief-intuition. It is in Marxism (as opposed to Marx himself) that this historical movement toward sense-reason reaches is culmination and, apparently in its blindness to the full nature of human life, its end. Western societies are now undergoing vast internal developments struggling to overturn sense-reason domination, for many have seen the origins of both in World War II and the wars the United States has fought since as resting in the epistemological estrangement of sense-reason and intuition-belief. When sense-reason denies communicable knowledge based on beliefintuition, it is transmuted into its opposite but in a malignant form: militantly destructive belief. To be “rational” about calculating the possibilities of war and the benefits that could accrue by going to war is to breed the very upheavals that create war. Chapter 3 Ego Established Approaching the Problematical Situation The dangers implicit in, and the problems created by, traditional modes of thought are now becoming clear. Consequently, it is likely that these patterns will be forced to change drastically soon. The changes must not be permitted to be merely reverse reactions to the present since then they will be equally erroneous and dangerous; rather, we must encourage knowledge to regain a totality of perspective. We are being called by our era to rediscover the lost fullness of consciousness, but we are also called to “understanding.” Fullness known could not be fullness “understood”—at least not in the sense currently given to the word “understanding” since it means capturing, containing, controlling, and dominating; in terms of this notion, which is founded upon secondary level knowing, full knowledge is an illusion. We are driven by these opposing forces, one to fullness and the other to “understanding"; how do we resolve the dilemma. If we were able to entertain experience without imposing mental order upon it, we would never err; but we must impose order for the sake of understanding. The trick of avoiding or minimizing the error and danger involved is not, therefore, nihilistically to blot out the attempt to comprehend but to escape its undesirable effects. This may be achieved—and to some extent already is achieved—in two ways. The first is through the proper utilization of scientific procedures. Scientific procedure, almost by definition, has meant an attempt to minimize creations of, and projections onto, reality; but science can never result in an adequate liberation from symbolic restrictions in effect against the known as long as science confines itself to parts, objectified parts, of consciousness. The sciences focus on some slice of reality such as “biology” and have always attempted to reveal some thing about consciousness or experience not previously known—to point to what we have not seen but could see and sometimes should have seen—and to develop a sensitivity to “qualities” of things such as color or hardness. In essence, the sciences have accepted the “reality” and “objects” forced upon scientists by their “perception,” and the judgment of science as to the validity of its perspectives and operations has long been that these perspectives lead to conclusions that “work.” “All that we care about is how it works, it makes no difference whatever whether a thing really is green or blue, so long as it behaves on the belief that it is green or blue.” (Eliot, 1964, 168) Natural scientists can be quite satisfied with perspectives that work since their goal tends to be “usefulness” within the context of a given social “reality” and “human image.” Neither they nor the would-be scientists of society, however, can afford to lose sight of the historically biased character of their labor; they accept a definition of “use” and “society.” Emergent humanity, however, needs new uses and definitions and these can only come from outside the given and working symbolic universes. Science is possible only if it operates within the framework of a specific symbolic universe of reality—a kind of universe long-dominant in most of the Western world and increasingly dominant in countries such as the Soviet Union and China as well as those in the Middle East. The Soviets and the Chinese constitute no essential threat to the scientists of the Western world or to those oriented toward the symbolic universe of object reality. This explains why scientists, along with their counterparts in the world of business, have tended to see the division between East and West as spurious. The symbolic universe of the scientist is not threatened, but other symbolic universes are. Unprejudiced scientists are not justified in concluding that their symbolic system is confirmed merely because it is accepted in foreign cultures or that other symbolic universes are less valid because they are not accepted. The tremendous worth of science must not be permitted to falter on the great sin of science, the sin of pride. Scientists must work at times enclosed within their symbolic-object universe, but they must not have the audacity to assume, much less insist, that their reality, their real world, is either all there is or even the highest there is for us. Science itself requires no less of them. The second trail to be followed and tread by at least as many feet as trace the scientific way is that of a “looking” that constantly strives to overcome partial knowledge of all kinds and get directly to the fullness of knowledge and consciousness. Like the scientific “object” approach, this too has a long tradition of thought surrounding, if not fully enveloping, it. Perhaps the most well-known exponent in this century of the different way of looking at the known is Max Weber and his concept of verstehen or understanding. His is a notion of understanding that stands in sharp contrast to the conventional approach to grasping reality. Most of those expounding Weber’s, or elaborating on their own similar, views seem either to have perverted what Weber had to say or else to have diverged from him more substantially than they have imagined. For example, Weber’s “understanding” has been unfairly characterized by the suggesting that to achieve it we must know another’s behavior by referring to an analogy between theirs and our own. (Winch, 1958, 47) Others have suggested the use of an emotionally “sympathetic faculty” to comprehend their behavior. (Hyde, 1964, 64) One difficulty with this sort of an approach for scientists is that it cannot be replicated; empiricists suggest that the knowledge thus developed is likely to be private since the verification is private. On the contrary, however, even were the new awareness private, it might be defended as worthwhile. In fact, it is likely that “the truth has to me MY truth before it can be true at all. This is because an ‘objective’ truth is relative truth” (Eliot, 1964, 168) and, therefore, strictly speaking, not truth at all. By far the most damaging assessment of the characterizations of Weberian “understanding” or use of the “sympathetic faculty” is that it does not dig deeply enough. It, too, is still seriously infected by object-subject preconceptions. By introspection we are to look into ourselves; this assumes that there is a subjective self to look into as well as a “looker” doing the looking and other subjective selves that are similar or comparable. Emphasis upon subjectivity, the coordinate of objectivity, does not challenge or question objectivity but rather confirms it. A better path, closer perhaps to what Weber had in mind, is not to flee from one aspect of the symbolic universe of objectivity/subjectivity to the other but to transcend the object by transcending the division in the various ways of knowing. We must try not just to know what we have pre-defined as the inner and the outer but to know wholly and directly. However, while we can never stop living in this primary level of knowing completely, once we have reached the secondary level, we can never go back to the homeland of our childhood. We can, nevertheless, re-integrate the forever distinct four modes of secondary knowing. The first step in doing this is to accept Hegel’s dictum that “Everything is real, so long as you do not take it for more than it is.” (Bosanquet, 1967, 84) Just as scientists must not take their object, the artificial creation made necessary when knowledge relies solely on the senses and reason, for more than it is, so, too, we who would go beyond science must not take “ourselves” or “our own feelings, intuitions and beliefs” for more than they are. We must not take part for the whole. Whatever we say we know is only partly known and, therefore, not known; whatever is expressed in words is only mis-expressed because words are only metaphors. Having achieved this humility, we may gain Weberian “understanding” by deliberately opening consciousness. For us who have grown up in a symbolic universe of objects, the ability to perform such an act of purity can only be gained gradually. Consciousness must attempt to strip away all the parcelling impositions of symbol and to know by participating fully. Then a new understanding may be developed by memory’s replay and comparison of that consciousness. Understanding cannot ultimately escape the parcelling process, but, by participating completely, consciousness can start to tear at some of the prejudices of present symbolic universes. In simple terms, the very heart of knowledge or consciousness is participation. The known is part of the whole that, in human physical terms, connects into brain patterns. Brain patterns then can be replayed deliberately. In this way, Pavlovian-type conditioning operates not only to change human and animal action patterns but knowledge patterns as well. “Brainwashing” is achieved by forcing you to participate in a total environmental arrangement that combines extreme novelty with prior conditioning; this preparation, if continued long and intensely enough can at least temporarily not only repress earlier action in other total environmental arrangements but also change the consciousness of the person participating. Ultimately, the tremendous human fear woven into the hidden carpet pads our era lays over reality so that we can tread more comfortably is the fear that our symbolic universe can be altered and the belief that it has only been created by participation in a particular culture. Before, we knew original sin. Now, we know what the nature of that sin is and why it can never be erased. The body is the basis for unity with, and knowledge of, the whole as long as we live exclusively on the first level. Once reason-symbol-object is established, however, the body has fallen and become the basis of separation. The connection, the unity, can be established not by clinging to the processes of physical existence but only by beginning with revisions in mind now separated from body. We cannot solve the division between mind and body, between one object and another, by reducing our lives to body but only by reorganizing our consciousness. Neither can we do so by fleeing from our body to our mind. We must develop our soul and our spirit. While each symbol-object universe is created artificially, gradually, and divergently by different groups, at the same time, there is a oneness, a sameness, in all of us and an inter-subjective tie linking us all together. We know the accidental and the essential in our loss of the concrete, but we no longer know the dividing line between them. In the final analysis, it is this dividing line that we are trying to discover because standing on it we may be able to catch a glimpse of the concrete that can be discovered only directly, not abstractscientifically nor abstract-introspectively. Only directly and by facing life itself, our own life, can we find the lever to move the symbolic universe. The line between essence and accident and, therefore, our lever may be discovered by examining what we often feel we know most directly both in its essential and accidental character. Creation of Self The problem “What am I?” or “What is the center of consciousness?” is one of those points where the dilemma of the relationship between “being” and “knowing” becomes crucial. Does self (being) exist prior to second-level knowing or is self a creation of knowledge. Stated in this way the existence and nature of self raises the broader issue of the a priori that we shall deal with shortly, but for the moment let us return to the original and single position: the only thing assumed prior to knowledge is the possibility of knowledge, consciousness, or experience. This position of maintaining only minimal assumptions is, however, not common among intellectuals. Refusing to assume the existence of self as a given prior to knowledge, we must face the question of the nature of our knowledge of it. One point seems clear: self is not a matter of direct apprehension. The argument from common sense that it is will not do. We do not know self as self directly. Even though most of us are likely to assert that self both is known directly and is the best known of all knowledge, if we strip what we mean when we say “self” of all the different things we “immediately apprehend” through common sense, the “self” we can agree upon is likely to be reduced to “consciousness” or at least to “consciousness of consciousness.” The self is the “being-that-knows” instead of the being that is known. 1. Self as Subject: Knowledge. Self is not known as self; what is known is, on the one hand, a precondition of, and, on the other, an artificial construct by, the symbolic universe. Two aspects of self must therefore be distinguished: self-as-subject and self-as-object. Self-as-subject is, in the same way that “objects” are, a construct at the heart of secondary consciousness. In order to know at the secondary level, experience must be isolated into parts; that is achieved by creating objects and facts; objects and facts are possible only by creating a subject apart from them and separating out that subject. We who know objects on this level do not have to be aware in the process that the objects assume a subject. Indeed, most of us are unaware of this, and it was only during the time of Hume and Kant that philosophy transcended thinking in terms of objects and even of subjects as objects, turned away thereby from objectivism and subjectivism toward Kantian “relationism.” (Kant, 1949, xxiv) Nevertheless, for Kant the difference between subject and object is assumed as necessary to knowledge even though the two are intrinsically linked. For those who accept only scientific knowledge as valid knowledge, “It is clear that all perception or knowledge implies a perceiving subject and an object perceived, and that it consists in any relation whatever between these two.” (Cournot, 1956, 6) Within this relationship some philosophers today stress the priority of subject over object while others stress the priority of object over subject. Charles Pierce, for example, emphasized, as do the positivists generally, the priority of object. For him, “the power of seeing is inferred from colored objects.” (Pierce, v., 1960, 150) The description of the self as subject is derived from objects. Traditional, formal and discursive, logic has strengthened the dichotomy between subject and object just as it emphasized the difference between one object and another. For example, Aristotelian logic, which is based on the law of identity, is possible only because of these distinctions and, therefore, is tied to the creation of subject. The law of identity that A equals A asserts the existence both of an isolated object named by a symbol and the separate nature of the knowing subject. More recent logical systems point to the possibility of minimizing, but never eliminating, the necessity for the dichotomy if thought is to be preserved. Although Alfred North Whitehead refuses to see the subject-object relation as fundamental only to second level knowing and agrees with Descartes that the “subject-object relation is the fundamental structural pattern of experience,” (Whitehead, 1933, 225) he does identify Descartes’ basic source of error as lying within the dichotomy. Living in a logical-empirical, a second level, world of knowledge, Descartes easily fell into assuming that the minimal core of all knowledge was the given subject. (Whitehead, 1966), 149-156, 166) Descartes used the given subject-self (I think) to demonstrate the existence of the object-self (I am). It would perhaps be fairer to Descartes to use the original language he wrote in; the Latin cogito (I think) and sum (I am) link together the thought process of consciousness with alleged self; Descartes may be justified in saying because there is thought, being must exist also, but to assert what later philosophic commentators have stressed that the presence of some thought and being demonstrates the existence of a being such as an “I” or a “self” is completely unjustified. The most any of us, Descartes included, is able to demonstrate as evident is that consciousness is. We cannot demonstrate that “we” exist and cannot even explain what “we” are (or what “I” am). In the world, to become an “I” is to become a category, an object. Subjectivity never proves the existence of any object, even the self. Although one assumes the other, from the one (either subject or object) we can never reason to the existence of the other. The assumption of self, in short, permits the rise of second level knowing in general, permits discursive logic, and, finally, allows the development of communication in language. By raising the issue of language and communication in this way, we run smack into the problem that society seems to create the notion of self. Society fosters self in its subjective and, more obviously and strikingly, objective senses. Society nurtures the subjective but creates the objective self. 2. Self-as-Object: Society. The basis society uses to build an objective self, a persona, is action. Individual consciousness experiences itself as a cause, as exercising power. On the foundation of this power the self can be erected and, once in place, modified when necessary. Consciousness possesses a direct relationship with a cluster of powers; these are known on the second level as “bodily powers.” In establishing the separation of subject and object, second level consciousness sets the line of division not between consciousness and all other things, but, since consciousness can only with difficulty be known as a “thing,” between what more and what less often fills consciousness. Thus, while we may posit the hypothetical existence of an ego within the body in the sense of mind in body, self becomes most closely identified with body-mind together. In knowledge a subject-self is necessary; the line in the second level of knowing between subject and object is drawn between subject-body (those experiences regularly and intimately attached to consciousness) and object-body (those experiences less regularly and less intimately attached). But the line is never clear; “I” often know or feel some thing (object) going one within my body (subject); therefore, I experience the continuing tension over whether self is “mind” or “body.” On the basis of this subject-self tenuously distinguished from objects, we develop an object self through society. That I am a subject is given by the very existence of knowing on the second level. But second level knowing is fundamentally an ability deliberately to replay primary knowing, and primary knowing is participating knowing. Therefore, society can create self beyond simple subjectivity by placing us into specific kinds of participation. The assignment of role, for example, creates self-asobject initially, and change of role changes objective self. Object self is created at the same time as subject-self, and both come concomitant with second level knowing. Therefore, given a strongly developed sense of object self, what role change challenges is not only objective self but the totality of second level known reality; the intensity of the challenge is proportional to the radicality of role change as well as to the closeness of the tie between individual consciousness and the secondary level with its object self. While all of us live to some extent at the primary level, those of us who have lived mostly there will find reality little challenged by a substantial role change; while those of us who have lived mostly at the secondary level and thereby experience objective self intensely will be very much challenged by even a small role change.1 That part of self we call object, moreover, is created not just by participation so that there is a primary level core to it, but also by recognition of other people—other “centers of consciousness”—we relate to as object. So self, as known in everyday life, is known not only as subject, and as participant in wholeness, but as object or at least potential object to others. Thus, self is given not only identity as subject and doer but identity as object, that is to say, as separate. Whole “self” is the assumed integral unity of subject, participant, and object; none of these elements, while necessary for second level knowledge, stands as a reality prior to it. Constituted in this way, self—especially object self— is in continual process of development with society. “Once crystallized, it is maintained, modified, or even re-shaped by social relations.” (Berger, 1966, 159) This maintenance and change can take place in three ways. First, in a kind of quantitative arena, the self may be adjusted by making it more objective or more subjective. Relations can force self to stand more and more as object or more and more as subject. A centrally and extensively controlled society makes self increasingly an object, autonomy makes self more and more a subject. Movement toward one or the other, whatever the direction, creates ego tension; and confrontation with elements of the opposite in either object- or subject-dominant societies can induce resentment. The ambivalent experience of police as enforcers against the subject in the subjective society is an excellent example of this. The reverse is true too; displaced persons who had fought for autonomy in eastern European countries have been shocked by, and opposed to, the kind of autonomy demonstrated in Western nations. The second place for maintaining or altering self is role or participant change; not only may relations be more or less demanding, they may be of different kinds. Participating in the environment of a prison changes a self as does participating as a soldier in war. Though less formal in prison, the tension-filled training period both in it and in the military is striking; by participating a self is “made” a convict or a killer. That a self may be changed in this way and be different does not argue for an ethical relativism; it does not deny the capacity of impartial judgment of one self to be better or worse than the other, though it does demand humility in the judgment. Aside from these direct methods, self may be maintained or altered by manipulating merely the symbols surrounding it. For example, though based in the same role as before (the role of “father” for instance) with the same amount of subjectivity, a self may be maintained or altered by the everyday symbols expressed around it. The father may be maintained in role and subjectivity by symbols standing for respect and admiration or for recognition as father and may be changed by expressions of denial as father and of failure. Discordance, whatever its direction, between symbolic assertions and position creates tension since, having defined evil as negation to the individual consciousness, the individual consciousness cannot affirm self as evil or negation. In sum, the self is developed, maintained, and changed in society and is understandable only as a dialectical process of interplay with society. Society goes even so far as to define us if we are experiencing a breakdown in our mental distinctions as “mentally ill.” Society’s psychiatrists would even seek to recondition us after forcing us to accept that what we are experiencing when the distinction is threatened is insanity rather than insight. Once self is present, and its very presence is the result of process, what is given in it shapes and, in turn, is shaped by, the rest of the world of things, including the world of others. Chapter 4 Ego Overcome Why Self? 1. Control. A question about self at least as important as its nature and creation is “why?” Why does it develop in us at all and why is it universal? Two kinds of responses appear automatic—one in terms of social function and one in terms of the human organism physically and psychologically. The two are, of course, not unrelated. First, the social explanation. The enormous role of society in creating and manipulating self is not without reason. Although often seen as the antithesis of society, self constitutes the very core of society and permits it to operate. So important is self, as Cooley pointed out, that “an unhealthy self is at the heart of nearly all social discontent.” (Cooley, 1902, 260) Both the affirmation and the negation of either the subjective or objective self can provide the foundation for the group. So far, group inventiveness has been able to use either self-negation or selfaffirmation while it has been unable to use selfdenial. The collectivity can use the affirmation of self-assubject by identification or by responsibility. The establishment of a strong subjective sense of self, once developed with society, can be identified with something “beyond one’s own body” under the rubric symbol “love.” The subjective self, objectified in a special role, can, if strong enough, pour itself out into that role or that participation. The self can empty itself into a poem, a piece of pottery, a cake, or whatever and be devoted to the creation of something the group wants. Only a clear self can provide the stable family relationship in “love” that is beneficial to the group. It has long been evident that only those who strongly love themselves can strongly love others, that it takes a certain arrogance and strong psychic sense of self to make another person “mine” for life. Responsibility, too, can be used by the group. The inner-directed or “self"-centered, the introverted rather than the extroverted, those of us who act on the basis of principles we find within ourselves rather than legal standards imposed from outside, can, out of a sense of responsibility, be made to do what society needs. First, the group places into self those principles to act from; if no other principle is there, surely the desire for good will be. The will to good when we are self-oriented leads us to do what is good for others and thereby serve society. It may well be that the group can use a strongly developed sense of subjective self and may even foster it, therefore, only because the autonomous self is an illusion. Society fosters the subjective sense because, since all of us are inwardly tied together in fact whether we want to be or not, it will inevitably develop social responsibility. Lost in our subjectivity and unaware of the tie, we might be induced to serve the group best by serving ourselves. Just as society may be served by self-affirmation, it is also served by self-negation. Both presuppose the reality of self. Social control may be established by threat to self, threat of self-deprivation, but we can be deprived of self only if self is there and the more self there the more that can be threatened openly and subconsciously. If we have a role-self in society, we probably can be effectively controlled by a threat from society that it might remove us from that role; if we have a strong life-sense of self, we may be ruled by threats of various kinds of death. If we have nothing of the sort, and in some groups both of these are lacking though there may be others, we may escape control. This is one reason that self-denial is so important in many eastern religions. Somewhat similar to self-affirmation is voluntary self-negation; a society that develops in us a depth of subjective-self may use it and limit it by reminding us continually that there are many, many subject selves and that the one should yield to all the others. In other words, self should yield to the objectification of the subjective. Societies thus far have used the self in whatever form it comes; self-affirmation and self-negation are only two sides of the same assumption that is useful to society. I must assume self to affirm it; I must assume self to negate it. Self affirmed as subject, self affirmed as object, and self negated as object are all useful to the group. Social control has, however, so far been unable to make its peace with subjective selfdenial. All who deny themselves as subject cannot be controlled. This precisely is the dilemma confronted by many nations as well as the world as a whole today. Nationstates on the international scene have assumed a stance of self-denial in their willingness to risk everything to avoid being controlled by other nations; individuals within these nations have copied the stance for themselves, and by denying the self that alone can commit the person to eternal love, responsibility, and self-negation, they have “dropped out”—if they drop far enough, they, too, like nation-states, become invulnerable to control; power may annihilate them but cannot govern them. Objectification of the subjective self, which consists of the willingness to do anything to preserve yourself as a thing, increasingly destroys the subjective self; but because subjective self is the basis of the whole edifice of self, the objective self, too, is gradually eroded. A society dominated by the public is possible only under circumstances of subjective self-affirmation and cannot exist without objective self-denial. Democracy is, therefore, pre-eminently a psychological problem. As long as societies are based upon objective selfaffirmation or objective self-negation, they will be undemocratic. They will be divided into two parts: wolves and sheep, the strong and the weak, those who control and those who are controlled. There is no other path than the denial of the socially-constructed illusion of objective self. This may be possible only by total self-denial and that would mean a postdemocratic, a post-political, society. Moreover, just as the future of political systems may depend upon the surrender of subjective self, the future of knowledge may depend on the surrender of subjective self. Perhaps groups can make their peace with objective self-denial; perhaps the time is right for groups to move beyond control, beyond the necessity for objective self. Perhaps individuals and the group can make their peace with subjective self-denial. 2. Survival. The primary reason for the objective self and motive for its creation in society is likely to be social control in all its forms—separate persons controlling each other, primary groups and secondary groups controlling members, and the political order controlling citizens and groups. Current “dangers” as far as this kind of control is concerned are based on increasing personal awareness of it and increasing disregard for the keystone in its edifice, role. Families, the economy, and the whole state are likely to topple as this occurs. The threat to the social order and to humanity goes much deeper than the mere erosion of particular interpersonal arrangements. The human organism itself is threatened. It is threatened because the major instrument of attack upon the objective self has become the subjective self. The subjective self, too, is an illusion. We end with a situation where one illusion attacks and destroys the other. But it may well be that the only check on the dominance of one illusion was the other, and surrendering one means we surrender to insanity. The only check on the objective self or role was the subjective self; the objective self became stronger and stronger in America at least until the subjective self revolted; in the ensuing struggle, it may be that one or the other will be obliterated. We have seen how the subjective self is established and, in part, why, how we make the world into objects in order to use it, how the price of objects is the simultaneous creation of subjects, and how the price of both of them is tension. The subject is empty, and this emptiness moves it to objectify itself as a role. Use gives birth to object, object entails subject, and subject becomes one of the many objects thus established. But subject resists complete objectification, and the dialectic tension thereby created may end in our destruction. So far in the contemporary era we witness the extreme rebellion of subjectivity against its objectification, but what happens when subjectivity triumphs? Will there be a flight in fright back to objectivity or will subjectivity then understand that it, too, is an illusion fostered by our fall into abstraction and into the creation of objects? If this is understood, will we nihilistically be driven to the destruction of our minds? 3. Fear. An explanation of why self is established and not only established but continued despite tension may throw brighter light on the whole problem. The source of object, self as subject, and then self as object lies as much in emotion as in reason. Subjective self is the logical correlate of objects, but at least one observer has suggested that a human emotional push to clarity concerning “what is” is the basis of both, that subject and object emerge from a state of feeling. (Eliot, 1964, 165) Having established objects for their usefulness, we suffer from an existential wound. Chaos has been rendered orderly and safe by organizing it into a structure of defined objects, but out of this ordering come two realms—inside and outside. The outside is the world of created objects. Living in the world and paying all attention to it, I as subject become frightened of the possibility—which at the primary level I know is true—that I am “no-thing,” that this spark of consciousness is only a container to be filled with alien things, and yet I fight to fill it and to have others see that it is full. In fear and trembling I create an object self, make an object out of subjectivity. Psychologically, the roots of the problem of objective self and subjective self-consciousness are connected to the problem of second level consciousness itself. One of the roots of second-level consciousness is the refusal to accept the transitory nature of what is. We create objects on the basis of mental constructs to avoid accepting a constant flux or chaos that we cannot master. Life is the assertion of permanencies. Second-level consciousness denies impermanence by holding onto concepts abstracted from experience and pretending that they are unchanging realities behind the surface of change. By turning “what is” into things, we not only can control it but also make it more stable. The price of doing so is the establishment of an empty subjectivity that we then seek not only to fill but also make stable by means of objectifying it. We objectify it by identifying it with the things we created, both “physical” things such as “arms,” “legs,” and “bodies” and intangible things such as “roles.” In the age of plenty when things are hyper-abundant and economic organization depends not just upon identification with things but also upon the constant willingness to let them go, to let them wear out or be destroyed before they wear out, the contradiction leads us ever more to recognize the emptiness of objects and of objective self. The very fear that drove us to create objects, the terror of subjective self, joins with objective self and now forces us to abandon the objects, but can we face returning to an empty and chaotic subject? The drive to flee from impermanence and its usual human form, the flight from death, have to be overcome. These problems can be transcended only by yielding to impermanence or death. This does not mean that life is denied; acceptance of death is the only path to life. Issues and Answers 1. Dilemmas. If denial of self holds many dangers for the group and if we seem driven to establish self both as subject and object, the assumption of self likewise holds many problems and dangers for consciousness. Once we assume the existence of self in any of its forms, we immediately confront the fundamental subject-object knowledge dilemma already noted. Given the division of reality into self and all else, we must choose epistemologically; either we are “a part of the world” or we are “the constituting consciousness of the world.” If we start with ourselves as one among many we are a part of, we “lock ourselves within” our own limits and cannot know anything of others. Similarly, if we are constituting consciousness, we cannot reach the other. (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, 71) Either way we confront a fundamental contradiction once we assume self. Either we impute to “other people” what we find in ourselves or else we can demonstrate no fundamental “other” and that lack contradicts our hypothesis of “self.” The ultimate philosophical reduction of the self/other problem is set in terms of mind-body or some other kind of dualism. “The universe is dual,” says Whitehead, “because each final actuality is both physical and mental.” (Whitehead, 1933, 245) Dualism of the mind-body problem exists and erects an insurmountable barrier in knowledge only because of the prior assumption of dualism in accepting self and other. Knowledge thus given ego/other dualism has two choices; for the sake of a knowledge theory it can accept one side of the dualism (self or other) as primary and base knowledge on the one side even though this contradicts the fundamental assumption of inherent dualism, or, for the sake of consistency with the assumption of ego/other, it can live with the dualism that forever keeps knowledge in two separate realms. It may be true that serious doubt remains over whether “a solution to the subject-object dilemma is prior and necessary to a theory of knowledge.” We can, after all, take knowledge and the dualism as a “fact”— the physicist need not analyze the concept of “mass” to use it. Eaton, 1923), 178-179) We can ignore the dilemma—indeed, we have long ignored it—as long as we take “usefulness” or “success” as our standard of knowledge. The dangerous consequences in ignoring the problem, particularly for students of society, have already become all too apparent. In addition to the epistemological dilemma, one of the dangers of having a societal system that uses selfresponsibility to maintain control over persons is that self and self-responsibility allow those successful in terms of social goals to praise themselves and blame the unsuccessful for their own misery. This problem is not insignificant in countries such as the United States and particularly so among individuals and groups who have but recently emerged themselves from, or are still near to, an extremely low status. You are struck hard in America by the self-satisfaction of the newly arrived middle class member regardless of their ethnic or racial backgrounds. If American society caters to self-responsibility and then demands that less developed countries do likewise, it surely has lost sight of the sources of some of its most sensitive problems. Another kind of problem likely to develop and threaten a society based on self is the family. The self-confidence and self-centeredness so essential in some societies in order to allow men and women to choose each other “freely” for purposes of tying others to themselves permanently, contradicts the demands of life together after marriage. Extreme tensions within a marriage can endanger the well-being of the children— society’s major motive for encouraging marriage. In the past, romantic pursuit and marriage demanded that one of the partners yield to the self of the other. This is an intolerable situation in a self-centered society. But the allegedly subordinate self can dominate in hidden ways. The outcome of this process is likely to be the breakdown of family arrangements and crises in identity. It is most intriguing to speculate whether the early death of Romeo and Julliet is the highest ideal of the ego-centered romantic marriage precisely because it avoids not the “horrors of marriage” but those horrors induced by an egocentric romanticism. The arranged marriage may not be romantically interesting, but at least it is societally consistent. Finally, one last all-encompassing danger of inducing and using ego-centrism to serve group needs—the tenuous character of the self. The shaky character of the self appears as soon as it is lightly tested and not simply assumed. In his attempts to understand the causal aspects of self, Brian O’Shaughnessy has presented an exploration of knowledge of self as an agent. His relevant and significant conclusions are that not only is the agent self not experienced directly in action but also that the attempt to isolate agent self while action is going on even impedes the action. (O’Shaughnessy, 1966) He thereby illustrates both the fading quality of self when self is questioned and the creation of self on the symbolic level in conjunction with the isolation of object. Similarly, experiments conducted by immersing persons totally in bodytemperature water show the weak identification of “self” with those sense-impressions that are fairly constant when some of subjects of experiment have experienced extreme fright when self starts to dissipate as sensed body outlines disappear. Both personal and social crises may be the outcome in a group fostering strong-self assumptions. Currently, we have innumerable examples. The decay of self has been symbolized both in “stream-of-consciousness” writing and in existentialism. Both have, however, attempted to replace traditional self with new self— “stream of consciousness” by assuming that the readers will supply a self to “possess” the consciousness stream they read and existentialism by noting the emptiness of self but asserting the self of selfcreation. Novels and existentialism only express what we of the twentieth century generally know, the loss of self. The experience of “identity crisis” seems to be more and more widespread. It has been attributed to attacks on both modes of the self—the self-as-subject and the self-as-object/role. Rapid change, according to what is already a cliché, forces us to adjust to new roles; therefore, we must alter our identities; and thus a fundamental character of identity, its permanence, is challenged. Moreover, Western civilization is increasingly contradictory; on the one hand, it insists that on the verbal level we be treated as subjectselves while, on the other, it more and more forces us to behave as objects. It is not that being numbered and indexed is depersonalizing as much as it is that the process forces those of us who conceive of ourselves as subjects to recognize that we are being treated as objects. Nothing reveals this subject-object contradiction in Western societies—especially in the United States—as well as does the economic arena. Both as workers and as consumers we have been more and more objectified, yet resistance to objectification by a society that demands and verbalizes ultimate subjectivity forces economic agencies to pretend they are treating us as subjects in order to make us into more perfect objects. Therefore, societies such as that of the United States have tacitly agreed to maintain the pretense that you are subjective self while requiring that you live as objective self. Advertising absurdly appeals to fifty million people to be unique and subjective by all smoking the same carcinogenic cigarette, and “personal” bank account checks must have a “personal” identification number printed so that only a computer can read it. This kind of weird tension in objectsubject self as well as rapid role change induces serious identity conflict into persons and may lead to the final collapse of some Western civilizations as more and more selves in conflict withdraw from participating and the rest in society attempt to prevent their departure. 2. Suggestions. This is not the place to analyze the ills of this or that particular society but to point out that many of their problems may be traceable to self. What we need most urgently to explore is a way of saving knowledge from its link with largely illusory self and especially of saving knowledge when what has been self in a society dissipates and is disregarded. What is needed is a wholeness and an opening of consciousness to all of its capabilities without the prior imposition of categories. The history of knowledge may be seen as the development of principles increasingly directed at the removal of these categories. Required, therefore, is not the abandonment of all past processes of knowing but their fulfillment. The errors of “perception and judgment”—setting aside “logical error”—may well be minimized by seeing to it that the categories are still further attacked. Self emerged with the earliest manifestations of second level knowing—memory. Self constituted liberation from the confinement of the given. Strange as it may seem after all the discussion here so far, a basic liberation from self/society categories was the emergence of objects and objectivity in knowledge; the attempt to rid knowers of conditioning that had preceded their confrontation in experience was a giant step. The further development of object and objectivity went, however, the more the presence of self was stressed. Apparently, one could abstract the preconditioning of self from consciousness or experience only by creating a greater and greater distance between self and object. Thus, the drive to objectivity creates its own negation; the stronger the objectivity becomes, the stronger objective and subjective self become. The stronger self becomes the more likely it is to revolt against the objects and the objectivity that created it. Aware of the contradiction within objectivity, many recent philosophers have largely rejected both it and its “opposite”—subjectivity. Neither subject nor object is ontologically autonomous, and even less is it epistemologically autonomous. To enclose oneself within alleged subjectivity is to accept the distance between subject and object and is in fact to objectify self. To enclose attention within presumed non-subjective objects is to assert the power of the subject knower to stand outside. Argument in favor of transcending the dichotomy and merging of the two has come in a variety of forms. There are elements of transcendence in Dewey’s and Bentley’s concept of “transactionalism,” (Dewey & Bentley, 1949), 56) which argues for overcoming concentration on self-action and interaction by transaction. Marxism, too, contains a kind of relationism. And, of course, existential attitudes seek in the emphasis upon existence itself to ignore subject and object, self and other, by moving to “embrace” them both together. There are many was to characterize a method of knowing that goes beyond self by going beyond, though not obliterating, former patterns of discovery. Mostly what is possible in this regard has to be a matter of conjecture or hints rather than explicit method. The first direction must be to avoid as much as possible accepting the conclusions of studies that assume self and/or object. The second suggests how the process of learning and knowing is not of isolated parts but of wholes. For example, when children begin to “know” or understand what seem to us to be complex concepts such as the difference between “mine” when spoken by others and “mine” when spoken by themselves are actually learning simple ideas—they learn not just the isolate symbol “mine” but the who complex of emotions expressed when learning “mine.” This is simple, whole, or gestalt knowing and not isolated piece knowing. Similarly, knowledge of throwing a ball is given not by watching and analyzing the movement of arm and then motion of ball, the action of the knower, and then possibility of human agent as thrower; you knows less, not more, about throwing a ball by watching your own arm and the rest; you know better by paying attention, by opening consciousness, knowledge, and experience to the fullness. A third suggestion points to a fundamental tendency of Western intellectual endeavor. Physical scientists themselves and now increasingly psychologists as well have discovered the danger of excessive attention or concentration. Some psychiatrists have found that intense attention and intention together make the “object” examined disappear. Viktor Frankel, for example, found that many phobias con be overcome if the patient will think of the fear, accept or reject it, and deliberately attempt to follow its dictates. (Frankel, 1967, 60) Ordinarily, you will find that if you concentrate upon a word as a word, as an object, the word will suddenly become strange , foreign, erroneously spelled. Scientists, unable to solve a problem may discover that the solution comes easily after they stop trying to force it to come. The lesson to be learned is that the more we seek to capture knowledge the more readily it eludes us. Western scientific knowledge has been based upon and seems ever more oriented around the scientist’s attempt to force nature to answer questions put to it. It may well be that this must change in order to renew knowledge. The increasing role of the scientist and especially the social scientist both in the natural laboratory (the social world to be examined) as well as in the artificial laboratory to gain more knowledge may instead be preventing the birth of the most important kinds of knowledge. Like the boy trying to ask the question of his own arm, “how do you throw,” while throwing, the scientist by asking may be both destroying the throw and interfering in the possibility of answering the question. Intellectual life must become more contemplative or meditative and less action-oriented. We must converse with the world, natural and social, and not cross-examine it. Wholeness can never be fully recaptured once we have lost it by the fall into reason and the second level of knowing, but by dedication and by humility in knowing, knowledge can be vastly improved. Primordial paradise, “the unconscious wholeness of nature where there is “no division between subject and object, no reflection, no painful conflict of conscious with the unconscious” (Berdyaev, 1960, 38) may never return and might be disastrous if it should. Some “things” such as self and object may never fully be avoided, but their threat can be minimized by concentrating on opening to the fullness of experience or, at least, since fullness can never be re-captured, by deliberately denying self and object and enabling awareness of the given. Again, modesty is essential since the unerring fullness of primary knowledge is forever gone. Since we can no longer escape from either partial attention to the given or temporal sequence, we must be modest, denying of self and object, and open to past and future, history and teleology, in knowledge. All errors in “perception” or “judgment of perception” arise because of mis-taking one way of knowing on the secondary level for another. Self, objective and subjective, and object are two elements in that confusion. These are memory constructs that we take for sensations or emotions we experience. We can overcome some of the error in contemporary social research particularly, but in physical scientific research too, by rejecting the actual reality of these constructs. Chapter 5 Impure Reason The characteristics human beings possess that permit secondary knowledge to arise and that distinguish it from primary knowing are memory, comparison of elements that are preserved in memory, and abstraction. These three become so pervasive that often they or their resulting “propositions” are taken for the whole of knowledge. On the contrary, knowledge is much broader than the list of what is or can be put in propositional or even in verbal form. Propositions and verbalizations—indeed the whole process of memory, comparison, and abstraction (which is more familiarly called by a general term “reason")—is secondary knowledge based on the broader primary knowledge. Now it is necessary to go beyond discussing the perceptual and judgmental errors that arise when reason tries to connect itself to allegedly “external” reality and briefly examine reason in itself as it operates isolated from the world. A Priori The most perceptive philosophers persistently discover that our acts of knowing seem always at least partly projections upon reality—projections “from our minds.” For example, when we look at an object, we experience it as a permanence but only a limited permanence because to us it exists “in time.” But time is not a quality of the object; it is instead our minds that attribute time to our perceptions and attribute it to the objects we perceive. Time is one example of a whole series of such projections that are a priori to our perceptions. Other examples of these a priori projected categories, which are said to be prior to, not given by, and not explainable in terms of, experience, are space and number. We see things in terms of time, space, and number, but if they are not “in” the things, if they come from our “minds,” how do they “get into” our minds and how do we know they are not just arbitrary and inaccurate distortions of reality? Kant “solved” the problem of where they come from by ascribing them to “faculties” or indelible structures of mind. His solution, however, raises the further problem of the projecting character of the mind; it fails to answer how the mind gets its structures—are they inborn or learned; and it merely suggests that since we absolutely need the categories we need not be bothered about comprehending them. To an enormous degree our difficulties can be overcome by recognizing two principles: first, the categories are not prior to experience at all, and, second, they are preconditions not of experience or knowledge but only of second-level knowledge. The categories arise from and after the division of experience into parts; they are learned out of experience once that experience has been divided into parts. That the categories arise out of the second level where experience is presented in terms of objectpieces can be shown by the example of time. Time is one of those non-objective categories that Kant understood to be absolute conditions for human knowledge. We are immersed in duration, however, primarily because, once we step into the second level of knowing, we constantly live in pieces of memory. But duration seems suspended in certain circumstances when we still know—when we are “caught up” in work or pleasure or when we “know” unconsciously. Freud, as early as the 1920’s, suggested that we are “in a position to embark on a discussion of the Kantian theorem that time and space are ‘necessary forms of thought.’ We have learnt that unconscious mental processes are in themselves ‘timeless.’” (Freud, 1951, 54) Aware that for Kant “thought” was quite different in meaning than for Freud in that it did not contain the possibility of thinking on the primary level, still, the quietude that usually accompanies the acceptance of Kant’s categories is truly amazing. The second principle we can use to cope with the Kantian a priori problem is one that more of us are likely to find objectionable. Not only are the categories non-existent on the primary level of knowledge but also they are derived from second level experience. They are not projections of mind upon experience but are developed out of experience. While indeed prior to this or that particular (partial) experience, they are not prior to experience in general. The categories are present not because experience cannot do without them but because reason as it currently operates cannot. They enable us to apply contemporary thought processes to experience. The a priori categories are founded upon abstraction from experience. We gradually learn them from experience. The rise of the a priori category of number is instructive. Establishing second-level knowing, creating subject and “things,” and becoming able to abstract similarities in these things, we can bunch things; we can see similar bunches and abstract from certain of them the similarity named by the symbol “three.” The principles involved in “three-ness” are valid not only for this world but also for all possible “thing” worlds. Because of this universality of number, we deceive ourselves into believing that it is not an abstraction from experience. The a priori categories are not projections of the mind upon reality but arise from the development of second-level knowing and its attempt to capture and dominate external reality. However, primary knowing, the basis of the secondary level, subverts the imprisonment of this “external” reality by making it impossible without categories; it thereby shows that “external reality” is a projection, at least in part, of our minds. The categories make certain that pure reason cannot generate knowledge unless it relies on their demonstrable artificiality. The categories subvert reason in the name of knowledge. Kant himself, we hasten to re-assert, insisted that all knowledge begins with experience. He proceeded, however, to argue that while it “begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience.” (Kant, 1949, 24) Our own “faculty” of knowing, he adds, contributes something to knowledge. The distinction between what is given by particular experience—by the object—and what is given by the subjective knower produces the distinction between synthetic and analytic judgments. Analytic judgments are judgments of reason or “mind” alone after, but not derived from, experience; and synthetic judgments depend on the object. Apparently like Kant, many recent empiricists have been unable to overcome belief in the almost absolute dichotomy between analytic and synthetic judgments. In fact, of the two basic “dogmas” of empiricism, one insists that fundamental cleavage exists between the two kinds of judgments. (Quine, 1951, 20) Factual or synthetic judgments (for example: “That is a table.”) are sharply distinguished from logical or analytical judgments (for example: “Two plus two equals four.”). The synthetic a priori, the a priori judgment drawn from experience, was considered by both Kant and empiricists alike as taboo. When philosophers such as John Stuart Mill attempted to demonstrate that analytic judgments of mathematics were drawn from experience, that if a demon were to supply one extra apple every time we added apples, then for us two plus two would equal five, he was laughed at. Were a demon to do this, it was said, we would just have to make a sharper distinction between mathematics and physics, and that in mathematics two plus two would still equal four. (Lewis, March 29, 1923) Mill’s example may be weak, but the criticism of it depends on orientations drawn on the basis of our demon-less world; the point remains that two plus two equals four only given the assumptions (1) that reality can be objectified into parts that then can be added and (2) that the idea of “adding” would remain the same were a demon automatically to place another factor in experience. The invisible shield between a priori and a posteriori and between analytic and synthetic judgments is so beloved by empiricists, who generally appear reluctant to admit the existence of anything imposed on experience by “mind,” precisely because it is the empiricist group that most pursues not “experience” but single, discrete, particular experiences. There is safety in suggesting that what is given in a particular experience or a series of them is only object and that if subjective elements creep in, they come only because of the unchangeable and universal structure of the human mind. By means of this assumption, empiricists are saved from having to deal with the possibility that mind imposes something it need not upon “objective experience”—they no longer have to worry about research beyond their objectifications. The safe world is not always, however, the true world, and the safe world has, even in the short run, a tendency to be safe only for a few and, in the long run, a propensity to become unsafe for all. The categories in experience are not a priori to experience nor are they analytic judgments separate from the synthetic. The categories come from experience but experience that is divided neither into subjective/objective alternatives nor into discrete particular segments. There can be no doubt that given the assumption of an objective-external world and, therefore, of a subjective-internal world, the absolute a priori and the absolute separation between analytic and synthetic judgments are inevitable. If we assume an externalobjective world, that world can only be known by a “separate” knower who either passively or actively receives and grasps what is given there. The other alternative where mind creates and projects the objective world is denied by the empiricist assumption of the independent reality of the objective world. One basis of the Kantian position appears unassailable today. What we experience or extract from particular knowings and call “things” are partly constructed; “mind” projects certain categories upon “objects.” Knowledge of objects in terms of the categories “space and time,” for example, is not given by the particular experience. This is not, however, to say that space and time are not derived from experience. If you lessen belief in the objective world, as I have attempted to do already, then the claims made for the categories as a priori to experience diminish. Kant, at least, makes clear that the existence of the a priori occurs only in what we have called the second level of knowing. He hints, much to the contrary of his empiricist interpreters, that the a priori is not part of “objective experience.” It seems, however, that Kant, when discussing the a priori neglects the distinction between generic knowing and judgmental knowing—you may apprehend directly without the categories, and the categories become useful and necessary only because of reason or knowing that requires judgment. Kant wrote that “empirical judgments are not judgments based solely on experience,” but that beyond the empirical and beyond the perceptions given by the senses generally, special concepts must come into play. These concepts have their origin entirely a priori in the pure intellect; every perception is first of all subsumed under them and can then be “transformed into experience by means of these concepts.” (Kant, 1949, 71) It seems that Kant is indeed referring here to judgments in experience, the cutting to pieces of consciousness and putting them into categories that can be grasped by intellect. The categories are given by memory and reason and are useful only to the extent that reason is useful; they are necessary to one kind of knowledge, but not to all knowledge. The a priori in an experience is a posteriori to experience; by nature the a priori is synthetic. Logic 1. Deduction. As a conclusion to this discussion of knowledge in general, we should pay some attention to pure reason in logic and to how it must become less pure in order to approach the concrete. Pure reason exists only after, and is ultimately dependent upon, practical reason and primary knowing. In its core, pure reason is manifested as the process whereby these symbols were abstracted from experience. This is, of course, why Aristotelian logic, or the deductive model, is the only logic some philosophers wish to label “symbolic” logic. It is the only logic that ignores the concrete, is based solely upon symbol/sign, or, in Kantian terms, offers pure analytic judgments. Strange as it may seem, the recent empirical and positivist schools of philosophy, which have argued in favor of getting to experience and reality in knowing rather than being confined on the heights of abstract speculation, are the very groups that have demanded that philosophy be enclosed within the realm of abstract symbolic analysis. They start with experience, denigrating any thing that pretends to go beyond experience but end by admitting that they cannot decide what is real but only what it means to say that something is real—they end by enclosing themselves within pure reason. Once abstraction has occurred and symbols are the matter handled by consciousness, it is impossible for positivists or anyone else to return to the concrete. Logical truth then becomes only tautological truth—it is enclosed within the world of abstractions, it is analytical. The statement “The morning star is the same as the evening star” is logically true only if the symbols “morning star” and “evening star” have identical definitions. As Kant suggested, “Pure reason requires completeness in the use of the intellect in dealing with experience. This completeness can only be a completeness of principles, not one of images and objects.” (Kant, 1949, 98) Only deduction has the right to be called pure reason; the other so-called logical systems such as “induction” and “dialectics” may be modes of reasoning but not modes of pure reasoning. Only deduction is based on pure symbols, and only pure reason in its purity is free from error. In deductive logic we find three symbols all abstracted from experience; error arises only when we wish to attach these symbols back to experience. The symbols may be labeled “A,” “B,” and “C.” If “A” equals “B” and “B” equals “C,” then “A” equals “C"; the statement is completely without error. Error arises only when we try to apply the abstract symbols to the concrete—only when we try to say that this or that is “A” and so it is also “C.” 2. Induction to Return to the Concrete. Since a primary justification for deduction is knowledge of what we do not or can not know or experience directly, questions arise over how deductive conclusions relate to experience. Deduction can offer the dream of unerring knowledge, but how can we be assured that its conclusions are related to experience? The usual answer is that we must test in experience the conclusions derived by deduction. But this will not by itself transfer the certainty of logic to life; moreover, if it were possible to test, to experience, conclusions drawn from deduction, little would be served by the logical process. Instead, we may try to connect logical validity to the concrete by studying how close the symbols used in deduction are to the concrete. The symbols were constructed as abstract generalizations from experience. Thus, the symbol “telephone” is abstracted from any part of experience that demonstrates the specific characteristics for the receiving and sending of voice signals over long distances. From the attempt to verify conclusions drawn from deduction arises the interest in induction, or generalizations from a number of “cases” and “inference” from those cases to the whole “class.” Empirical science built the idea of induction into a religion. If you were interested in knowing, you should go and gather pieces of experience guided by some idea, compare them, create a generalization, test the generalization, and you would end with an everincreasing body of knowledge. Scientific empiricists began to assume that induction was not really a kind of servant to deduction in knowing but that it was a coequal system of logic, that you could, from induction, come to generalizations that were as certain as those of deduction. Moreover, induction seemed the very basis of deduction, in as much as it was the source of observation-symbols to be compared in reason. David Hume’s attack on causality devastated this early empiricism. He demonstrated that no justification existed for assuming that there was a necessary connection between parts of experience and that such a connection alone would legitimize generalizations. You could gather similarity after similarity in experience and yet not be justified in generalizing on the basis of mere similarity. Positivists often responded by conceding that the actual justification for induction was not inherent validity but its “usefulness” in serving given aims. (Reichenbach, 1954, 243) No one in recent years has taken a position so strongly against induction as a valid method of logic as has Karl Popper. (Popper, 1962) Popper points out that major problems in knowledge have been brought about by the view that induction is a valid logical system leading to confident generalization; induction, he insists, is not logic but science, and science is the modest statement of conjectures that are then refuted in a process that never ends in a concluding generalization. Any other approach makes induction or science into dogmatism. 3. Dialectics and Existentialism to Return to the Concrete. Popper’s description bears striking similarity to the other knowing process also considered to be a form of logic, the dialectic. The long-standing notion of what constituted secure and certain knowledge had been what was produced through inductive generalizations manipulated using the deductive model; but statements derived from induction, however carefully abstracted from parts of experience, seemed to contain glaring errors. Errors persisted, observers at least since the time of Hegel argued, because of the very nature of the abstracting process. Two facets of that process are fallacious. First, abstracting the common element of several things ignores diversities and often forgets to consider those aspects that in the concrete are the negation of affirmed elements. We may, for example, pick out or “abstract” from the concrete the reality of “human being” on the basis of the standards of “rationality and animality,” but humans are not purely “rational animals.” The statement, “That is a human being,” often ignores and conceals these negations for the sake of characterization as a rational animal.1 In other words, the idea “human” may be that of “rational animal,” but the concrete existent can never be just that. Through the copula “is” we transfer the logical realm to concrete life. By it we ascribe being to an abstract essence. Many primitive languages have no verb “to be” and are therefore saved from the error. Some recent perspectives suggest we abandon that verb. The followers of semanticist Alfred Korzybski have tried to develop a form of English without it, (Korzybski, 1958) but has not had complete success—the phraseology used to replace “to be” makes the same, although less apparent, assumption about the existence of essences. The phrase, “I feel cold,” is not actually all that different from the phrase, “It is cold"; both assume the concrete existence of abstractions such as the “feeling person.” The second source of error is not only the abstraction of common elements from “things” but also the abstraction of “things” from their “background.” Those who argue for dialectic knowledge tend to see the first error in induction—the absence of accounting for negation and process—and the existentialists tend to see the second failure of knowing—the lack of consideration for the whole of experience. It is precisely because of this that the dialectical knowers and the existentialists both, though the existentialists to a much greater degree, have found it necessary to search for new media of expression especially in the arts. If understanding and reason occur on a level subsequent to abstraction and abstraction itself is a barrier to knowledge, then the great bearer of abstraction, language, must be overcome. It is hard enough a problem to tear away at the symbolic superstructure; but even if that superstructure is shaken and a full experience becomes possible, we must still face the issue of communicating the new fullness. Old language and logic can no longer serve the task. Dialectic logic takes one of the steps leading to the communication of the fuller knowledge and at least challenges the old logic by stressing unity rather than separation. The analytic logic of Aristotle—based upon abstraction—became the synthetic dialectic of Hegel. The importance of dialectics in this light is not so much that they stress change and conflict but that they suspend analysis and adopt synthesis. They reverse the abstracting process by putting back together in the concrete the contradictory essences and surfaces abstracted. Twentieth century existentialists—Sartre is a prime example—have partly replaced scientific language as the pre-eminently precise mode of communication with an art form. Apparently, it is as of now only in this way that thinkers can hint at the fullness of knowledge; discursive language is excessively tied to traditional abstract symbols. Innovations in some of the art forms, the novel, painting, drama, and especially film, are based on and at the same time illustrate Kant’s thesis that the mind projects categories onto reality; more significantly, however, the art forms illustrate, not the projections of “mind” upon “experience,” but the wholeness of experience before the slicing of reason occurs necessitating “projections.” It is intriguing, too, that the new art is reminiscent of primitive forms. The art of primitives, like their language, often reflects the absence of the division into separate things. Since they are not perceived as separate, for example, there is no need in language for copulative verbs such as “to be.” (LevyBruhl, 1926, 91) Since the split is not assumed, it need not be overcome. The renewal of knowledge may begin by turning to the origins of knowledge. The origins may be discovered by looking at the thought, art, language, and myths of primitive peoples. PART II: EXPLANATION Chapter 6 Explanation as Instinct 1. Source of the Drive. The nature of explanation is best disclosed, at least in the beginning of the investigation, by questioning the place of the intellectual phenomenon called “explanation” in the broadest outline of things. Paradoxically, explanation permits knowing of what is not known. Explanation is an attempt to overcome partiality and to reach fullness. It tries to conquer all separation, all dualism, and to return to unity. It assumes the hope of “deliverance from the antithesis of consciousness and reality.” (1950, Cassirer, 3) Explanation confronts both the known and the unknown; it is the process whereby the unknown is known through placing it in the context of the known. Whatever the form the unknown comes in, it is linked to the known by means of the communicable symbol. The knower knows partially; the explanation of what the knower knows is that which places what the knower knows in the context of fullness. You posit a theory relating this piece of knowledge to all other pieces and thereby gain a better understanding of the piece. You abstract from the particular piece of knowledge what will enable you to place it together with the memory/symbols of past knowledge; of course, your explanation will be erroneous to the extent that your pre-existing memory/symbol patterns are of such a kind that they can be connected only with certain elements abstracted from the new piece of knowledge. Moreover, these may be insignificant or superficial elements so that the knower may end, not only with ever tinier pieces, but also with having the new experience increasingly hidden under rather than revealed by explanation. Both the new experience and the theory or explanation may be communicated to someone else whose knowledge is partial because that person lacks both the explanation and the new experience. Again the link between the two people is the memory/symbol, and, something that is most important, the explanation as well as the description of the new knowledge is likely to be guided and confined by the nature of the pre-existing intersubjective patterns—language, for example—that lie between the knower and the non-knower. To explain, in general, is to remove the obstacle of partial knowledge and the mystery of a particular experience by noting the wholeness, but far more important to explanation than the removal of the obstacle is its creation in the first place and the perception of its nature. In the social as well as in the natural sciences, most explanations involve pointing out an obstacle or the partial nature of an experience to the rest of us for whom until that time the obstacle or the partial nature of our knowledge was invisible. The discovery of obstacles to action—thus, the connection between usefulness and science—seems to reveal obstacles to knowledge. I want to climb the tree or fly to the moon. Assuming I can do these things, I seem unable because I do not know how. What is the obstacle to my knowledge? Now, the framework for removing obstacles is not that of the communicable symbol alone but also the knowledge the symbol stands for. If I offer you the partial, meaningful, but false explanation that the moon is made of green cheese, I have somewhat explained the moon even if your knowledge of green cheese is only that it is a food, but ultimately I have succeeded in my explanation only if the symbols in it, such as “green cheese,” are as much based on direct experience as possible. My explanation of the moon in terms of green cheese is an explanation to you to the extent of the directness of your knowledge of green cheese. Explanation is a reference to the familiarity of another experience and not just familiarity with other symbols. 2. Anxiety in the Drive. Near madness drives many of us to resolve obstacles to knowing and even more of us to hide our blindness to obstacles from ourselves. We are pushed not just by desire for fullness but, more importantly, by a nagging anxiety that what has not been explained may threaten the whole symbolic universe we live in. Our very lives are maintained by our intellectual endeavor. By the same token, the validity of that endeavor is found not within a symbolic system but in the concrete. The more we live from our symbolic system, the more we threatened we are by the possibility that something concrete might fail to fit into it. This existential anxiety is extensively experienced among social scientists of our time, less on the part of the philosophically-oriented, however, than on the part of the historically-oriented. As the historical group was challenged by the behavioral movement, the new generation of strict behavioralists is threatened by existentialist claims that their symbolic systems do not and cannot explain parts of experience that are important in the life of the behavioralists themselves. The anxiety does not shatter us if we build a wall of separation in our lives between self and scientist, but if we enclose the whole of our knowledge of human life within behavioralism or historicism, then we will be most threatened—if an important part cannot be fit into the system, cannot be explained, perhaps the core of the system is fundamentally erroneous. Physical scientists are often better able to cope with this anxiety primarily because they usually find it easier to erect barriers between their work and the rest of their lives. Physical science allows thinkers to refrain from identifying their whole life with what they are studying; the subject of social science is the human being in its entirety. It is with trepidation that we will put our existence, our lives, under the power of only a part of it—the mind. 3. Security by Reductionism. A primary thrust in science is to consider explanation as the same as reduction. A piece of wood is explained by reducing it to is molecules, then to its atoms, and then to its sub-atomic structures. An apparently complex and mysterious psychological reality is “explained” as “nothing but” a simple and universal “Oedipus Complex,” or a fantastic, colorful religious festival may be explained by referring to it as merely the expression of a “father fixation.” The view of explanation as essentially a simplifying mechanism is inaccurate on two counts. Even though it is necessary to isolate out familiar parts of the notunderstood or not fully-known experience in order for abstraction to take place, the consequent simplification risks distortion. If, for example, I do not understand or cannot explain that thing named “automobile” in front of my house and yet I am familiar with color and form, I may reduce automobile to its artistic explanation and proceed to hang it on the side of my house.1 Moreover, the very attempt to reduce and simplify will usually lead me away from essential parts of the experience. Automobile may be comprehensible only as a whole “self-moving” vehicle.” To explain is not to tear apart but to look into the wholeness of experience by means of symbol; I understand the automobile I see in terms of the fullness of its place in the universe I know. Explanation is both dangerous and limited. It can be useful only within the realm of an accepted symbolic universe pattern. One danger is failing to see the tenuous character of an assumed schema for what it is, and proceeding to extract prejudicially a part from what is to be explained. This path to explanation puts it at odds with true fullness. We can explain only in terms of abstract symbolic assumptions. Symbols are only abstract metaphors. No explanation is, therefore, precise. All is imaginative and created. There are those who laugh at the “imprecise picture language” used by thinkers such as Plato and who suggest that explanation in terms of such language may be tolerated only until such time as precision is possible as it is today. (1954, Reichenbach, 12) But all language is imprecise, and picture language may have the extreme value of never letting us forget its imprecision. 4. The Source Revisited. Although social scientists have, like their colleagues in the other sciences, developed an increasing interest “in explaining social facts rather than merely describing them,” (1950, Harsanyi, 138) critics such as Wittgenstein have argued that because of the lack of precision “we must do away with all explanation, and description must take its place.” (1953, Wittgenstein, 47) By description rather than explanation we may avoid enforcing and confirming a symbolic system that permits only an extremely narrow view of what we experience. Wittgenstein illustrates an important point. Explanation is one attempt to know fullness. We attempt to know the fullness after having objectified our knowledge and dispersed it into parts. Explanation is the re-integration of those parts. It is a reintegration that can, however, never be complete because it assumes the context of a given symbolic structure. The attempt to move closer to direct knowledge after the secondary level is established constitutes, therefore, a possible alternative to reductive explanations that oversimplify reality. As we have tuned ourselves to awareness of the small part, the object, so, too, we may be able to tune to the fullness by greater attention to it. Indeed, the intuitive leap in knowledge, suddenly bestowing upon us what we labored days to achieve, appears to be none other than a sudden opening to the fullness, an opening that tends to come with the most startling of suddenness to scientists searching for explanation by picking apart the pieces. The explanation that intuitively comes to us in a dream or while walking usually is an explanation that adjusts at least part of the symbolic framework we were trying to place the problem under. We are automatically attuned to a fullness that simplifying explanation must repress in order to prevail; like other repressions, it comes out spontaneously and in dreams. Linkage: The Instinct Satiated Even if we assume that explanation essentially consists of the linkage of the unexplained part of knowledge with a larger part through the instrumentality of a symbolic system, we still confront the problem of the form this is done in. How do you go about creating this link? A fundamental assumption underlying all human intellectual endeavor is the belief that everything, at least in some fashion, is related to everything else. We assume that the linkage exists, or, more precisely, that wholeness is. Our problem, therefore, is not the attempt to establish that there is a link but identifying what of the whole is nearest to the unexplained part of knowledge. If we have a symbolic universe, in order to explain any new part of knowledge, we need only refer to that part of the symbolic universe closest to the new part. The validity of causal explanations requires more extensive discussion and we shall return to it later, but let us at least note here that the link between the symbolic universe and the new unexplained part of knowledge is most often set forth in terms of some kind of cause. This connection is established by means of the cause-effect concept where the unexplained is explained by making it the effect of a cause lying within the symbolic universe and already “known” there as a cause. For example, I may see Mr. Humphrey standing on a box in Central Park making a speech. What a mystery. Mr. Humphrey never did such a thing before. How can I explain his behavior? Ah, yes, I remember, Mr. Humphrey is starting his campaign for the Presidency. He is speaking in the Park because he is running and because he is too poor to afford the high cost of television time. I have explained his behavior by seeing it as the effect of campaigning in poverty. “Campaigning in poverty” is the causal statement that links his behavior to a whole universe of understanding. Despite alleged desires on the part of many contemporary philosophers of science to transcend the ancients, most have added little to the analysis of the form of explanation provided by Aristotle in terms of causation and developed by Medieval Scholasticism. The “four causes,” formal, material, efficient, and final, as well as variations or combinations of them, provide the core of most speculation on explanation. Two of the causes stand out as most used in social science, the efficient and the final. Efficient causation appears most useful to social analysis. For example, we notice something happening between two men; one man is lying down and shaking. We do not understand the shaking. We want an explanation. We discover that the man lying down is shaking because he is being shaken by the other man. This constitutes an explanation since our symbolic universe already contains the notion of one man’s being able to shake another; one man can have effects or be an “efficient” or “agent” cause on another. We may be satisfied with this account. By far the longest established form of further explanation is in terms of final causation. Social scientists have become less attracted to using efficient cause by itself except to identify a new piece of knowledge as “social” or as occurring among people. A greater and increasing interest is the question “To what end?” We know one man is shaking the other; further desire for explanation or for fitting the new knowledge into our symbolic system more fully leads us to inquire why the one is shaking the other. One form that defines this final cause is the notion of purpose. One man is shaking the other because he wants to wake him up. This is explanation in as much as “the purpose of waking another up” already exists within our symbolic universe as “cause” for the “effect” “shaking.” To some analysts this notion of purpose is basic and irreducible and always presupposes an agent or efficient cause. To an increasing extent, however, explanation in terms of final cause is becoming absolute in the new scientific study of society at least in the form, not of purpose, but of function. One circumstance that may account for the exchange of purpose for function, or for an “analytical” rather than a behavioral or psychological approach, is that recent social—and especially political—science has turned to the alreadyestablished physical sciences. In the physical sciences purpose as explanation is considered the antithesis of knowledge and as reeking of animism. It is hard to see, for example, that the causal observation, “It intends to awaken a sleeping man,” contributes to an explanation of why an alarm clock is ringing. The attribution of purpose to alarm clocks does not exist within our contemporary symbolic universe (though it might have existed in others), and, therefore, purpose is not explanatory. The approach of the physical sciences toward whatever they study does not recognize possible intention or animism of purpose. In ordinary society, however, purpose has been, until today, a perfectly acceptable explanation of human behavior—though, like science, not of “inanimate” behavior. In looking to the physical sciences for guidance, social scientists have sought to eliminate the animism of purpose from their study of humans and to attribute to us instead a structural final cause. Purpose may exist, the scientific study of society admits, but explanation can be furthered by ignoring it and instead concentrating upon the function of shaking and waking in terms of some larger social structure. What is significant in terms of the argument over what form explanation shall take—efficient cause, final purposeful cause, or final functional cause—is not that there is sharp distinction among them (they all imply each other) but the precedence given one over the others. Not only the different emphasis but also the mere fact that there is disagreement and strongly-felt disagreement is a sign of the attempt to isolate one cause-effect relationship. The drive to isolate only one derives from two sources: completeness of understanding and the particular nature of the symbolic universe erected in science. If a single cause-effect relationship can be identified, then there is clarity and necessity between the two partially knowns. The nature of the link of the new part of knowledge to the known symbolic system is clear and necessary. This cause, which I already know and know as cause directly, produced the result that I new partially before I made the causal link but now I know it as fully as possible. The necessity and clarity of the linkage is furthermore important since it is presented within a symbolic system of science wherein the belief that “consciousness increases in value as it increases in clarity” (1967, Nietzsche, p. 283) because clarity permits knowledge to be used is prevalent. Suppose we want to explain a particular act we have just noticed. A loaf of bread drifted down from a grocery shelf. Of course, normally this would not be a matter demanding “explanation,” but we have made it problematic by questioning it. By the concept of efficient causation we could say that the loaf drifted down because a man took it down; we understand now the movement of bread since we have already accepted the possibility of ourselves as a reality and as a cause. Final cause conceived of as purpose would suggest that we explain the disappearance of the bread by shopper’s intention to remove it. When we raise the issue of final structural cause, we may take two paths: if we say than the shopper bought the bread because of hunger, we open a biological symbolic structure we had already accepted as explanation; or if we say that the purchase of the bread occurs in order to put currency into the grocer’s hands, we are turning to an economic symbolic structure. Whatever explanation we settle on will be dictated by the reason why we want an explanation, and the reason why we want one will be determined by the nature of the symbolic system we operate under. Explanation does not exist autonomously but only within an assumed system. There is tension and argument over what constitutes explanation because there are more than one assumed symbolic systems among us. One of these systems, the scientific one, takes prediction for the sake of usefulness as the central function of explanation; another takes “understanding” for individuals as the central purpose and objects, therefore, to the confining nature of the scientific system. If there is debate over the form explanation should come in, it arises primarily from differences in the goals of explanation among the debaters. Chapter 7 Prediction as Poison The Use of Laws One of the most sacred tenets of scientific social studies is that the goal of analysis is prediction. some philosophers of science have gone so far as to suggest that explanation and prediction amount to the same thing. “An explanation,” argues one eminent philosopher, “is not complete unless it might as well have functioned as prediction.” (1942, Hempel, 38) This is not really to say that prediction is the same as explanation but is to suggest that the explanation of some part of experience is by virtue of another part so that when the other part occurs you can predict the occurrence of the part explained. In other words, the explanation of the part of experience consists in stating the causes leading to the emergence of the partial experience. Many social scientists argue, in addition, that social inquiry into the cause of a phenomenon ought aim at establishing those “universal laws” that “can predict behavior.” (1967, Connolly, 5) 1. Laws: Political and Scientific. The form of prediction taken to be the key to scientific explanation is that of a law subsumed under other laws. Any number of empiricists can be cited supporting the view that the ultimate form of explanation is a general law.1 Argument over the nature of scientific law is very closely related to disputes in the field where the concept of “law” is derived as a metaphor, the laws of society. Some jurists have claimed that social law is simply a universal statement of what is and is not to be done. The order, “Thou shalt not steal,” is just that, a demand. Logical positivists in the field of law, however, have delighted in pointing out that most laws in society either are, or can be stated in the form of, an “if-then” proposition: society does not say, “Thou shalt not kill,” but “If you kill, then you shall be killed.” The one form of law, the “if-then” proposition, bears a striking resemblance to the statement of a prediction in science. Scientists strive to demonstrate as law the prediction, “If a Republican is elected President of the United States, then the United States will experience an economic depression,” or, “If the sky is red in the morning, it will rain before evening.” The metaphoric use of “law” in this way ignores the same thing that logical positivists in jurisprudence ignore, namely, that the “if-then” proposition is possible only within an assumed context of the other kind of law. The statement, “If you kill, then you will be killed,” is possible as a law only because of a universal assumption or “natural law” prior to the “if-then” proposition: “Thou shalt avoid being killed.” The “ifthen” form of law is only law given the assumptions (1) that punishment is possible and (2) that being killed in this case is conceived of as something very undesirable. This is only one more way of saying that in science prediction or “if-then” law propositions are possible only given the larger symbolic universe wherein they operate in. We may explain the partial experience that “it is raining tonight” to some extent by the “if-then” law “if the sky is red in the morning, it will rain by night.” The “if-then” proposition is explanatory only if it refers to the symbolic system in a way that permits the symbolic system to point to the kind of necessity and degree of necessity existing between red sky and rain. Although the analogy between jurisprudence and science can be pushed too far, it is revealing. 2. Use. The symbolic system of science anoints only certain kinds of explanation as legitimate. Today’s scientific symbolic system is oriented to practice; practice demands prediction, which is the linking of two or more phenomena within the symbolic system so that we can do things in the world. It is in order that things may be done that science needs to identify cause-effect relationships; who would really care whether such relationships existed were it not that the intent contained within the symbolic system of contemporary science is to alter the cause so as to bring about a desired effect. Bergson claims, in fact, that all division of the extended world “is purely relative to our positive action upon it.” (1962, Bergson, 328) The entire pragmatist and positivist orientation toward “practice”—a concept is acceptable to the extent that it is useful—betrays the bias in explanation both toward the “useful” toward a particular notion of what is “useful. Once again we return to consider the stultifying character of science approached in this way. If we are given its symbolic system as the completely adequate arena for explanation to take place, then science unscientifically cuts itself off from potential knowledge. The “scientific” dictum mis-appropriated from Kant that any experience that “cannot be classified under any law of sensation that is unanimously accepted by men” and that, therefore, “would only go to prove the irregularity in the testimony of the senses” should be disregarded. (1949, Kant, 21) Herein lies precisely the source of the tremendous, but unfortunately ignored, difference between the “pure” and the “applied” sciences. We are driven to seek explanation of our partial experience because what is unexplained challenges our belief that our symbolic universe allows us a comprehensiveness of understanding. This drive is the core of anything in human history that can be called “progress” as well as what we tend to categorize as “pure science.” We are also driven to indulge in explanation by our physical and psychological “needs.” This fails, however, to challenge the symbolic universe and, on the contrary, forces the unexplained into the mold of the given symbolic system for it is the context our view of our needs is embedded in. Science seeks usefulness and, for the sake of usefulness, clarity in knowledge. The invention it uses to achieve clarity is not unlike the physical capacity to focus our eyes. Clarity demands extreme focus on pieces so that they may be used. This might be acceptable as long as we stay within the brightlyilluminated sphere of our symbolic universe; but when we try to look into the realms not yet illuminated, we must do what our eyes do in a darkened room in order to see: we must un-focus our attention. Both “needs” and the scientific explanation that leads to their satisfaction are dominated by the given symbolic system either of a whole society or of a specific scientific sub-culture within it. The true scientific drive in Western thinking is in danger of drying up; science is in danger of losing its creative mind, a suicide generated by its own devices. Those indulging in what is currently called “pure science” most often get jobs in either industry or academe focussed more on how to overcome more general problems than the “applied” scientists so that out of the work of both products may be more profitably sold or “better” armaments built. Challenges to the symbolic system of science come less and less from those who call themselves scientists; the insignificant objections they raise among themselves are always within that system and assume it. Science oriented to practice, like science under fascism, is extremely powerful; when it loses its creative mind, it becomes a powerful malignancy. If society survives long enough, science may get a transfusion of mind from the nonscientific, artistic and philosophic community, but the transfusion may come too late, the blood may be too diluted, and the suicide may still be successful. Prediction—the dominant orientation of the current scientific symbolic system—must not be considered as the goal of social explanation. This is not to say that prediction has no place within social explanation; it may serve as one way some forms of explanation can be stated so that they are testable by different people. The unlimited pursuit of prediction, however, tends to corrupt knowledge, and prediction that presumes to certainty tends to corrupt it certainly. Corrupting Knowledge 1. Part of a Part. Second level knowing consists of knowing through symbol or names, and names become possible only with the parcelling of the world into small and separate pieces. Scientific knowing consists of the process of isolating one piece from all the others and from their influence and then explaining that piece by relating it to a whole non-concrete symbolic universe held in the mind. A great dilemma is that the process wherein a single part of experience is isolated is only the initial division; another is performed. Even the single “piece” is not looked at in its wholeness but, because of scientific explanation, only that part of it amenable to the scientific verbal system. Science ends not just with piece knowledge but only with piece-of-a-piece knowledge. In this way, the separation of science from whole experience becomes more and more complete. Science not only creates and “perpetually recreates its object,” (1949, Schlipp, 125) but also creates and recreates objects within that object. Scientific theory is really much what the “instrumentalists” see it as, a way both of isolating and then of organizing the isolated parts of general experience. Theory contains not only general principles that may serve as explanatory devices but also the guiding doctrines used to split up pieces of experience, knowledge, or consciousness so that they may be re-united by thought. It is in this sense that the familiar idea that the questions science asks are much more difficult and important than the answers is most significant. The questions contain the selectivity bias; changing their nature is inconceivably difficult. Experience is ultimately indivisible. It cannot be divided without great violence to its nature and content. Human consciousness has the capacity to assume the illusion of successful division. Experience appears through consciousness to be divided into movements and moments, but although scientific explanations divide them artificially, “every moment...is indivisible.” (1962, Bergson, 328) And more than merely divide it, scientific predictive explanation skims the most accessible parts of the particular change and connects them to the general model. Ultimately, the phenomenal surface triumphs over the existential depths. (1948, Hyde, 20) The movement of science seems toward an ever-greater dividing of experience. This tendency runs directly counter to the developments in the broader realm of consciousness. The drive of “nature” and the drive of consciousness are both in the direction of “complexification”—the bringing together of an evergreater number and degree of contradictions into unity to produce harmony “mentally” or “physically.” Science seeks to state precisely what these individual contradictions, which it calls “variables,” are and, on the basis of them, predict and explain the behavior of the whole. Because there are fewer contradictions in the less complex phenomena, statement of contradictions and prediction is easier with regard to them. Because of the tremendous volume of contradictions in us, prediction is most difficult for our whole being. Therefore, the other alternative is taken—to isolate easily accessible contradictions such as economic greed, territorial imperatives, or lusts for power and fit them into a verbal-conceptual schema. The first and inescapable problem of science, therefore, is determining where to make the “cuts” in the fabric of experience. What is to be divided from what and how massive is each of the divided units to be. In social science the problem of establishing standards for making the cuts appears practically insurmountable and so far social scientists have been free-wheeling in their choices. “Nation-states” were once considered the units in political science. But within them economic parts were cut from sociological parts. The psychological was long relegated to the realm of scientific non-existence; some social scientists have insisted on seeing all in terms of the “individual"; others have argued that social wholes and types, processes and organizations as well have to be considered units and are just as real as the individual. The second problem emergent from the discussion is reductionism in science and especially in social science. Precisely because whole explanations could not be obtained, precisely because any part isolated from us for the purposes of explanation left the other parts unexplained, sweeping statements of reductionism were developed. In order to explain us, in order to fit us into some kind of theory or existent verbal-conceptual system, we had to be reduced to the size suitable for theory. Therefore, from Adam Smith during the nineteenth century to John Maynard Keynes in the twentieth, students of society have preached an economic reductionism. Human behavior can be explained in terms of greed; we are “nothing but” economic animals. Others later said we were only “political animals” or “social animals” or some other part of us. There have always been those who claimed there was something more to us than these kinds of reductions—even if all were put together—claimed, but they remained a decreasing minority certainly within science and the social sciences; the search is on for a general theory that will reduce us to verbal-conceptual stature and explain us while forbidding anyone else to say we are “something more.” Just as partial knowing is necessary for the whole category of second level knowledge so, too, is partial explanation necessary for “science.” As scientific knowing refuses to recognize anything different from the defined category “physical” so also scientific explanation refuses to step into the metaphysical. Scientific knowing and explanation posit the existence of physical-metaphysical dualism, but reality is one. The physical and the metaphysical are only two ways of looking as the one and same process of life. Nevertheless, as long as the dualism is assumed, science can only relegate the metaphysical to the realm of non-existence. As long as metaphysics is kept in that place, extreme conflict between those who see beyond science and those who see only to its borders for fear of falling off the edge of its world will persist. 2. Causation. To conceive of science as a useful enterprise is to demand prediction of it; prediction depends upon laws; laws stem from causation; and causation is the stickiest problem in science. Scientific prediction depends entirely upon some notion of causality; if there is no assumed impact of cause upon effects, science is either impossible or utterly arbitrary. The forecast “John will come” implies a full causal relationship and a full causal knowledge; the prediction “John will probably come” implies at least a causal relationship and a partial causal knowledge. As scientific predictions neither of these can be based only on correlations. John’s coming and rain may, for example, have always occurred together. To predict that because it is raining, John is coming is to suggest both a necessary relationship between rain and the coming and a one-way cause-effect relationship—the rain always has preceded John’s arrival. Prediction assumes there is something about the rain that affects John’s coming. In its use as the nexus between an isolated object and the scientific verbal-conceptual universe, causation manifests itself primarily in two ways. The object or event, seen either as a cause or as an effect, is explained by efficient or final causation. Scientists explain the event either by referring to the factors that preceded it, by what brought it about, or by referring to the events that came later. It is important to note that scientific prediction by means of either approach to causation is possible without any kind—even without the scientific kind—of explanation. A preceding variable may be taken to be the cause of the interesting event; as long as the elements of the prediction point to scientific “realities,” prediction can proceed, verification can be made, uses can be applied—all, with no attempt at explanation by linkage to the scientific verbal-conceptual system. The prior cause that you point to in you prediction of an event may not itself be much integrated into the system and thus not very much understood; or, you may isolate an effect of the event you are interested in and still that event may not be well-integrated into the linguistic-conceptual system. Prediction is occurring, but explanation is lacking. Scientific explanation aimed at prediction is causal, and causal explanation is partial. All descriptions and explanations tend to bifurcate into the empirical and the causal modes. Under the empirical mode of explanation of a part of “reality” that has been isolated from the fabric of experience, the explainer merely observes and states all that is seen in the situation surrounding the part. Causal explanation isolates those parts of “situations” that are most relevant to theory or use. Beginning with correlations that isolate and summarize certain parts of phenomena, we leap under causation to beatify the “necessary” oneway relationship that we then canonize in the form of law. It is exactly because of causality that we can take the part for the whole of experience and tend to do so. Causality induces us to ignore the whole even though never is “simple event” “A” causally connected with simple event “B"; rather “the whole background of the system is vital to explanation.” (1927, Bridgmen, 83) The notion of causality permits us to make “things” to use by isolating and connecting them, but it may end in the destructive eclipse of our experience. Causal thinking is dangerous because it blinds thought to the arbitrary nature of how experience has been sliced up. Causal thinking is the source of both the cuts and the blindness to them. Philosophical analysis, for example, was long plagued by division or cuts between substance and accident in “objects” perceived. To a large extent the division was due to the idea of causation; the taste of the apple was not the apple, nor was the color, nor texture. The division of things into parts and emphasis upon causal thought helped produce conceptualization of substances behind what was known. The apple causes my taste of sweetness; the sweetness is not the apple but is produced by it. Fundamentally based upon the separation of experience into pieces, the notion of causality, for the sake of usefulness, sustains two other artificialities. First, causation maintains the separation by allowing only the re-unifications it specifies; and, second, it looks to a chain rather than to a network of links. For example, you may explain a fire by saying that the short-circuit caused it. You know that the fire was connected to everything surrounding it (the house, oxygen, electricity, and so on), but you have isolated as cause what indicates how fire can be avoided in the future. You have not even tried to isolate all the factors necessary for fire to burn again but merely the one thing “under your control.” To verify the link that interests you, you may try to test the prediction that all other factors being the same, the electrical system will cause fire. To Aristotle, the idea of causation—the material, efficient, final, and formal causes—primarily revealed mutual interrelatedness. Usefulness, however, impels us to see reality in terms of causal chains; knowledge ends in being bound by those chains. You say that your running around the block has no impact—or so little that you are justified in ignoring it—on the rotation of the earth. (1956, Cournot, 40) But on what basis do you judge the lack of a connection or characterize another as “minimal”—is it not according to what you understand now and according to what is useful to you and you can manipulate. Causal thinking has implications that are much more practical and more directly dangerous than mere philosophical disputes. When investigating social problems, for instance, you are often driven to isolate the abnormal from the normal aspects. You trace the cause of a crimes, for example, to criminals and then look for the special causes that make them criminals when, indeed, crime may be better understood by examining the social whole that encompasses criminals. We look for causes regardless of understanding because of our subservience to “use,” in this case, to end crime; we can handle “criminal” but not the social whole. When sociologists focus on “criminals” as perverse and their treatment rather than on themselves and their own perversities, they gradually define more and more of the members of society as criminals. The same is true of any study that directs its attention toward the problems through causal analysis. It tends to lose sight of the whole network so that suggested solutions to problems generate as many disruptions as they heal so that every treatment for crime only increases crime; it tends to concentrate on external observables and spreads the belief that any problem seen can be eliminated; when turning toward consciousness or persons, it takes a moralistic tone. Given its impact upon the knowing process, we may reasonably inquire into the source of the idea of causation. Testimony on this matter is contradictory. Nevertheless, it seems clear that “cause” is not a matter of immediate experience even though Kant notes that causal relationships “can never be derived through reason, but that these relationships must be taken from experience alone.” (1949, Kant, 19) He indicates that causation is known directly in experience; you know that will and intellect move you today, he suggests, but cannot explain this knowledge using reason. There is no rational justification for rejecting the position that you deceive yourself if you assume that you experience causation. You may experience a replay in consciousness of “doing” something and then proceed to do it, but this does not mean that your thought or your will or yourself caused the thing to happen. You did not experience causation itself. Even before the time of Kant, Hume had devastated the dogma of causality, and Kant and others since him have not rebuilt it. “All our reasonings concerning cause and effects,” Hume pointed out, “are derived from nothing but custom, (1961, Hume, 68) and “we have no other notion of cause and effect, but that of certain objects which have been always conjoined together.” (1961, Hume, 85) We have no reason for assuming that what has always been conjoined will always be conjoined. As we have no experience of that necessity, so, too, we have no experience of causality. There have been attempts to re-validate causality, but all have failed. One recent one simply insisted that no one can logically deny “that if, whenever I produce an X a Y follows, then X causes Y.” (1957, Dray, 95) The errors in this kind of position can hardly be more transparent. Certainly, even though you could not deny the possibility of causality in such circumstances, you could not affirm it either; and at any rate the writer assumes the possibility of an “I” as a cause-unit “producing” “X,” an effect-unit; he assumes what he purports to establish. Better conceive of “I,” “X,” and “Y” as happening rather than causing. To repeat, no correlation, however high, can lead to the establishment of cause-effect. If cause is not a matter of direct experience, from what source does it arise? The many theories describing the origins of causation usually point to something in experience, such as human purpose, to suggest that while experience does not give causation, it does reveal it. In fact, however, causal relationships are only conceptual devices that point to the necessary relationship among all things, a relationship that cannot be known directly at the second level. Everything is necessarily related to everything else. There is wholeness or fullness. An adjustment anywhere in the wholeness reverberates everywhere. Causation is the word we use to point to reverberations we believe relevant—the ones we notice and find useful to our purposes. Statements such as “all events...are causally determined by other events,” (1966, Taylor, 95) or “all events are effects of a cause or causes,” are only the attempts of limited consciousness to characterize how the wholeness is whole. We must ask the question, “how are things bound to each other” (1964, MacIver, 28) because, on the second level of consciousness, we cannot know the fullness directly. Again we must face the limitations imposed upon knowing by our “fall” into reason or into the second level. The same factors driving us to second level consciousness drive us to causation. In order to be secure in the world, to control it, we had to separate ourselves from it and objectify it. The concern for secure control at the same time meant we had to understand how we were related to these objects. Without knowledge of connection we are as much at the mercy of the world as without knowledge of objects. The idea of cause performs both functions well. Instead of seeing causation and total connectedness as opposites, we see causation and chance as opposites. It is quite right to say that “chance is only our ignorance of the real causes"; instead of contradicting causation, chance is the primary condition that necessitates and defines causation. We fell from eternity into time. Partly through causation we built ourselves a false idol of unauthentic eternity to pursue—a causal relationship is secure and eternal since it is necessary and unchanging. Reason demands the separation of wholeness into parts and even into things that may then be deceptively accepted as individual “wholes” or “entities.” To regain comprehension of the entities, we must place them back together with one another. One way we think we can do this is through causation. We know or assume that all is necessarily linked to all; we are interested in “causation"; and we employ it to point to both an awareness of the connection between things and the importance of particular things to other particular things. We do not know causation when we say “causation” but we know connection by the term “causation.” Causation thus considered constitutes not the highest reaches of sophisticated second level knowledge, but the most manifest testimony to the necessity of our living on the primary level of wholeness. Connection, importance, and, therefore, causation are “known” in several ways. A couple of general categories of these may suffice, however, to demonstrate the “knowing” process. One of the most persistently discussed sources of the notion of causation is the “self” as agent. Causation is a projection of reason; “man’s reason (the subjective reason) seeks for and grasps the reason of things (the objective reason).” (1956, Cournot, 19) People believe in causes allegedly because they “know” themselves as causes. However, people nowhere “experience” themselves as causes; they may have a sense of purpose, or an idea of future actions, or a decision, choice, design, or intention, but these are unknown without at least referring to the effects; they can be seen only “as the expression...of a whole event.” (1968, Gunnell, 196) There is no way that a cause-effect relationship is experienced. One point of significance in asserting the existence of a causal link is that there is a necessary connection present, but we already knew this since all things are necessarily linked. More importantly, therefore, we are saying when we observe a cause that we are aware of a way that things are linked and that this way is important to us. One of the most illuminating methods of describing the genesis of causation is to investigate our earliest ancestors. On the one hand, we find that they absolutely refuse to accept the idea of accident—“there is no such thing as chance to the primitive.” (1935, Levy-Bruhl, 60-62) On the other hand, they have no 2 sense of causation. The clouds in the sky, which may be taken to be a sign of rain, are not understood to be causally connected to the rain. In a sense both clouds and rain seem to be understood as simultaneous manifestations of the same event “occurring in two different forms.” Events occurring are not just what they are but are manifestations of some “Beyond” (1935, Levy-Bruhl, 57) not unlike the Buddhist concept of the ever-present Tao. Although James Frazer’s famous book, The Golden Bough, claims that the primitive sorcerer and the modern scientist are quite alike in their concepts of causality, the difference between the two is most significant. It is true that the sorcerer seems to perform certain acts in the belief that there is a connection between things—the acts and some desired event—and it is true that this is similar to scientists who believe in direct cause-effect relationships between things. However, the Shaman in performing the ceremony is seeking not to be a cause of a desired effect but to evoke a wholeness his ceremony participates in, whereas scientists see themselves as involved in a one-to-one cause-effect chain. Science goes much farther than the people of our earliest human cultures. They attribute what goes on to a general mystery, and they conceive of what is central to themselves as a part of the whole that is beyond. It is not that they project onto all nature what they feel subjectively but that subject and object, inside and outside, are less distinct. Scientists caught up in cause-effect, having sharply distinguished between self and other and between subject and object, are different. They see themselves as cause to external effects, then attribute what they find in the “inside” to the outside. Not only are they cause to outside effects, but outside effects objectified are causes to each other; this is an enormous projection on their part. Outer conditions are also causes and scientists are effects to them. The birth of scientific research comes with the realization that the things that are important to us are important to each other—they cause each other and they cause us. It is in this sense that all the talk of causation in subservience to use is most significant. The rise of the notion of cause is intimately dependent upon the notion of mutual use. The isolation of a particular condition to be a cause is not arbitrary but according to our interests. Causation is employed because it isolates the “important” parts from the wholeness and places in our hands the power to control them. Again, great danger resides in this in as much as what is identified as important is not always or even usually immediately grasped but is given in social construct. We do not direct our attention at the wholeness or the possibility that other interrelations may be more important; we accept the definition of importance and in these way may reinforce our blindness to the others. The implications of this for social scientific research are incalculable. For example, social scientists may be interested in finding the cause of a death. According to their or others’ interests, they may say the cause (or the important or relevant connection) is a lack of oxygen, or a gun-shot wound, or the person who shot the gun, or the psychologically disturbed parents of the killer, or the social whole. They will choose among these and their choice is dictated by an importance defined beforehand. It is as if an ice cream cone were squished upside down onto a circular table top. If you look at it from above, you see concentric circles with a dot at the center. If you look from the side, you see a long thin rectangle with a triangle on the top. Yet none of us confronting this situation in the concrete would say that an “ice cream cone” (if that was what we were told we were observing) is composed of a triangle and a circle. We would take much more into account and, although we are likely even to have ignored the two projections, we probably have a better idea of an icecream cone than a scientists using tools that control their perceptions of what is and put it under the rubric of a particular causal link for the sake of usefulness. Not even if you put all the partial perspectives together do you get a better understanding of what is than if you try to grasp the concrete directly. When determined in the light of its source, a cause is only a “relevant relationship” isolated from the wholeness of necessary relationships. It is required because we cannot know the whole; we now live in the realm of second-level consciousness where we see “what is” initially by what is relevant to us and finally by “external” use. Wholeness is. In second-level terms, you could say that every “thing” is necessarily connected to every other “thing,” or that any clod washed away from the continent diminishes the whole, but neither the continent nor you yourself need care since you can isolate the causes you consider relevant after assuming an illusory concept of self. Causation is both a blessing and a curse. 3. Sense and Reason. Just as errors in experience tend to arise primarily from confusion between the given of sensation and the given of reason, so does dispute concerning the nature of explanation emerge because of confusion among these modes. In shouting “back to the things themselves,” phenomenologists suggested how memory-concepts ruled the world of knowing; memory-concepts have also dominated explanation. Predictive explanation, always in terms of laws or causation, refers what is to be explained to a theory, and theory is a construct of reality that science fits all phenomena studied into. The necessity for relating scientific experiments to a given theory places those who would argue that empirical research is firm and that mental constructs not derived from it are fuzzy into a paradox. They are tempted to suggest that theory and its central concepts are somehow the product of cumulative scientific experiment, yet they tend to admit, although grudgingly, that theory cannot be conceived of as a mere compiling of similar experiments. Our challenge to them is for a description of what else intervenes. One description would make the experiment and mathematics the two keystones of modern scientific method; (1954, Reichenbach, 106) scientists putter around with experiments and fit results into given theory, and theory is developed by discovering two or more contradictory experiment results when both seem solid scientific findings. In such a case scientists develop a mathematical statement that can contain both. (1959, Reichenbach, 30) Again the question concerns what interferes beyond the experiment to develop theory. There is no way that fundamental concepts of a science can come inductively through experience. In social science a number of central concepts such as “role” and “culture” are generally accepted but are never used in testable propositions. (1967, Homans, 1) Somehow “mind” comes into play, and yet the predictive scientists strive to insist on the belief that sensation and its servant, reason, act unaided. The scientific embarrassment is made worse when there are defections from the ranks of “science” itself as in the case of Einstein and when critics justly charge empirical scientists with having attitudes that injure their very ears—accusing them of “metaphysics, for example.” It is not possible for empiricists to defend themselves merely by suggesting that the “mind” is simply a reflection of previous sense observations. At best such a suggestion merely pushes the matter a little further back in time. Somewhere, certainly, theory must have been first presented and must have been beyond experiment. Where does the first or the “new” new theory come from? It comes from an intuitive leap into the fullness of experience that stands beneath all knowledge and theory. We still live in the fullness of eternity even though our experiments and established theories create the isolated conceptualsensuous world. The fullness of our experience suddenly illuminates the specific experiment or contradiction in partial experience and partial explanation. The greatest of scientists are those who can maintain an openness at least in their private lives to all modes of knowing. If scientific theory is considered a mere reflection of empirical research, scientists confuse the rational construct for sense data. You must not, for example, see “role” as a social “reality”—as a given now or from past sensuous observation—otherwise you mistake reason for sensation. But neither should you take the theoretical construct as a creation of sensation and logic merely applied to sense data. Both of these approaches are valid only within the assumed context of a theory. The final source of that theory and immediate source of any new theory is found by jumping outside the context to the fullness. One final difficulty with scientific explanation must be noted. It is the general problem that “explanation” seems in tension with knowledge. When you explain the tree by fitting it into some already established mental pattern, to some extent you have said, “The tree teaches us nothing we did not already know.” Inevitably, scientific explanation “explains away.” As this kind of explanation has developed, it has become increasingly rigid. The temptation to use apparently new discoveries not for the purpose of expanding the scientific pattern but to support or to fit them into old patterns may be the fundamental problem—the contradiction between mind-expanding discovery and mind-limiting explanation. Theory, or scientific explanation, does not bring knowledge to us. it is not there to impose itself upon and guide our experience. It is rather to reveal on the second level what we already know on the primary level. “Everything is in man, waiting to be awakened.” (1951, Pachter, 25) Understanding The liberation of thought from moral philosophy has long been taken as one of the most important steps in the development of human knowledge in Western civilizations. The movement from moral philosophy to scientific philosophy is seen as the victory of physics over metaphysics and, therefore, of clarity over fog. The victory was liberating, however, not because of the intrinsic higher value of scientific philosophy but because moral philosophy had become so controlled and degenerate that investigations carried out under it could not possibly emerge with ideas that could challenge accepted patterns. By separating itself from moral philosophy, physics gained freedom for investigation. The most significant aspect of this change was, in fact, not the surrender of metaphysics—since physics must assume some kind of metaphysics in practice—but rather was a shift in the center of attention. Formerly, explanation was always at least partly directed at “individual” or “personal” consciousness. Physics, by contrast, directs attention toward the use of knowledge not by persons for themselves but by technicians for others. Because science is oriented to the technicians and their use, the standard for evaluating scientific explanation has become the possibility of deducing the future from it. Explanation is essentially, in all modes, directed at understanding, and understanding is reached by placing the newly-found in the context of the already-known. Scientific explanation does this for technicians by placing the newly-given into the framework of a “law” or complex logical statement they already possess and that contains all other relevant pieces of knowledge. Any number of difficulties arise over this kind of scientific explanation. For one thing, such an explanation may not be meaningful. That is, the explanation may carry you no further than the newlyknown since your acceptance of the general model may be quite arbitrary. Religious life may be explained as “nothing more than” society’s way of attaining selfawareness. But notion of “society’s self-awareness” may be as obscure as “religious life"; you may feel that it is less obscure, but your feeling may be due only to the prior use of the words “society’s self-awareness,” or the position of these words within a logical schema. (1964, Merleau-Ponty, 89) For this reason those who attempt explanation must minimize their use of technical abstract patterns for fitting the newly-given into and turn instead to explain the newly-given in terms of the past-given. They must avoid technicians, causes, and prediction and return to “personal” consciousness. Social scientists need not explain the crime of theft by theoretical statement. The crime of stealing bread is explained no more by the “law,” “Human beings seek food when hungry,” than by the ordinary observation, “He took the bread because he was hungry.” Both are partial explanations based on cause-effect thought, but the law has meaning only because the experience of hunger and its effects are known without the law. (1966, Louch, 1) As soon as explanation goes beyond appeal to a given known of this kind, as soon as it attempts to explain by placing the new in the context not of experience but of a logical model, the risks become overwhelming. In order for an explanation to be an explanation under these circumstances, receivers of the explanation must first accept the validity of the general law that they themselves have not experienced. Explanation thus rests on the tenuous grounds of non-necessary faith or belief. Ultimately, the so-called basic laws themselves cannot be explained or demonstrated. If a law is challenged and it is really a basic law, it cannot be defended other than by an appeal to the given. A basic law can be placed in no logical pattern since it is the foundation of the logical pattern. (1966, Hospers, 116) The social sciences are primarily interested not in prediction but in knowing, understanding, and explaining. Only two things make prediction valuable— its use as an aid to action and its use as one kind of check on hypotheses. Explanation is prior to prediction or deduction, and to jump to deduction and prediction without explanation or understanding is to jump into error. Explanation is intrinsically connected not to prediction but to meaning—there is a meaning woven into a perception itself and there is a meaning derived from explanation. “The proper function of a social science...is not prediction but diagnosis.” (1963, Runciman, 17) Diagnosis is based not upon particular prediction but upon understanding of the whole—of meaning; “that we can successfully predict how people will behave in certain circumstances does not imply, much less entail, that we can explain their behavior.” (1960, Dodwell, 1) The point is twofold. First, “explanations” that are scientific may not lead to understanding and, second, all valid scientific explanation depends for its ultimate validity on the same kind of knowledge the ordinary, commonplace, popular explanation does. If scientific investigation wishes to challenge or add to conventional knowledge, it can best do so by referring to these general givens and reporting in terms that make the outcome explanation for all and not just for technicians. There are a couple of extremely serious obstacles to all of this. To achieve it requires a major alteration in both scientific knowledge and explanation; and it may demand, in addition, a revolution not only in scientific thought but also in all social thought. The problem is that all groups in Western society— scientific and all others—are trained not to see the given in experience. We all have social blinders fitted to us shortly after birth that permit us to see some things more clearly and others not at all; the scientist has only a slightly altered and later-fitted pair. Scientists must disencumber themselves not only of reliance on their private conceptual universes but also from the unconscious. To achieve this the entire society they operate in may have to become unrepressed. Chapter 8 Social Explanation in Decay Contemporary Orientations It is an impossible and, therefore, foolishly pursued task to review all the social sciences in terms of general trends, especially when the discussion turns, as it does now, to theoretical tendencies within the disciplines. Therefore, the sketches of dominant developments offered here are of the briefest kind, yet they may reveal the depth of the rut all the social sciences have fallen into. Assuming that the goal of all social science is understanding and grasping the meaning of society, how far have contemporary processes advanced that goal? Even a cursory view of social studies makes clear the presence of a dichotomy deriving from the nature of the subject. Social science tends to assume a dualism that, like the dualism of subject and object in knowing, appears impossible to overcome. The dualism is between the whole and its parts. Explanations of social phenomena tend to be set either in terms of the operations of the whole or in terms of its parts and the motives underlying them. One kind of social explanation insists that understanding can come about only if you look at the entire social arena; the Keynesian economists, for example, seek to understand the economy of a country only by looking at national income accounting, the overall circular flow of wealth, and by generalizing constructs such as the “multiplier effect” or the “acceleration principle.” The other approach insists that an understanding of society can be derived only by explanations that refer to units within or forces beneath the whole; thus some economists, still not entirely in vogue today, insist that economies cannot be understood without reducing the overall picture to its constituent parts and concentrating on consumer, entrepreneurial, and labor motivations. More striking than in economics is the distinction in sociology between the approaches of Americans and Europeans. One view holds that “American sociology is characterized by a psychological realism (social nominalism); and European sociology, by social realism (psychological nominalism).” (1959, Wolff, 589) American sociology apparently reduces social phenomena to psychological categories of the parts of society or to psychological forces while to Europeans the psychological is only an epiphenomenon built on the social. Probably the greatest difficulty in trying to discuss all the social sciences at once is the tendency of one social science to reduce itself to another for purposes of explanation. Political science has started to see political explanation in terms of sociological phenomena, and sociology has attempted to explain social phenomena by reducing them to the psychological. Strangely, psychology explains allegedly psychological phenomena by reducing them to categories of social patterns or social needs. This interdisciplinary movement reflects the emptiness of explanations enclosed within artificial disciplines; it also reflects the desirability of a fuller or holistic explanation. It reflects these, but it does not achieve them. 1. Mechanism: Systems and Functions. The most characteristic kinds of theories of explanation arising from those social scientists who concentrate on the whole of the object of their disciplines are the systems theories and the theories of structuralfunctionalism. Theories of society or the group as a system take on a mechanistic bent while theories of functionalism ground themselves slightly more on an organismic basis. Both attempt to isolate cause-effect relationships and to develop, on the foundation of them, some regularized laws. As scientists, the systems analysts and the functionalists devote their attention to the emergence of necessary and objective predictions. By definition, a “system” is a “set of variables each of which is inter-dependent with at least one other variable in the system.” (1968, Kaplan, 37) The set of variables relevant to identify a specific system would cluster around some concept central to the discipline: a family system, for example, identified as a system upon the basis of a sexual or economic factor—or the political system, identified as such because of the clear distribution of authority within it. Explanation of family as a political phenomenon is given primarily in terms of the whole, but systems, like mechanisms, have parts, and these are also discussed independently. They are discussed in terms of actors or roles and in terms of subsystems. Cooley, for instance, isolated three fundamental “thought” systems—personality, group, and culture. You might identify the United States, to take a concrete example, as a political system, but, if so, you must take admit that it has economic and personality “subsystems” and that it itself is a subsystem within the international political, economic, or social system. The very great value in systems theory is that it does insist that what exists or happens socially “does not exist in the abstract.” It turns attention to some extent at least away from objects and toward relationships (1949, Hyde, 186) and so raises some hope of returning to the uncreated metaphysical rather than sticking to the created “things.” It tends to view society as a process rather than as a thing. However, it does little more than that. The interpretation of social life “as a system of behavior set in an environment and open to the influences stemming from that environment, as well as from internal sources” (1945, Easton, 479) and the society as nothing more than the “organized repetitive responses of a society’s members,” (1945, Linton, 5) opens what might have been a closed social world, but it does this at a high cost and with danger. Not only is the theory excessively artificial and lacking substance but also it threatens to replace the content with the container, the actor with the play. (1966, Kress, 11) Certainly, some accommodation for the actor and the subsystem have been made by the admission that a system can be “subsystem dominant”— that the parts can dominate the whole—but still the parts are determined and defined by the whole. This means that the system is static; systems theory can account for change and activity but only in accordance with the system as envisaged; it does not account for the transformation of the system itself. Even the Parsonian assertion of “emergent systems” does not explain but only accepts the existence of systemic change. One of the “most developed” of the social sciences— so-called because of its reliance on apparently precise and mathematical methods—demonstrates how serious the danger from systems theory can be. Economic analysis in the Keynesian mode concentrates on the surface, on the national flows of wealth and labor. Prediction based upon Keynesian theory, however, is also based on questionable assumptions about human activity hidden in its theory. As some recent economists have suggested, modern societies may be on the verge of an implicit renunciation of economic competition because it has become inefficient in the global marketplace. If so, then policy suggestions, for example, to stimulate the economy by relaxing controls on the availability of money, may not have the anticipated effect. Keynesian theory is unlikely, since it concentrates on the national system level, to be able to account for important changes occurring below the level of the system as conceived. More intriguing—for what they attempt rather than for what they achieve—than the systems theorists are the various functionalists. Nearly every systems theory, save for the crudest, contains at least elements of functionalism. Usually functionalism is represented in systems theories to account for the ultimate origins of them: systems or organizations are developed to serve certain social needs. Functionalism implicitly reintroduces as its essential characteristic “final causation” into the study of society. It is in fact the attractiveness of “final causation” that as made functionalism so strong today. Earlier theories that might be called functional, what some have referred to as “organizationalism,” (1960, Wolin, 409) that were derived from Hobbes, Herbert Simon, or Chester Barnard, for example, suggest that the system or structure is rationally arranged for clear purposes. Although this certainly may be true of some organizational structures, it is hardly true of those that social scientists have conceived of as most important. Certainly, nation-states are not rationally established by those who currently live in them even though consent-philosophers, while admitting this, then avoid the consequences of their admission by positing a rational establishment in the past.1 Far more dominant functional theories refer to the structure as an organism rather than a mechanism —it exists to serve needs that cannot be reduced to those of any of the parts within it. The structure serves its own needs above all. These needs include stability, integration, and cohesion. The whole requires that it be a “good” whole or good as a whole—where the parts fit together, mesh, and stick to each other well. Talcott Parsons, one of the great functional systems theorists, insisted that the whole is directed predominantly toward its own survival and because of that direction is equally driven to equilibrium and balance—its goal is stasis. Functionalism in the social sciences constitutes the pre-eminent return of causal thinking. It is under functionalism that, of the four Aristotelian-Scholastic causes (efficient, material, formal, and final), the formal and especially the final become dominant. Society and social phenomena are understood and explained in terms of the form or “essential character” of the social relationship and in terms of the general outcome of the relationship. Older explanations had sought understanding in terms of the origins of the social relationship—in terms of the human purpose to be served; the new functional explanation refers to outcomes and how they are conditioned by structures. The differences, for example, between the Renaissance and modern conceptions of the character of human beings and society is that while the Renaissance mind saw a mechanism with an end or purpose in its origin or use, the modern functionalist perceives the end as lying within the mechanism itself. (1966, Grene, 227) In religion, the transcendent God of medieval thought has become the immanent God of Protestantism. In the natural sciences, the creator standing outside and giving meaning to creatures because of the higher purpose they serve has become the inward creator of evolution—the end is contained within the thing itself. Functionalism stands in the closest of relationships to the biological model not only because of the connection based on the immanency of evolution but also because of the idea both share of an “energy transfer system.” Like the biological model, the functional model suggests that “Living forms are not in being they are happening.” There is a ceaseless change going on in the matter of the structure; material is not constant but overall form and process are. “The meaning of any part or process...is the function it performs for the system as a whole.” The meaning of the stomach in the animal body is determined by the digestive function it performs for the whole body. The tendency for social systems as for biological systems is toward greater complexification, division of labor, and specialization. (1968, Landau, 55-58) It would seem that much of science is constantly driven back now to functionalism as an explanation. We do appear to explain something well by referring to its purpose or function. Yet there are many difficulties. When the structural-functionalism of biology is transferred to social science, it does prove fruitful and most suggestive. But surely the same faults—and some others besides—that lie at the core of biological structural-functional analysis persist in social science. Paradoxically, although functionalism concentrates on processes rather than things, functionalism also looks at reality in terms of entities. As has been demonstrated by recent investigations in ecology, biology errs when it concentrates on “organism-inenvironment.” Biological studies at least have always examined many forms of animals-in-environment while social science looks only at one, us. Social science, like biology, has attempted to overcome the isolation of entities by concepts of “input,” “output,” “feedback,” between organism or structure and environment, but for social scientists much more than for biologists the lines dividing one structure from the other are drawn arbitrarily. One of the stickiest problems in functional theory is the establishment of the functions served by different structures in the social universe. The most essential ends of processes within structures are said to involve the preservation of the system. Since what is needed for the ongoing operation of the system is not obvious— certainly as long as the system is still operating— functionalism provides an opportunity for the theorists to inject their own personal preferences into the outline of the functions necessary to the efficient operation and continuing development of the social system. If personal prejudices are not a problem, there is still the additional tendency to assume that those social “realities” that have persisted for a long time are the ones that must support the system; they could not themselves survived unless they maintained the system they depended on. In actuality, however, every recurrent social reality supports the whole—or at least can be claimed to. The entire theory of functionalism is built on this gigantic, rigid tautology. Before functional analysis can be meaningful, it must comprehend the whole system, not just its “supportfunctions” but how they relate to each other and how important each is to the others. Biological analysis of human beings is postulated upon an assumption of a whole human being. If we do not know the whole human being (and many biologists do not even try to), it is not meaningful to suggest that the stomach functions to help digest food. The idea of the stomach may be made meaningful by the idea of digestion but only if digestion is then connected into the whole organism. This is done in biology by the concept of “life support,” and it is attempted in social science by the idea of “survival of the system.” But surely for social life, and maybe also for biological life, single-minded pursuit and preservation of the “life processes” is a fanaticism that understands neither life nor society. A society and a social scientist obsessed with equilibrium and survival may be the greatest destroyers of genuinely human existence. It is most difficult, if not impossible, for social scientists to isolate those social realities that are actually needed for the survival of a system—which of them are “functional” and which of them are “dysfunctional.” In the field of political science particularly, Gabriel Almond has come up with what he calls “functional imperatives” of a social system. They include political socialization and recruitment, rulemaking, rule-application, and rule adjudication. (1968, Landau, 75) Are these truly requisites of stability? If they are, are the particular social realities that are said to perform them actually needed to do so? By its own standards, functional explanation requires that scientists (1) state that and how particular phenomena perform a function, (2) show what the function is and why it is universal—why all such systems must have it performed—since only then will it constitute an expansion of understanding, and (3) raise the question, “Must this function be served by this particular phenomena alone?” If it is possible that the function need not be served in this particular manner, then functionalism, to avoid a persistent status quo orientation, must show alternatives, discuss consequences of change, and point out how the belief in the need for the particular expression of serving the function has so far been sustained. Surely, the value in functional analysis of connecting particular social phenomena to the whole is important, but functionalism may dangerously assume it is demonstrating a clear stomach-to-body relationship for survival when the need for that relationship in all such organisms is not clear and may not even be present in a particular existing whole. Another objection to functionalism is that it is entirely too impersonal. This criticism comes from both humanists, who already object to the depersonalization of us in society let alone our depersonalization in the study of society, and from the reduction-oriented social scientists about whom we shall speak next. Functionalism or organizationalism, like modern organization itself, depersonalizes us by restricting to a minimum the distinguishing traits of our individuality. As the organization is one method of bringing order out of chaos, so functionalism is one method of bringing knowledge out of chaos. But there are other ways too. Functionalism, like the organization, relates objects to each other externally; different constructs, more in keeping with the idea of “community” rather than mechanism, connect us more internally. Perhaps functionalism is one of the easy paths out of intellectual chaos, a path that forces social reality to conform to the more secure mental tools scientists can be equipped with. One of the great thinkers in the social sciences, Karl Mannheim, argued long ago that “the development of modern society led to the growth of a technique of thought by means of which all that was only meaningfully intelligible was excluded. Behavioralism has pushed to the foreground this tendency towards concentration on entirely perceivable reactions, and has sought to construct a world of facts in which there will exist only measurable data.” (1953, Mannheim, 39) Despite warnings such as these, the behavioral movement persists. It fails to understand that to be made meaningful, explanation must relate social phenomena not just to some abstract function of some abstract structure or system but to human experience. You will really understand the stomach in terms of its functions only if you know directly what it means to be alive. The mechanical model implicit in structuralfunctionalism can be useful in prediction. On the basis of what happened again and again in the past when certain functions were not performed, we might be able to predict the collapse of a system. But this does not mean that we have arrived at an explanation even in the sense of the natural sciences where scientific explanation means that the statement about behavior can be deduced from a model, and this cannot be done from a strictly mechanical model—prediction for this kind of model must come as well from some condition antecedent to the model. Some critics go farther and suggest that the ideas of structure and social forces should be pried entirely from science, arguing that like explanation in the natural sciences, the social scientific explanation requires intervening variables—“dynamic facts”—and that these “rather than the symptoms or appearances are the important points of reference.” (1949, Lewin, 285) Or, as Whitehead argues, “What is the sense of talking about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what you mean by mechanical?” (1962, Whitehead, 834) 3. Reductionism: Economic and Psychological. The tendency opposite to holistic simplification and at least equally important in science is reductionism. We look at a social phenomenon and say that it is “nothing but” a manifestation of some “more basic” human impulse. We “reduce” the complex event to a simpler event or to one of its parts. This tendency in social explanation, like the holistic tendency, has its correlate in the physical sciences. Underlying many of the approaches and activities of physical science is the assumption that “ultimate things in the world...will somehow be explained in terms of physics and chemistry.” To represent “higher” or more complex things “in terms of their baser particulars” is a persistence dream of many physical scientists. (1959, Polanyi, 64) Reductionism allegedly makes understanding easier since it point to the more complex in terms of the less complex. Yet reductionism seems inevitably in error, inevitably prejudicial, since it takes the whole and sees it in terms only of a part that is said to be better comprehended. But the part as part if only a figment of the imagination of the “knower.” Two forms of reductionism have proved most pervasive in our time. These are economic and psychological determinism. The two outstandingly creative figures of the past two centuries in the social sciences, Marx and Freud, gave them birth although more recent midwives of Marxism and Freudianism contributed most to establish the reductionist perversion of their core ideas. Probably most familiar is the economic deterministic argument ascribed to Marx. Society, according to a Marxist viewpoint, has been “nothing but” a struggle among classes for their own economic advancement. Derived from the earlier utilitarian viewpoint that conceived of all humans as economically determined competitive individuals who were, because of nearly equal powers and capacities, just about interchangeable, Marxian theory argued that the group, rather than the individual, was economically determined and that, therefore, competition made us almost inevitably unequal. Everything in society can be reduced to this single form of conflict—philosophy, religion, politics, the family, or whatever. Philosophy is no more than the rationalizations of ruling class interests; religion is the opiate of the people working to narcoticize the natural resistance of the lower classes thereby protecting the higher classes; politics is nothing but the struggle for economic advancement; the family functions only as an instrument of reproduction and of the production, preservation, and distribution of wealth. The sweeping comprehensiveness of economic reductionism appeals almost aesthetically to the human desire for explanation. But a number of inconsistencies arise to plague even the crudest outline of the perspective. Not least of the problems of such an idea is that all ideologies under it are supposed to be only expressions of particular economic arrangements. How is it that individuals such as Lenin or Stalin, who are only “parts of nature” are able to make statements that escape ruling class service and are universally valid? Even Marxists themselves begin at this point to insist that we are “something more” than mere objects or victims of history and of particular economic systems existing in history.2 What makes economic explanations meaningful is only the assertion and, following the assertion, the belief that at their core our actions are economically motivated. We can explain work as “nothing but” the manifestation of a need to eat, a desire for television, or an acquisitive drive. These are explanations only because all of us have done things “in order to” eat or watch television and only to the extent that we do things in order to reach these satisfactions. Thus, we understand “explanation” itself since we experience or assume we experience purpose. It is clear that these economic explanations are inadequate or not meaningful unless we specify our definition of adequate or meaningful in terms of “hunger,” “visual pleasure,” or whatever. The inadequacy is at least partly because the idea of purpose and cause may well be illusions that we are told we ought to experience and because our experience is not exhaustively described by these terms. Hunger may be only a small part of experience that, therefore, fails to explain other parts; for example, why is there hunger, what “function” does it perform, and was it actually “hunger” you felt. Similar observations can be made for psychological determinism. This reductionism is derived from Freud who at one time said that all human behavior is psychologically determined by an “instinct” always to return to an earlier stage of development and that mental illness is all induced by trauma and usually by childhood trauma. The similarity between Freudian and Marxist thought becomes even clearer when you compare the economic motive of acquisition with the Freudian “pleasure principle.” Freud seems, like the economic liberals, less hopeful than Marx since for Freud the pleasure principle is ultimately subordinate to the will to die—that we strive perhaps only because we have repressed the will to death and there will be no quiescent society except in physical death. The healthy society is a contradiction in terms. A major basis of the anti-Freudian critique of psychoanalysis coming from some of Freud’s best heirs stems precisely from his determinism-reductionism. This is not totally apparent in Adler’s but it is most clear in Jung’s approach. Adler does make both heredity and environment, which are determinants of human behavior for Freud, much less important and stresses instead the “attitude of the person to his defect,” (1955, Munroe, 337) but Jung explicitly rejects Freudian mechanistic and reductionist explanations: “when exalted into a general explanation of the nature of the soul, whether sick or healthy a reductive theory becomes impossible....Life has a tomorrow, and today is only understood if we are able to add indications of tomorrow to our knowledge of yesterday.” It is not your childhood that is most significant to you today as much as what exists right now that pushes you to regress to your childhood. (1955, Munroe, 534) Freud finds himself in an insoluble quandary because of his reductionism. He cannot resolve the dualism between the pleasure principle and the death instinct largely because he looks for the resolution reductively—looks to the origin of animal life and the origin of individual human life. He writes, for example, that human germ cells and their drive to coalesce demonstrate that the sex instinct, like the germ cells, seeks life while the ego instinct seeks death or a return to a more primitive state of things. (1928, Freud, 78-79) The dualism noted in humans is further reduced by identifying them with all living creatures when Freud, assuming that the inorganic world is quiescent and does not itself contain a push to the organic, points to “the most universal endeavor of all living substance—namely to return to the quiescence of the inorganic world.” (1928, Freud, 108) Even with the briefest of glances it seems clear that germ cells are not seeking to perpetuate their life but to die and allow another different development. The germ cell, like the seed, seeks not its own existence but the larger life and its reproduction. We must see the germ cell in terms of the larger life, not the larger in terms of the lesser. Probably still under the influence of Darwinism, Freud considers only the adaptation of things for life—the germ cell strives only for life—and he ignored the possibility that the germ cell allows not life or existence but meaning. Similarly, the search for that principle universal to all life seeks only a reductive explanation. The most universal is not necessarily the most important or the best explanation and certainly is not the most meaningful. If we are to explain human psychology, we need start with human life itself and not with the simple cell. In a persistent way, Freud sought to reduce psychology to biology by referring repeatedly in his explanations of human behavior not just to human or animal sex but more deeply to the sources of sexual activity common to all life. In sum, we find that political behavior is reductively explained by referring to sociological and economic events. Sociology and economics reduce to social psychology and psychologically economic motivation. Psychology reduces to biology. And biology reduces to chemistry and physics. Whereupon explanation increasingly tends to flip a full circle and chemical and physical relations are explained in social terms or metaphors such as the “magnetism” of “attraction and repulsion.” To claim that these are explanations is to assert a deception. 5. Combination Approaches. Reality makes it hard and contradictory to pursue a completely one-sided approach to explanation; most contemporary theories in some fashion combine reductionism and mechanism. Combination approaches are represented by a diversity of labels including social psychology itself, game theory, and decision-making. One of the more fruitful fields in the social sciences recently has been that of social psychology. For a time during the early twentieth century psychological boom, some social scientists attempted to use psychological explanations to make individual social behavior understandable; although there are still such attempts, more recent movements have explained the personal in terms of the social. On the surface, unity of the individual and the social is the goal, but so far most results seem to suggest either that social or political behavior can be understood by individual psychological observations on the childhood traumas of political leaders, for example, or that the individual can be seen as a manifestation of social conditioning. The socialpsychological mixture has failed to become a solution and the two have separated in the same glass either the social or the psychological floating to the top according to the light-headed prejudices of the “scientist.” A contemporary device in political science is similar. The decision-making approach seeks to isolate all factors going into the making of a decision. On the one hand, the researchers strive to understand a whole, a social or a political decision, but at the same time try to take into account the individual and less-thansystematic factors going into the decision. While considering both the whole and the parts, the decisionmaking approach tends to concentrate on the part, and hence, to fall into reductionism. The political decision will be “explained” by referring to the various private and individual actions that have gone into making it. In this sense, the decision-making approach is similar to the reduction of sociological phenomena to individual psychological attributes. Exactly the reverse, and therefore more similar to the reduction of individual psychology to sociology, is the device of game theory. Here again we try to put together those parts that we term roles or actors, look at them and yet see the whole pattern of the game as instructive. For example, if you are interested in understanding an international situation or the nature of conflict within a city, you may bring together a small group of people or a number of small groups, assign them values and rules, and have them interact. The rules, values, and interactions are formulated to symbolize the international system or the city system. If “in real life” you are a mayor, allegedly you should be better able to understand the sentiments of a “real” racists if you play a role similar to theirs in a game. Or if you are a “real” American, you may be able to know the feelings of Soviet citizens if you play a role similar to theirs in a game. In any case, the importance of the game scientifically speaking is not to the player primarily but to the observer who expects to watch the game and, on the basis of the interaction, be better able to predict the course of social affairs. Few things appear as ironic in the behavior of social scientists as game theory. Games, imitations of life— but usually with “better” outcomes—are made into the standards of life. We are told that we all, as individuals psychologically or as nations politically in our interpersonal or international relations, are doing “nothing but” playing games. So game theory reduces, although subtly, human behavior to a function of the game. The game as game has a victor or winner not for the sake of the victor but for the sake of the game itself. Both sides or players “die” at the end of the game divesting themselves of their roles and the values they represented. To end the game there is a winner, but the “game” of life, it may cogently be argued, is perverted if it is played for the sake of victory or the game goal. The game is to be played, like life, for its own sake as a celebration or for the sake of the player and not in order to get something out of it. Here is the error in the “games people play.” We tend to see these games in terms of something sought— something to be won—rather than in terms of the living itself. Awareness of the game should lead us to understand what life is actually—that it is not like winning or losing a game. To repeat, if Western life is full of problems and if the problems are related to or based upon competitive illusions, then game theories foster both the illusion and the problems and may well lead to self-destruction. If the rules developed in game theory do reflect the illusory constructs of civilization, then game theory may indeed possess some predictive power, but that power is more than vitiated by the failure of the theory to provide understanding, to permit players at least to “stand under” the game, see through it not in terms of arbitrary and relative rules but in terms of what is not a game or what is not arbitrary and relative. Failure of Past Orientations The common defect demonstrated by nearly all of the contemporary methods in the social sciences stems from phony separation and phony conjunction. The persistent tendency of social scientific explanation has been to reduce phenomena established in one discipline to unfamiliar terms borrowed from another. One example was the reduction of sociology to psychology. Obviously, this form of explanation becomes possible and perhaps necessary only because of the division of reality into the two parts, “the psyche” and “the social.” In point of truth, the “reality” of society is psychological and the “reality” of the psyche is social. It is precisely the false division that makes the subsequent conjunction an “explanation.” When you put the psychological together with the social, the result is satisfying only because in doing so you artificially join what you had formerly artificially separated. The attempt to join the two fragmented sides never fully succeeds; it is always distorted by the mediator needed to accomplish it artificially. More broadly, social scientific explanation has failed in as much as explanation remains in the realm of symbol/name and refuses to step into the realm of the concrete. Social scientific explanation is offered only in terms of words. What you explain you merely restate by way of explanation in terms of something that you know no better than the phenomenon you wish to explain. Sociologists who “explain” the social phenomenon in terms of the psychological in most cases understand the psychological no better than the social and many times understand it less well—they are more in touch concretely speaking with the social rather than the psychological. To repeat, they explain the unknown with what they take to be the known while what they take to be the known is not known concretely and directly; it is nothing but a system of words held in their minds and taken for, but not known to be, a representation of the reality. The problem is not only the reification of the abstract but also the reification of the concrete. Social scientists take the abstract notion of “power” or “society” as some “thing.” They reify it. But also dangerous and at the root of this reification of abstraction is the reification of experience itself. The most creative of social scientists do refer to actual experience, but then proceed to reify that experience. You experience other people; the social scientist calls that common experience “society,” a thing. You experience feeling or thought; social scientists make that “a thought,” “a feeling,” produced by “your psyche,” a thing. The concrete experiential is reified and thus distorted. Second rate social scientists then come along and reify the abstraction that they never even themselves experienced in the concrete. Now, lest the picture in the social sciences appears too darkly painted, recall recent trends. Not least of value is the indication that we ought to turn to the concrete, even though we rarely do. Initially, this push helped wipe away prejudicial misconceptions of social reality, but then as the first push gave way, the new science erected its own abstractions blocking the view of the concrete.3 The very fact that social scientific explanations seem satisfying to some indicates a core worth. This core lies in the attempts to put reality back together. Social philosophy is satisfying because it is an attempt to rejoin at least two kinds of pieces formerly separated. Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason. refers to two types of students and scientists; one group follows the principle of “homogeneity” and the other, the principle of “specification.” (1946, Cassirer, 6) You might call the one group “synthesists” and the other “analysts.” The analyst takes apart and specifies the elements, seeing that knowledge can be achieved by looking at the parts. The synthesists seek to discover a unity. The synthesist follows a process of knowing called comprehending or grasping “disjointed parts into a comprehensive whole.” (1959, Polanyi, 28) The difference is not merely between theoretical and practical research, although theory seems to be a weak representation of the synthesist urge. What “synthesist” refers to is more Hegelian; the synthesist seeks to see the concrete unity and not to create the verbal/symbolic unity by putting together the parts separated by the analyst. The political synthesist strives for comprehension by seeing the whole direction of the political society. Modern social science tends to be analytical and theoretical and tends to forget that understanding can never be achieved through analysis alone. Both analysis and syntheses have places in social science; analysis contributes usefulness, control, and prediction; synthesis affords understanding and meaning. What do or should social scientists study? As in the natural sciences, in the social sciences great debates exist and more lie ahead on this question. Reductionists say that the “state” is not real, only human individuals or small groups are real. Natural science reductionists say that the human body is nothing but its chemical, cellular, or organic parts; the body is abstract, unreal, or at least less real than its parts. These disputes hit home the importance of looking at all levels, microscopic and macroscopic, the person and the government. All are equally real and equally unreal. What differs among them is neither their reality nor lack of reality but our eyes, the scales of our observation. What we have done persistently in the social sciences is to allow our explanations—our reductionisms, for example—to determine our perceptions of reality. We set up our godly explanations such as conflict theory and let them dictate the terms of our surrender to a illusory “reality” in our scientific explorations. PART III: RENEWAL OF SOCIAL EXPLANATION Chapter 9 The Whole Arena of Awareness Separation, Unity, and Filters In order to renew explanation, we must take the wholeness of potential experience into consideration. When we explain, we are attempting to bring to awareness or consciousness what we had been previously unaware or unconscious of. Consciousness seeks to drag from the darkness what it not yet contains. The process of bringing into consciousness what was formerly not there has been described by Bertrand Russell as self telling self something. He suggests, for example, that “a desire is ‘conscious’ when we have told ourselves that we have it.” (Russell, 1921, 167) This view is certainly incomplete. Undoubtedly, the process of increasing consciousness for us contains an element of internal verbal dialogue, but telling ourselves does not constitute the consciousness even though such action maybe a condition of second level knowing. Awareness or consciousness of what was not conscious formerly is constituted primarily by a recognition and an affirmation of the words internal dialogue presents. We become conscious of something through explanation when we recognize and affirm it. In other words, the conscious realm is surrounded by an unconscious and equally present realm. Explanation induces consciousness when it points to that unconscious realm and we affirm it as present not by our conscious selves but by our concrete whole selves. For example, when I jump into an icy lake, I do not become conscious of the chill only because I tell myself that I feel chilly but also because the telling is confirmed and affirmed by more than my conscious self. Occasionally, it may seem that I do not feel cold until I tell myself I do; the illusion arises because while telling myself does not make it so it does facilitate attention. My attention may have been temporarily elsewhere. This statement not only defines consciousness more fully than Russell’s does but also indicates the answer to an extremely puzzling question. How can consciousness possibly reach beyond itself into a realm as different from it as night is from day; how can day reach into night and illuminate it? It does this by performing the miraculous act of inducing “copulation of subject and object.” (Brown, 1966, 249) The current realm of consciousness does not contain this union but it can choose to induce it. We are indivisibly connected with everything; consciousness is separation and “discrimination of opposites.” (Jung, 1959, 96) The affirmation of knowledge comes from the universal union prior to the divisiveness of consciousness. “My body” is intrinsically connected with the chilly lake; I am conscious of the chill when my conscious self lets in or directs my attention to the immediate information of chill. Just why consciousness is so hard to attain, is an enormous mystery. Why, if there is an ever-present human conjunction with everything, has consciousness to go through as elaborate and tortuous a process as thought to produce copulation? We, like all nature, appear to be plagued with two contradictory principles: the filtering principle and the uniting principle. The contradiction has been excessively obfuscated by single-factor theories of human nature that stress only one or the other. Evolutionary theories, for example, almost universally dominant in science for well over a century, fall on the uniting side of the contradiction— at least as they have been interpreted by lesser minds. Evolution, based upon the ideal of survival of the fittest or upon “natural” selection, argues that that organism best adjusted to the environment will survive— that organism, in other words, that fits in or is most united and at peace with the environment. Evolutionary theory failed to take sufficiently into account the organism itself. “That which” was to survive was hidden too deeply under the idea of survival alone. We find that all organic life, rather than adapting to the environment, is driven to resist it by an opposite principle. Organic life pre-eminently operates as a filter against the environment. The inorganic, the mineral, survives best in the environment; thus “lower” forms of life seem more fitted than the “higher.” Human consciousness is only a special type of the general filtering phenomenon similar to the body’s filter, the skin. Sun touches or is connected to the human body; the human body is arranged to filter out much of it. If the filter fails to work, “dangerous” burn/pain arises. Pushed into consciousness is a message of filter failure and pain as a means of suggesting a substitute filter. Burn/pain seems most intense, incidentally, in the very young who have less developed the secondary filter of consciousness and must instead react automatically; strangely, the difference in sensitivity between the young and the mature is usually thought of as the effect of old age “wearing down” the delicate instrument of youth rather than putting it aside for a better and more accurate instrument. A further expansion of the notion that the human body in the broader organic realm and the human brain in the specifically human realm operate as filters is to be found in the amazing phenomenon of the human brain cells that are “uniquely surrounded by a littleunderstood electrochemical fence” dividing brain from chemicals in the blood stream and allowing in only selected substances. Certain chemicals injected into the brain cells directly have profound effects, but these are kept out by the invisible barrier. (Rosenfield, 1969, 228-229) Certain hallucinogenic substances such as LSD apparently are able to leap the fence, enter brain cells, and induce the amazing results experienced among large numbers in contemporary society. Although this sounds suspiciously like an argument in favor of the basic universal drive of selfpreservation, it is not since the argument in favor of self-preservation has persistently assumed an understanding or definition of the self to be preserved. Thus, some have derived from Darwinian or Spencerian theories rationalizations for greed or competition using the idea of self-preservation. They understood that what they took themselves to be was justified in beating down everything and everyone in order to survive and prosper. My “self” defined in terms of “rich man” had a right and an evolutionary duty to maintain and increase wealth. If any single question is unanswerable by conscious self, it is undoubtedly the nature of that for the sake of which the filtering occurs. The processes of organic matter and certainly of life is the development of an ever more secure filter against environment, and, as the filter becomes thicker, the desire to reunite with environment become stronger. The sexual drive and the drive to know are both forms of this impulse to re-unification subsequent to filtering. If we are to re-unify in consciousness, to bring to consciousness what is not there, if we are to renew the search for knowledge, we must be aware that each of the filters that “things” and ” organisms” have built for themselves have exacted a price. Each type of filter has created some “thing” and cast it away. Expanding consciousness demands not just looking at one type of thing formerly cast away but the realization that what is looking stands in a defective perspective. To adequately know or become conscious of something, we, these centers of consciousness, must first become aware or conscious of the defects in ourselves, the filters. The first step in overcoming the effects of the various filters as far as awareness is concerned is development of some conceptualization of the filter or filter system in the human organism. The duality of the filter is most important and yet has only been recognized with the last hundred or so years. Envisage consciousness as a sphere floating on the surface of a lake. Unconsciousness exists upward and outward into the sky and light but also exists beneath the surface and into the depths of the waters. The realm of the liquid depths of the waters below and the realm of liquid space into whose depths ships now enter becomes increasingly similar to, and recalls, Biblical analogies of God’s separating the waters and mystery below from the waters and mystery above. The human “self” consists of this filtered sphere on the surface between the liquid above and the liquid below; renewed consciousness depends on penetrating both realms at once. The researcher or knower must look into the phenomenal-external level of unconsciousness and at the same time move into the noumenal-internal level of unconsciousness. As much a possible the realm of superconsciousness transcending the division into subconscious, conscious, and unconscious can thus be approximated. Renewal must proceed in both directions for, if drawn too much upward, the floating sphere is likely to plop harshly back into the waters and if sucked down too deeply the sphere is likely to leap raggedly to the surface. Some degree of fluctuation can make existence “exciting,” but excessive fluctuation can bring on the bends. Five-fold Blindness Rather than divide the realms of unconsciousness simply into two, the external and the internal, clarity requires that we divide them into five parts based on five distinct kinds of filters. The parts are, first, the “external” realm of unconsciousness or unconsciousness of those objects we perceive as physical; second, the realm of the life or “preconscious” unconsciousness—that kind of internal unconsciousness shared by all living creatures; third, social or “common” unconsciousness that exists as the price of social organization; fourth, personal unconsciousness or those elements of unawareness that exist because of attempts to filter out individual or childhood trauma from the organism; and fifth, cognitive unconsciousness or unawareness arising because of our use of abstract names or symbols. Each of these aspects of unconsciousness or lack of knowledge manifests itself as a paradox—they arise exactly as the price of knowledge or consciousness on the second level. Researchers into society must conceive of themselves as the sphere floating on the water and look at self/environment with all five perspectives of potential unconsciousness. 1. External Unconsciousness. The first and most typically regarded realm of unconsciousness is the external. We do not know all the things we can identify around us. The “object” has arisen as separated from the “subject.” Things become things or objects to the extent that we do not control them. The objects are both social and natural. We cast (literally , “ob-ject” means to “throw off") these away from ourselves since we have been unable to live at peace with them and then approach them with care as objects to be controlled or used where necessary. We must measure, calculate, quantify these things not so that we can use them but because they are unavoidably connected to us. We must know these, or come back to them, after alienating ourselves from them because they control us. The price of the external-internal split is the necessity of casting outside what is inside and casting inside what is outside. The objects or things are identified as being “out there"; they are “matter.” The internal “self” is identified as mind within. Therefore, external study, if pushed far enough, inevitably runs into and bangs against the obstacle of discovering “external objects” all the way into the core of “self” and against the impossibility of ever grasping whatever it examines since “part” of that is what the scientist has enclosed “within”—the interior of mind or self. Aside from this fundamental failure of external study as we know it, two significant problems arise when we consider the attempt to renew it. One difficulty concerns the purpose or orientation of the analysis. External study of external objects, unfortunately and erroneously identified with the word “science,” is supposed to “aim at the prediction and control of behavior as an ideal of inquiry rather than merely at the development of ‘appreciative understanding’ of the process studied.” (1967, Connolly, 5) The danger in this is that it tends to imprison consciousness, which is striving to expand, within the conceptualizations and demands of the present. Consciousness is trained or trains itself to disregard or ignore certain aspects of “external reality” as irrelevant. Rather than expanding awareness, such arrangements restrict awareness. For example, the much-used ideal of operationalism in social science tends to maintain the status quo and becomes what Herbert Marcuse has called “the theory and practice of containment.” (1964, Marcuse, 12-20) To operationalize “love” is to reduce it to behavior within the context of the present mental system. We thereby prevent ourselves from moving. The second difficulty arises when we try to suggest that science should basically renovate itself and not only reach into other “external” realms but also into the unconscious. We know that this is necessary since we have seen the outcome of emphasizing “external” science at the price of the other realms of consciousness. In Germany we found that the best investigators of the external realm in the twentieth century lived in, and contributed most to, a situation proving disastrous to the rest of the world. One of the greatest dangers “threatening us comes from the unpredictability of the psyche’s reactions.” (1959, Jung, 23) The universal rule for human consciousness seems to be that whenever matter from one side of a filter is excessively dense in comparison with that on the other side, the filtering membrane is likely to burst. We do not overcome the other realm by concentrating on the one or by strengthening the filter against it but merely become less aware of it. Like the sun shining on us, if we ignore and refuse to recognize one realm because our attention is elsewhere, we are likely to get burned. Scientists are not unaware of the possibility of this effect, yet they persist in their lopsided view of the object of their study. Scientists have developed their system—the scientific self floating high on the water encompassing much and bloating on the skyward side. The opening of consciousness in the other direction consists of an opening to the void. To “admit the void” is “to accept loss forever.” (1966, Brown, 261) Scientists, like others who identify self with role, do not want to die. It is not an economic or social position or even an “interest” that they try to keep alive but it is themselves. Like all of us, scientists repress the instinct to death or to “give up” the identity that imprisons them; to keep it repressed, they must assert themselves and will “kill” all whose existence “denies” their position. 2. Life or Preconscious Unconsciousness. The second manifestation of unconsciousness might be called “preconscious-” or “life-", unconsciousness. Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, offers the theory that the cerebral cortex is the nervous system’s outer layer and performs the primary function of being a mental shield or filter. Much like the skin and hair on the body, the cortex, the center of second level consciousness that depends on language, is a layer of dead membrane whose primary function is as a filter. “Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than the reception of stimuli.” (1928, Freud, 52-53) The living organism requires a two-way protection—a protection from interior disruptions as well as from exterior influences. The cortex filters both ways. To avoid consciousness of interior disruptions such as extremely conflicting emotions, the human organism projects upon the environment. (1928, Freud, 56) The primary matter that the cortex must filter out for the living creature is death. The physical body is organized to avoid externally caused death and the cortex aids this organization, but the cortex also must filter out what Freud discovered on the inside, the death instinct or the interior drive to accept death. We are conscious that elements in our environment threaten us with death so that we can protect ourselves, but we tend to be unconscious that the “threat” of death from the outside has an inner counterpart or that, indeed, the externally perceived threat may in many cases be only a projection of the interior “wish.” There is, therefore, a manifestation of unconsciousness in the human mind and perhaps in the awareness of all living things to the extent that they are alive. Animals may fight strongly—more strongly than us—to avoid death but at its point will become accepting and yield to it. Many of us yield to death in the end when it is inevitable. Both animals and ourselves accept death when seen as unavoidably coming from the outside. All nature “wants” to return to the more primitive states of being—to die or decompose according to Freud. The condition of life itself seems to be unconsciousness of a drive to return. Again, more important for the scientific researcher than the fact of the element of unconsciousness are its effects. Two results stand out. One is that the researcher develops an untoward stake in upholding a theory of life without a theory of death—a theory that we have the right to do all for the sake of avoiding death, for example. If researchers refuse to recognize their own death “wish,” they may have to explain themselves and all of us as dominated by only survival drives. The second result may be a remarkable resistance to change—at least a remarkable resistance as far as their own lives, their pet theories, are concerned. Indeed, it may be behavioral scientists’ refusal to look inward that makes them most unscientific or even anti-scientific. Freud’s thought leaves us, as it did him, with many problems. The theory that instincts are fundamentally conservative is a case in point. Freud argues that every instinct is connect with a tendency to repeat and is basically a drive to return to an earlier state (death) that has been frustrated by circumstances. Any alleged drive for perfection is only the result of the repression of the death instinct. (1928, Freud, 67-68, 76-78) We, like other animals, strive to live, to eat, in ways we find better only because we refuse to accept our instinct that tells us to die; refusal to accept instinct defines us as neurotic. This leaves completely unanswered the question as to what it is that resists the environment and why a return to an earlier condition is sought or what has produced the specific differences that make some of us more resistant to return and others less so. At any rate, the necessity for the internal filter establishes a realm of mystery within all of us. It is this realm of darkness that lies at the base of the excessive fear of night and of the complementary attraction to a kind of Jungian archetypal initiator into mystery. And for this reason researchers must pay attention to darkness and mysteries within themselves. 3. Social or “Common” Unconsciousness. Still another realm of unconsciousness that the researcher needs to face is the “social” or “common” unconsciousness. This form is less the price of life itself and more the price of life within society generally and within one society particularly. Human existence is predicated upon distinctions among people, and human societies are predicated upon accentuating the distinctions. We and our civilizations may be seen as parts of a tremendous natural process of specialization. In order to have sexual specialization and reproduction, it is necessary to produce the biological repression of polymorphous sexuality. In order to have industrial production, we may have to develop some strong worker types on the one hand and scrawny intellectuals on the other. The price of our human, our sexual, our social organization is the repression of parts and pieces of whole organisms both biologically and psychologically. Jung has broadly investigated the phenomenon of the collective unconscious, discovering somewhat in opposition to Freud and Adler that not only are there realms of darkness in all of us but that also there is a surprising universality in the specific structures that are hidden in all of us. He isolates, for example, general manifestations in the masculine psyche of what he calls “the shadow,” the “Anima,” and the “wise old man.” (1959, Jung, 41) Not only personal-type figures but also stories that are practically identical crop up everywhere in the world as do dreams that have strikingly similar details. Civilization forces attributes universal to us into the realm of the unconscious, the price of civilized, or even of social, life is a set of archetypes based on what everyone in any civilization or society knows. We are extremely diverse because we are extremely malleable, and we are malleable because we have the capacity, through unconsciousness, to be what we are not. This seems to emerge most typically in the arena of sex. Freud himself presented the polymorphous nature of human sexuality—how as children we seek pleasure anywhere. Children, openly expressing this pansexuality, gradually develop in society sexual orientations, built-in social hierarchies, where one sexual orientation dominates and orders the person. According to Jung, “As civilization develops,” the historically factual bisexual primordial being becomes only the symbol “of the unity of personality, a symbol of the self, where the war of opposites finds peace. In this way the primordial being becomes the distant god of our self-development, having been from the very beginning a projection of our unconscious wholeness. Wholeness consists in the union of the conscious and the unconscious personality” we all strive toward. “Just as every individual derives from masculine and feminine genes, so in the psyche it is only the conscious mind, in a man, that has the masculine sign, while the unconscious is by nature feminine. The reverse is true in the case of a woman.” (1959, Jung, 175) Thus, “social man” is pursued and pursues a mystical feminine creature and “social woman,” a mystical male. The sexual context is most useful since it may well demonstrate both the general pattern of “social man’s” psyche as well as the differences arising from society to society. If it is true that men seek wholeness by recovering their repressed, unconscious self since that unconscious self has been projected into women and that women seek wholeness in uniting with the projected masculine unconscious elements within her, then whole societies can be organized by directing these searches through appealing to the archetypes of men and women without their being aware of the control; they will know only their desires for each other but not be permitted to know that the desire is only for themselves through the other. All societies obviously use this to some extent for the sake of stimulating births, but others such as the United States and other extremely industrialized societies use it for purposes less and less related to human reproduction and more and more related to economic production. Industrialized societies use and accentuate sex in ways significantly different from less industrialized societies and this could be a source of problems in the industrialized society. For example, to take full advantage of the archetypes, advertising and sales are likely to tap not just the repressed sexual polarities of male/female but increasingly the whole range of polymorphous sexuality particularly what appears in the form of Narcissism. The outcome is likely to be “confusion” in sexual identity. Social researchers may tend to think of socioeconomic-political ideologies as the most important influences their societies have had upon them and therefore as the most important influences to avoid for the sake of unprejudiced study, but far more significant may be the images of man and woman, of what they themselves are, of what a person is, or of what crime is. Ideological influences are usually quite visible; these others are not. 4. Personal Unconsciousness. The fourth realm of unconsciousness, arising like the collective and social unconsciousness, from the filtering of interior information is the personal unconsciousness—those realities in one’s own life now hidden but still influencing it. Most of Freud’s work involved the personal unconsciousness, the psychological problems of individuals arising from their own early “traumas.” The distinctions between the personal unconscious on the one hand and the collective and common unconsciousness on the other are significant not least because they illustrate the nature of internal unconsciousness generally. The price of our becoming human or conscious on the second level is collective unconsciousness; the price of our becoming socially conscious is common unconsciousness; and the price of our becoming personally conscious is personal unconsciousness. Those human thoughts or ideas that Jung called archetypes and saw to be available to all of us were from a time prior to thought. They are not mentally constructed figures but images forced upon us. Thus, for men, the “eternal female” and the wild haetari are not constructs of thought or thinking, but are images of inner perceptions. (1959, Jung, 33) It is confusing of Jung to suggest that the “social” unconscious is “inborn”—that it does not derive from personal experience. (1959, Jung, 42) Personal unconsciousness is indeed different from life unconsciousness in as much as the personal is the price of personal consciousness whereas the life and even sometimes the social unconsciousness are not the price of personal consciousness. This does not, however, mean that the social unconscious is inborn. Rather it means that it is the result of non-personal experience. The unconscious archetype called “anima” in men arises not from any of their personal experiences but from experience or consciousness nevertheless, form prepersonal consciousness. Jung’s claim that the archetypes were “inherited” seems to have been an over-reaction to Freud’s concentration on explaining the whole of unconsciousness by early childhood incidents. The archetypes are neither “inborn” nor derived from projections such as a man’s turning his mother into an “anima"; they are conditions of our becoming human. Jung himself emphasized that “it is not a question of inherited ideas but of inherited possibilities of ideas.” (1959, Jung, 66) The statement says little since the possibility of becoming whatever a we do become has to be inherited, but it does reflect Jung’s discomfort with inheritance as an explanation. Personal unconsciousness stems from second level consciousness; the life consciousness and unconsciousness, from first level consciousness; common or social consciousness and unconsciousness tend to be from both. Therefore, within our social unconsciousness in a capitalist society may be hidden desires for community, passivity, and the acceptance of death. Repressing that acceptance of death, for example, may be what drives us to accumulate wealth. The particular society may encourage a particular mode of the life unconsciousness all of us have. One way that societies may foster repression maintenance is by special family arrangements and trauma that tend to be common in the lives of most children growing up in the society. The price of our particular capitalist society, or social unconsciousness, is a particularly emphasized aspect of the life unconsciousness reinforced by our personal trauma. It is surely needless to say that these manifestations of unconsciousness not only inter-penetrate but, in a sense, are actually one; we who are living and communicating on a second level must divide the society into parts to avoid being a Freudian or even a Jungian reductionist. 5. Cognitive Unconsciousness. All this talk brings us to the fifth and final distinction in modes of unconsciousness, probably most descriptively referred to as “cognitive.” It appears to be the latest step in the development of unconsciousness and may be, therefore, the easiest to overcome. We are not only conscious of things, of life, of society, and of our person but we are also conscious of universals, of concepts, of symbols. From a broad and sweeping background, we abstract things, life, society, and ourselves (our per-sona), and ultimately from these things we abstract uniformities, representing these uniformities in words or symbols. The price of becoming conscious of these uniformities and even naming them is to cast very, very much into the realm of unconsciousness. Repetition seems required here because of the extreme danger involved for humanity and human knowledge: Consciousness is threatened by being entirely reduced to abstract symbols and words. That we have words for things while these words are only abstractions from abstractions is dangerous. But we have them and too often insist on keeping only them rather than seeing what we are missing. “If consciousness is all words and no silence, the unconscious remains unconscious.” (1966, Brown, 258) Symbols and words may be absolutely indispensable for intelligibility, but the danger in their use is not lessened by their necessity. Once we have established objects and once the human cerebro-spinal system reaches its full development, that system “only apprehends surfaces and externals. It experiences everything as an outside.” (1959, Jung, 20) Thus emerges the tremendous problem with the human mental creation of objects and entities. Once we live with them and with abstraction, we tend to see only in terms of abstractions. We cannot know the interior of things as entities. Above all, the social sciences tend not to know the interior of human or social objects. It is still hard to see ourselves only as objects. It is hard not to recognize people as subjects, but we can, if we sufficiently harden our abstractions, cast their subjectivity into our unconsciousness. Is abstract objectification necessary for the intelligibility of society and ourselves? How can we see the interior of others? It is not necessary; we can see the interior by proximity to our own interior but only if we suspend our objectification and abstraction of ourselves. Again, only by reaching into the primary level of consciousness—tapping our unconsciousness—is this possible. Thus, it is most important for researchers to examine their unconscious on all levels, not least of them is the abstractsymbolic, the cognitive level. Jung points out that the interior of what we have come to regard on the second level of knowing as objects can be known by departing from the cerebro-spinal nervous system and turning to the sympathetic nervous system that “experiences everything as an inside.” (1959, Jung, 20) Too long we have believed that there is a “knower” residing in our heads alone. The knower does not exist as a thing and is not located in any one place. Knower exists only as permitting us to unite with all. The forces manifest themselves in “the brain” but also in “the heart” and in the “guts-spine.” All of these and others too point to how we are united. The knowing possibilities called “heart” or “spine” are not “just emotion” but true bases of knowledge as valid as “brain.” Other dangers of abstract unconsciousness are equally evident. For example, object-abstract consciousness tends to follow the standard Kantian position of calling existence a quality or perfection, or, consequently, a predicate and property. Can we truthfully ever make the statement “It exists"? Is existence a quality possessed or demonstrated by some thing or, on the contrary, is thingness a quality of existence? Rather than say “John is,” and so predicate “is” of “John,” we may just as accurately as that John is a predicate of “is-ness” or existence. In a sense we do say this when we declare that John is a manifestation or predicate of humanity. Pushing things far enough, we can say that humanity, too, and all being is “merely” a quality or predicate of existence. It should be clear by now that to predicate existence of John is just as ridiculous as to predicate thing or John of existence. But the important point is illustrated—that confronting consciousness is the whole single realm called “what is” that is then given division and classification by consciousness. The first division is between essence and existence; subordinate divisions are between different abstractions of essences. Essence does not precede existence nor existence essence. The structure of our minds may tell us so, but we need not accept the dictatorship even of the changeable kaleidoscope of our minds. Indeed, we must not accept it if consciousness is to grow. The Object of Social Research Just as researchers must look at each of these levels of unconsciousness within themselves, so, too, they must look into all such levels in the social objects of their studies. They must, of course, examine the behavior of societies and their members and the attitudes of individuals. They examine these, first because they are investigating the conscious life of the society and, second, because the behavior-attitudes of individuals may illustrate or at least point to the extent and areas of their unconsciousness. However, social studies, especially those dealing primarily with behavior also must take into account the life unconsciousness—the extent that the specific social organization giving content to the study requires a special repression from its members; of the personal unconsciousness, particularly in “attitude” studies, the extent that attitudes reflect personal trauma and personal repression; and of the symbolic unconsciousness or the extent that the minds of the individuals are enslaved to, or liberated from, their own abstract word systems. Recent psychological thought has presented us with a tremendous breakthrough for understanding individual and society. It consists of the insight that peering into the internal, as much as looking into the external unconsciousness, leads us not to the idiosyncratic or unique and personal but to the universal. Because early psychological theory emphasized the personal unconsciousness, it discovered differences from individual to individual and differences dependent upon the variety of their personal experiences. It is true that when we look at individuals, we usually first see the person, both the conscious and unconscious distinctiveness of the individual, but when we look harder, the universals start to emerge. In the depths we reach not “egocentric subjectivity” but universal humanity. Chapter 10 Finding the Whole Arena of Awareness The Method of Renewal 1. The Realm of Light. Much harder than suggesting what should be the object of social investigation or what would lead to greatest understanding of the individual is describing how investigators should go about their task. Dangerous error constantly arises primarily because of the divisions set up by human consciousness and active thought, yet the very goal and purpose of this thought is understanding and comprehension. Whether we want to understand either one single thing or all things, we must take into account how it or how all is related. Social science has gradually been offering a technique for understanding through deeper abstraction or deeper division of the social reality and for indicating how one segmented piece is related to the others. This must be continued and expanded, but it is a limited technique that tends to direct attention only to certain kinds of “external” connections between things, toward conscious attitudes and visible behavior. The method of achieving understanding that is dominant but still in the process of developing in the social, as contrasted with the natural, sciences operates only on the abstract level of knowing. Abstraction is the core of fragmenting instead of integrative understanding. It is impossible for the human mind operating at this level to see wholes. Standard social scientific research is, therefore, likely to serve the goal of understanding by following two rules: (1) All objects must be studied with at least occasional attempts to suspend the subject-object split and look at life as we best know it: by studying our own personal life; and (2) things must be looked at concurrently from all the partial scientific perspectives we now have (physics, biology, political science, economic, sociology, and the rest). It must not be forgotten that all the social sciences as of now, with the exception of part of psychology, probe a realm of human unconsciousness that is already illuminated; the shadowy realms have been too long neglected. 2. The Realm of Darkness. For the darker realms, other techniques become more relevant. We are already very familiar with psychological depth probing for disturbances erupting from the personal unconsciousness. Even here, however, it has been discovered that we cannot judge the significance of childhood traumas and memories objectively but only subjectively. The individual suffering from a problem must recognize the meaning of the traumatic incident. It is not the behavioral incident that induces personal psychological problems—indeed, it has been show that these “incidents” may never happened in reality—but the individual’s experience of it. Constant self-reflection is very useful for individuals, even if they are researchers, and is the most effective check possible on all areas of unconsciousness. Such study may be the only way that the barriers abstraction builds to consciousness may be overcome: Did I actually experience “tree"; how much of it was lost in the language of my perceptions; how little attention did I pay to experience rather than to object “tree"? In many of the social scientific disciplines the most forbidden kind of analysis, second, of course, to philosophy, is history. Yet in an important sense historical and developmental study is at the root of all second level knowledge. Even the strictest empiricists cannot escape history. The laboratory itself is only an attempt to enclose and control a brief history for study. The newest scientific approaches use history “as a laboratory for their researches.” (1966, Kaplan, 15) The only difference between what are usually called “historical” as opposed to “scientific” studies are, first, the length of time involved and, second, the amount of control exercised over the phenomena studied. More important than its use in uncovering external unawareness and ignorance is history’s role in revealing internal unconsciousness and ignorance. Just as the contemporary nature of the individual and society is revealed by its development so, too, is the present individual and society illuminated by the entire history of humanity and the universe. To put it in opposite terms, “Just as the human body is a museum, so to speak, in its phylogenic history, so too is the psyche.” (Jung, 1959, 15) Just as the body can reveal the development of the biological organism and just as the biological development of humanity can reveal the nature and development of this particular individual, so does the psychological development of humanity and human society reveal the psychological nature and development of this individual and society. Most significant is the extent that natural and social history can reveal the lifeand the socialunconsciousness. The one great challenge in examining the psychological and cognitive development of the human race is that there is concerning it a decided lack of the kinds of evidence that most of the social sciences define as valid. One source of information on this development is biological, and Freud’s work has been most important in this regard. His notion that we humans can be defined as neurotic animals is one indication of the fertility of his ideas. Perhaps we must go farther into biology and suggest that animals are neurotic plants and plants are neurotic minerals. The chain may lead us to a better understanding of the nature of humanity, animal, plant, and universe, not to mention what it might do for the notion of neurosis. A second fertile field for cognitive phylogenic investigation seems to be peoples living today under what appear to be primitive social conditions. Their actions and attitudes may reveal not only the stages of increasing consciousness but also the stages of increasing unconsciousness. One of the tendencies nearly universal in these primitive societies seems to be a strong belief in “invisible spirits” that have an essential impact on life. We who are modern and civilized take most of these attitudes either as silly or as ways leaders manipulate ordinary group members. Yet the people are not merely responding to “spirits” as words or explanations for phenomena; they concretely experience these “spirits.” Many such communities need no state armies or police forces to control them; they are internally controlled by the taboos and fears related to these spirits. The members of the society fear the release of the powers of the evil spirits when taboos are broken. They tend to be extremely careful about offending others or making others angry, not because the particular actions stimulate antagonistic feelings, but because the actions release an unconditioned element in humans. The unconditioned element is not created by an act but is found or revealed in the horror felt at incest or the anger let loose for an offense. When people do get angry or act unconventionally, they are not necessarily looked at as evil but as “possessed” by, or belonging to, “evil spirits.” The “evil spirit” is the uncontrolled or uncontrollable dimension of the anger. The “possessed” may be well-treated at least for the sake of avoiding worse punishment by the “demons”— unlike our “criminals”—but avoided. (1935, Levy-Bruhl, 67-77) We who are “civilized” usually see society as a rational, or at least a conscious, unity of wills; we can learn a lot from those we consider “uncivilized": Even if two sides agree on something, such as sex outside of marriage, for example, the “evil spirit” within may flower to poison both the couple and even the whole society. Finally, we have an enormous store of information on the unconscious lives of early cultures and, therefore, on our own, not only from those early forms that still persist today but those of ancient times, in the form of universal dreams and myths. Myths and dreams occur, to a great extent, in the realm of feeling and seeing rather than in that of the abstract-verbal form of “thought” (Cassirer, 1944, 81). Myths and dreams are symbolic, that is to say, they are verbal but not in the abstract stultified way that modern thought is. The precision of the scientific mind is often disturbed by the vague quality of myths and dreams. In the symbolic language of myths one word does not stand for one thing and so myth appears to be an inexact “pathology of language.” (Cassirer, 1946, 18-22) Yet it is precisely because symbol and myth are indistinct to the sharpest focus of our eyes that they are so important. Ordinary and scientific language is forced “to take up a single thought at a time"; it “skims over the surface of understanding like a soft breeze"; it makes the infinite finite. But symbol and its exegesis, which is called “myth,” contain contradictions, sink into depths, and keep the infinite infinite while making it comprehensible. (Bachofen, 1967, 48-50) The insistency of dreams and myths, their completely involuntary character, reveals their connection with the unconditioned in us; they are eruptions from unconsciousness that the cerebro-spinal consciousness filter cannot hold back. The spontaneous emotions or the “instinctive involuntary reactions” of the organism reveal the part repressed. (Jung 1959, 278-279) But today what is the usual mode of exploring the meaning of dreams and myths? We try to explain and understand them by analyzing them using precise words. We try to interpret in terms of abstract terms what is already a completely comprehensible symbol. We try to reduce the irreducible. We violate the integrity of the concrete whole. We try to place the unconscious in consciousness by means of the very tools that forced awareness to become unconscious in the first place. Myths, especially in the form of dreams, are not “aberrations in the organs of sensation” (Cournot, 1956, 12) but the senses and the mind spontaneously shattering the rigidities of pre-conception and reorganizing information to increase our understanding. We tend to see myths as inventions of earlier peoples— as created by the old men who try to make a story to amuse themselves and others, but the “primitive mentality does not invent myths, it experiences them. Myths are organic revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings, and anything but allegories of physical processes.” (Jung, 1959, 154) The basic myths and universal dreams presented, for example, in the form of archetypes are images that are themselves flooded with meaning. At best our scientific languages can indicate how to read myths and dreams but never how to give them meaning. Myths die or lose their meaning precisely when anyone gets concerned about discovering their meaning. The religious myths, for example, change but never disappear. Why do they change or die? Because someone asks, “What does our stone idol mean; what does the virgin birth mean, or the Trinity?” The gods die because people from time to time forget that they have meaning in and of themselves. Having lost our JudaicChristian God, we will look for a Buddhist one. We suddenly find we have no “thoughts” on the subject of our own gods, but the strange gods are dripping with hidden meaning. (Jung, 1959, 13) The order and objects that reason and thought weave during the day ravel at night in dreams and myths. Early human consciousness was in terms of myths; myths must be the starting point for any investigation of awareness. “It is the origin which determines the subsequent development, which defines its character and direction...True scientific thought cannot consist merely in an answer to the question, What? It must also discover the whence and tie it up with the whither. Knowledge becomes understanding only if it can encompass origin, progress, and end.” (Bachofen, 1967, 75) The Dictatorship of Consciousness Whoever wishes for knowledge must seek two things: wholeness and the concrete. The one is the path to the other. Concrete wholeness cannot be captured but at least it can be approached and caught sight of. The obstacle blocking the road and letting only very few of us pass through is secondary consciousness. It often seems that grizzled dictator becomes all the more powerful and all the harder pushes us backward from the citadel of concrete wholeness the stronger we strive to storm the fortress. We seek the ever-clearer picture of what is. We seek not only breadth or wholeness but also depth or the concrete. The concrete is opposed to the abstract. Abstraction can be a path to enabling us to use “what is,” but it can never allow us to approach wholeness; on the contrary, the abstract is built of pieces and progressively smaller pieces of the whole. Attention to the concrete rather than to the abstract provides the one way that epistemology and ontology inter-penetrate and fertilize each other. The possibility of uniting “what is” and “what is known” was brought farthest by Hegel; unfortunately over since, Hegelian thought has been mostly an enigma but only because it was being looked at either from a “knowledge” point of view or from a Being point of view—it was so regarded without the realization that Hegel denied the dualism of these and made them one. When we turn to the concrete rather than the abstract, what we see, as Hegel so clearly indicated, is the meeting place of contradictions. The contradictions “exist,” however, only because we cannot see the concrete wholeness. Until we become God, we must perceive contradictions. Yet by turning our attention toward the concrete we may find the effect of these contradictions lessening and dissipating and we will find ourselves transcending them more and more. We cannot approach the concrete by means of analysis but only by means of synthesis and the dialectics of transcendence. We cannot see it by cutting apart but only by perceiving together. For the sake of the concrete, we must suspend analysis and activate synthesis, providing we understand that synthesis is not merely putting opposing pieces together but immediately knowing that and how the pieces are actually one. Paracelsus, the parent of modern medicine, pointed out that anatomy took apart what belonged together. (1951, Pachter, 41) Similarly, psychoanalysis takes apart what belongs together. Perhaps, following Paracelsus’ lead, instead of anatomy, psychoanalysis, political analysis, we can begin to expand the practice of syntomy, psychosynthesis, and social synthesis. But consciousness is a great dictator—social consciousness, life consciousness, personal consciousness, and abstraction consciousness. How can the dictatorship be overthrown save by death. Plato’s definition of those who grasp “the spirit of philosophy” as those “willing to die,” those knowing how to die, (1920, Plato, 444) refers to much more than the ability of Socrates to drink the poison calmly. It means that philosophers are those who free themselves from the domination of these various kinds of consciousness, these constructors of being, and let them and, therefore, themselves die. As an awakening thinker, you awaken to a world you do not understand, and you, therefore, fight to interpret it analytically thereby putting yourself securely asleep again. If you are lucky, you are eventually entangled in life, and it proves immune to analytical knives. Analytical interpretation having failed you, you despair of it and sink into a voluntary death. Only then do you become a philosopher for only then will your eyes be without categorical encrustation. Einstein and relativity may well be the culmination of the old modes of thought that stretched back to the time of Rome and the late Greeks. Perhaps the process of life may have another lesson for the principles of thought; at the end, the being always returns to its origins before it dies. Division and analysis have snatched us from the primitive condition; perhaps we have begun to take three small steps to the end and to the beginning. One was the rediscovery of dialectical logic, even if in a form that permitted us to contain rather than transcend the contradictions, so that it placed us nearer to the earlier paradoxical logic and the even earlier primitive pre-logical systems of awareness. Cassirer and others have taken a second step reflecting the ancient sacredness of names and naming by demonstrating the way that objects are created by symbols. The third step, which will complete the process, is a method that can suspend the subjectobject dichotomy and return to a transformed version of primitive unity to achieve renewal and rebirth. We may begin to reorient social studies to the concrete by recalling that explanation of a social event means rendering it open to direct experience. If your automobile is stalled, you explain the breakdown by showing how the vehicle operates. You do not explain the concrete event by claiming it occurred because you have no gasoline. This may be a part of an explanation that might allow you to regain use of the car but it is explanation if you see what role gasoline plays in operating the engine and only if you have directly experienced this as well as the vehicle’s operation and non-operation. You must concretely experience the whole and how you, as driver, viewer, or passenger, are connected with it. Even those of us who might not directly experience the operation of this automobile may have that operation made available to our direct apprehension by means of analogy. This kind of validity scientists are usually quick to question; they are less quick to question their own scientific prejudices. For the sake of the concrete, it is most important to emphasize that explanation must get behind and dig under causal analysis. Your pleasure of walking under the tall trees in a garden might be explained by referring to the coolness of the air, but this does not mean that the trees caused the coolness even though you may assume some relation between trees and coolness. If someone catches up with you and says, “Why are you walking?” You may respond that you are walking in order to enjoy the coolness. He says, “No, you are in the garden for the coolness, but walking makes you warm.” So you may say that walking gives you pleasure. He asks why it does, and you reply that walking is beneficial to health, but you cannot explain why you enjoy it. So walking has meaning for you—or better, enjoyment has meaning for you; it is the explanation for your walking. But unless your interrogator already “knew” “enjoyment” or “pleasure,”—unless he has had the experience of them himself—enjoyment cannot be explained to him. You can make your experiences directly accessible to him only if your words point to his experience. You need not and should not say, then, that walking gives you pleasure but only that it is “part” of a pleasurable experience, that somehow it “participates” in such an experience although you yourself do not yet know how. All this should make clear that the approach to the concrete is the most empirical of all possible approaches—empirical in the sense that it refers most closely to experience and suspends the ordinary abstract categories that stand between consciousness and experience. Abstraction inevitably opposes not only the concrete but also and proportionately experience itself. It is usually practically impossible to demonstrate this to an abstract scientist. Jung, for example, went to great lengths to insist that his archetypes were not mystical artistic reactions but experiences, that he was dealing “not with abstract concepts but empirical ones.” (Jung, 1959, 56) The familiar problem of time is also most instructive. No matter how much abstract mathematicians may try to describe and explain time, they must always omit a key and central element in it; time is real only in experience, and there is no objective way of measuring its actual reality or explaining it. (1954, Reichenbach, 144) The length and quality of an “objectively measured” hour is infinitely variable. Rationalism is dehumanizing when it manifests itself in reality and pervades an entire civilization in the form of technology and bureaucracy; (Davis, 1963, 546) it is no less dehumanizing when its pervasiveness is confined to the realm of thought. In rationalism the so-called “known” is non-human, “something admitted by ‘self-evidence,’ previous proof, or by assumption"; in knowledge beyond reason, the known is something recognized by the human being. (1968, Bigger, 22) Socrates’ example from geometry is still instructive and familiar. He leads an “uneducated” slave boy to discover for himself the significance of diagonal measurement of a square in determining how to double its area, not by giving him the formula that “to double the area of a square, you use the diagonal of that square as one of the four equal sides of your double,” but by leading him to see, to recognize, and to come to the insight for himself. (1920, Plato, 361-367) The word does not contain the known, nor does the system of thought, but the word points to the human experience, and in that way it permits of direct apprehension or recognition. One final comment on what the rise of scientific explanation has done to us. Aside from relegating a tremendous potentiality for consciousness into the realm of unconsciousness and thereby establishing the usual extreme danger of gigantic eruptions such as those that have already occurred in Germany and the Soviet Union, aside from the tremendous costs these eruptions will have for both person and society, and aside from the sharp division between light and night in our lives that causes us constant uneasiness of spirit and occasional crises1 we confront a horrible loss of meaning in this century. The enormous expansion of the internal unconsciousness linked with overwhelming concentration in the consciousness remaining to us on abstract explanation has made this a century bereft of meaning. Meaning is neither behavioral nor attitudinal. It refers not to the physical person but to the experiencing person. It cannot be captured in theories. It is neither in the word nor in the sentence but only in “us.” Only metaphorically do things have meaning. Clouds, we say quasi-scientifically, mean rain; tears mean sadness. All these are dependent upon the knower who alone “has” meaning. Clouds connect with my experience of rain. The word “tears” connects with my experience of some internal activity. What is usually called the problem of meaning refers not to meaning at all but to communication. I want to be of one mind with you, to be understood by you, so I try to stimulate in you, by means of words, what is in me. But the words that can capture what is in me may not be available to me so I must shuffle the words I do have around and ultimately use them to refer to a real living experience; unfortunately, it is unlikely that your experience was the same. However, by dialogue directed at mutual understanding, we can expand ourselves through each other "Meaning is a continuous creation, out of nothing and returning to nothingness. If it is not evanescent it is not alive.” (1966, Brown, 247) But it is of continuous creation only through experience, while contemporary social science scholars keep drawing us to the abstract. Neither institutional nor behavioral explanations are adequate for the study of society. What must be re-established is the centrality of human meaning. The primary question must once again become: “What significance does this have for us"; not what does it do to us or for us, but what does it mean. The scientific orientation has proved itself utterly incapable of providing us with an answer to the problem of meaning, yet if any problem is ours it is that of meaning. The “scientific” orientation has afforded us only reductionism, and reductionism cannot offer us meaning. Why not? Because the universe itself is dominated not only by the principle of division that is reflected in analysis but by two principles: integration and disintegration. The face of history looks, in an evolutionary sense, ahead to ever-greater integration or complexification, yet throughout the process there is ever-present disintegration, decay, or entropy. The chaotic spread of energy throughout the universe in the beginning has led to globules of energy, systems of energy, evermore complex. Globules divide from each other only to reunite into complex relationships—so it is with matter and so it is with us. We are born, grow by pulling the pieces around us into our systems, then decay by letting them fall back. We become individuals, separate, then flee to reunite ourselves to ourselves and others driven back by fear and love. "Science” first reduced us to where we came from, the parts that made us up physically and historically. Those who took the historical perspective of science farther pointed out that the complexification process has not ended or if it has for us physically, it has not socially. Marx explained us by the future and so did Teilhard de Chardin. We at least had a function to perform in Marx’s schema—we could choose whether to participate in the direction of history. Marx considered his system to be scientific, but one reason established science failed to see it as such was that he attempted to offer some kind of meaning in terms of the future rather than merely make “objective” predictions. Science fails whenever it refuses to admit the realm of the concrete. Both Teilhard and Marx make the concrete perform some role in their schema but not a central role as far as meaning is concerned. For meaning, we must indeed look beneath our parts and beyond and above ourselves but only in as much as these places illuminate the concrete within the realm of spirit. It is our interior, the pre-eminently empirical interior, that is the path to the concrete. Scheler has pointed out how strange it is that the spirit has come to be looked on psychologically as an artifice of the animal—looked upon as figment of brain and a generalized substitute for the “lower animal’s” methods of survival, or as an over-compensation for our inferiority, or as the repression of the death instinct—when it is clear that the spirit is not explained by these but rather these are explained by the spirit. (1961, Scheler, 59, 64-65) Meaning is to be found neither by reductionism nor by futurism but only in the concrete, the spirit. Science must, certainly in its study of society, finally comprehend that it is strong enough, that it can be brave enough, to dare to reach forth and touch the concrete. Chapter 11 RENEWAL OF CONCEPTUALIZATION: POWER AND SOCIETY Power as Explanation After this brief sketch for a renewed approach for social science as a whole, there remains one final problem: What can and should be done to renovate the individual disciplines? Each field is based on a series of central concepts, and each research project has its own narrower conceptualizations. Probably the most fundamental concepts of the social sciences are the very words identifying them as distinct: the “economic” (economics), the “social” (sociology), the “psychological” (psychology), and so on. A first step in the renewal of social investigation and social consciousness entails reconsidering these; we must reassess the true nature of “social” relationships or “economic” relationships. Discussion even of each of the defining ideas, let alone the other major concepts, in the disciplines as well as some examples of research conceptualizations, is decidedly out of the question here because of the limited purpose of this study. Yet one fairly detailed example may suffice to outline the direction of the kind of re-examination that needs to be undertaken. Tradition in the field of political science has made “power” the concept closest to the heart of the discipline and one rooted in political theory since the time of Machiavelli. Despite the centrality of the concept, political scientists have failed either to give it concrete meaning or to discard it in favor of something else. Political science has consequently been markedly lacking in coherence. The result has been a form of theorizing that demonstrates little connection with what is happening politically, (1968, Gunnell, 163-164) and leading political analysts have suggested that unless the issue of “power as the problem of political science” is settled, “political science as the study of power, cannot be said to exist.”(1968, Simon, 28) Other political scientists have been less disturbed. For example, some argue that it is fundamentally an error to attempt to define power or the political, “we are not students of some subject matter but students of problems.” (1968, Gunnell, 163) Others, insisting on a theoretical eclecticism, argue in a similar vein that theory in political science has always been practical, the theoretician always a partisan confronting problems and issues. (1953, Cobban, 330-331) To a degree these arguments are persuasive, but their validity must not be misunderstood or overestimated. They rightly suggest that there is no need, and in fact it could be positively dangerous, to define and delimit the field of political science by claiming that its subject matter is power, that power is defined as such and such, and that political science validly deals with nothing falling outside the definition. We must concern ourselves with power not so much because we need to delimit or define a discipline but because we use it within a discipline as an explanation, a means to understanding, or a path to meaning. Most crudely, and wrongly of course, “power” has been used as a reductive explanation in political science the same way that “society” has been used as an explanation in sociology or “economic satisfaction” has been used in economics. Even eminent sociologists such as Durkheim try to explain religion, for example, reductively in terms of its “social” function of confirming and strengthening the connection among people. (1964, Merleau-Ponty, 89-90) Political scientists attribute meaning to political activity by reducing it to a power struggle. The most ironic thing about the political scientist’s plight is that, at a time when more subjects are being politicized or falling under the operations of the societal “power structure,” a process that has been characterized as the “sublimination of the political into forms of association which earlier thought had believed to be non-political,” (1964, Wolin, 429) there seems to be less and less concrete experience of the political. That is to say, fewer people seem to participate in real struggles for power or for things. Surely, therefore, this explanation called “power struggle” is a minor part of what goes on and demonstrates that political scientists excessively concentrate on the political activists or the politicians and interest group leaders. A deeper investigation into the nature of power may overcome the narrowness of this perspective and better solve practical problems of political life as well. A richer description of power is needed both because power is being used as explanation and because those who refuse to describe it more concretely and instead have pursued social studies that look at problems given in political practice have employed defective methodologies. The students of politics or society who confine themselves to social or political problems put themselves into straight jackets and allow the object of their studies to be determined by, and therefore enclosed within, the existing political system. Unless they stand outside the practical system, they may be unable to see even its most glaring flaws, and they cannot stand outside it without a piece of theoretical earth to set their feet upon. We can achieve a better understanding of the nature of power only if we look at it from two standpoints: what it is and how we can know it. These two must be distinguished because the kind of understanding involved in the individual social sciences is secondlevel understanding—the kind that occurs after subject/object separation has been made but, it is to be hoped, not necessarily after complete abstraction from the concrete. It is in fact precisely because we must minimize the importance of both “reality” and knowledge of “reality” and are tying at the same time to keep in mind that “knowledge” and “reality” are actually one, that distinction for purposes of discussion is important. Power as a Means and as an End The meaning of “power” in society is deceptively simple. Power is the ability to do or have done. You act or have actions performed for you. You control. You “possess” power. Two aspects of power that are hidden from outside observation are most important. The first is that power is always a means and the second, that power is not something you possess—it is not a quality of your person or your life—but is generated only in connection with other persons or things. In the physical realm, you may claim you have the power to climb a mountain, but your actual gradual ascent is impossible without the slope of a hill; moreover, were there no hills, you would not have the real ability to climb. You might object that you could climb, that you still had the power to climb, were elevations to be made available in the future. Of course, with elevations, climbing would again be a real possibility, but you would not be able to climb unless they were actually present; climbing is not a power you possess; it exists only in your relationship with another. Similarly, social power—power between people— is never your power or my power but always our power. The same holds true as far as the social is concerned. Power over you is not something others “have” but something that is generated by you and the other. Others may say that they have the power to fire you from your job, but they “have” this power obviously enough only because a social organization allows them it and only because you have been working in this organization of your own volition. Let us turn now from this brief sketch of the problem of the so-called possession of power, to a more lengthy exploration of the other issue, power as a means. 1. The Tyranny of Means. Everywhere in the contemporary technological society we are met by an encroaching tyranny of means. Indeed, it may be the mark of the technological society, epitomized by countries such as the United States and Japan, that it establishes means as the standard of all life. Modern theories and attitudes “deny contemplation and recognize nothing but struggle. For them not a single moment has value in itself, but is only a means to what follows.” (1960, Berdyaev, 152) American society is a wealthy one because it is efficient, not as efficient as Japan but still more so than Russia. Efficiency consists of the achievement of the greatest value of returns for the least value expended, and the development of this relationship depends on clearly visible and accepted value. That is, the ends of activity must be definitely established and all must work to those ends. Assuming the ends, all can and will work well to reach them. Concentration on means is likely, however, to be dangerous in the long run because human concern about ends, long repressed, tends to become unrepressed suddenly, popping up at any time to disrupt the efficient society. Both the former Soviet Union and the current United States are experiencing crises in ends. The two have become more and more alike by concentrating on means, and their rising similarity has induced a false sense of hope for international peace in the minds of many social scientists who have neglected to see that while moving more closely along similar paths, the United States and the former Soviet Union have been traveling paths that are not equally good but equally bad. A society that casts its lot on the side of means is forced thereby to repress interest in ends. Ends become the forgotten Achilles heel of the system; ends become the shadowy realm of darkness as means become the object of high intensity lamps. Questions of ends emerge insistently from the darkness whereupon the means-interest technocrats can do one of two things— give in to those who challenge current means as inappropriate to alternative ends or suppress them. Signs of eruption of the ends-interested elements in both American and Soviet societies as early as the 1950’s. There was some hope that the technocracy would accept modification. Ironically, in the United States panels of technocratic experts were set up by President Eisenhower to develop and deliver “goals for Americans.” Ends interests then flowered briefly in the children of the early 1960’s and slightly later in the Carter administration, then blinked out. Today all reform programs focus on means; “better” education never questions the established goals of education, jobs, but only how more effectively to fit us into them. Technicians, calling themselves scientists, both in the physical and social arenas, contribute to the reign of means in contemporary society. Individual and society are indefinable in terms of ends since we are “project” or process, and “project” indicates that ends emerge from life discoveries and not imposed on it. (1965, Desan, 71) Social scientists implicitly recognize this when they avoid the manifest establishment of ends, pretend to be “value-free,” and say they speak only in terms of means or power. This has not, unfortunately, meant that ends have been left open; by ignoring them, or by defining them in terms of means, political scientists have fostered the domination of stagnant ends. Recent history in political science includes a huge battle—now superseded by the temporary victory of scientific Behavioralism in the discipline and an uneasy toleration of diversity—with Hans Morgenthau on one side and a scattering of forces on the other. The issue was Morgenthau’s enthronement of power as the central concern of the State and, therefore, of the discipline. (1951, Morgenthau) Resistance to the coronation lacked unity but not intensity. Some expressions of opposition insisted that power had to have purpose, that the means had to have an end. (1952, Cook & Moos, 342-356) Unhappily, the opposition was weaker than it could have been since, as it stood, it tended to give the impression that purpose had to be “set up"; then power could be utilized to achieve it and that “ends” were only means of exciting people in a way that gave their leaders power. More attention might have been paid to the nature of human purpose; purpose is pregnant not positive. It is surely one of the more significant justifications of democracy that human ends are emergent and not imposed. Were it not so, we should all set up the goal of a world safe for “democracy,” or a “free world,” or “winning” all our contests, or “great societies,” and then devote our lives to the fulfillment of these ends, marshalling all the power we could for a social system of law and order that enforces them. 2. Power as an End in Itself. At this point, the discussion of power must bifurcate. We must concern ourselves with the view that power is an end and a specific goal in us and the view that power is a means to rational ends. Morgenthau, many of his followers, as well as earlier and more profound thinkers such as Hobbes and Nietzsche, conceived of the desire for power as an elemental category of human activity. (1959, Hoffmann, 350-351) Some emphasized the emotional side and called it a human “lust” for power; Morgenthau, like many psychologists of his time, rationalized this emotion and justified deliberate human behavior in terms of it. He and they together argued that we all have a desire for power; having it equally, it must be universally human and needs therefore to be moderated by reason if we are to survive together. Hobbes’ assumption of the natural and inevitable human passionate lust for power, by contrast, led him away from the notion of democracy as a system for rationally reconciling opposing desires for power to develop society as Leviathan and controlling monster. (1952, Voegelin, 185)1 There are at least two explanations for the rise of the concept of power as an end in the post World War II era. One of them is the reductionist tendency. If we cut any human act into small enough parts we are always going to find as one of them a desire that the action be completed. As reductionists, we would be tempted to say that all human beings lust for the ability to complete there acts, or for the “power” to do so; we may fail, if we are sufficiently reductionist, to see that the human individual lusted not after the power but after the completion of the act. Power was both an abstraction and not even one central to the act. A second explanation for the rise of the concern with power and for failure to recall that power is only part of a whole action is the general cultural orientation in political society that places high value on action. Those who are interested in election to, or control over, public office attract most of our attention politically in a democracy. One of the prerequisites for achieving election is, however, that the candidates demonstrate no self-interest in the office other than the office itself; they must show that they do not want to exploit the office but only “to serve the public.” This need to prove a lack of interest in goals is one of the principal peculiarities and difficulties in American two-party democracy. Candidates are, first of all, to demonstrate they have no “private interest” in the office—they are not seeking it for their own personal gain in any sense except for the honor and respect they receive in exchange for having done a good job. Second, in the American system the candidate for public office is placed in a two-party environment. Two parties need to attract a majority of the voters in any given election. To do this, the candidates must, therefore, appeal as much as possible to members of both parties. Consequently, they try to show as little interest as they can in issues or to prove that they are closer to the national consensus, if there is one, on any issue than the other candidate. The enormous contradiction and danger in this to the nation and its citizens lies in the role of politicians who are supposed to be trying to attain the power to control the power of society. Almost pathologically, they are supposed to be interested only in doing a good job; on the other hand, how do they, as Presidents and Representatives, experience that they have the power to control the American society’s power save by making decisions for themselves—decisions that may not be in their selfinterest necessarily, yet decisions that do not merely reflect the wishes of the society but are their own. Because of this, duplicity is built into the system. Presidents are supposed to be, as they proclaim themselves to be, the national unifying figures, yet at the same time, they are to be power-oriented by nature, though this they may hide from the public, themselves, but not to clever political scientists who see through to the “basic power motive.” To conclude, then, American political scientists are tempted to look to public officials as manifestations of the universal power motive and to concentrate on what seems to be the psychological motivation of these officials. Politics is the struggle for power and power itself is the end of the struggle. Of course, “power” would not have survived so long as a central theoretical concept unless it could successfully account for the “facts.” “Power” is a successful explanation both because it is always an element in action and because other motivations must be concealed in two-party consensus politics. Morgenthau’s situation is most revealing. Not only does he look at life from a Western-democratic perspective but relates that perspective to his primary interest, international affairs. The American politician is struggling for power, pure power; the nation-state in international politics is similarly struggling for power. The pathology of the politician that political scientists falsely identify as normal is projected onto the international scene. Clarity may be achieved by reversing the examination; we should look to the international scene to illuminate the nature of domestic political power. American politicians are supposed to be pre-eminently interested only in getting into and staying in office, “having” power to control America’s social power. They are then entrusted also with the guidance of American foreign policy. From a domestic position where they are selflessly to search for power over power, they assume an international position where there is little organized international social power to control. It is at this point that politicians and political theorists as well should recognize that hidden assumptions about goals are made in domestic life while there are few internationally, and that these purposive orientations are prior to and dominate the means called “power.” Is it any wonder that these political scientists regard the most successful politicians within American political society they also see as the greatest failures in international politics—and vice versa? In America, politicians present themselves as domestic servants who represent no interests; in international life they must create the purpose and focus it. If the development of an international community in the future is unlikely, it is not because of inherent prejudices in the peoples of the world but because of the prejudices built into them and into the current domestic political systems that place the future in the hands of those incapable of building a world and that to a large extent gives them a role that makes them incapable of guiding it. 3. Power as a Means to Rational Ends. The second path in the bifurcated discussion of the use of “power” as an analytical category concerns the error not of making power its own purpose but of attempting to establish a abstract goal for power outside of life. While those who consider power its own goal tend to emphasize the emotional in us as fundamental and reason as merely a tool that serves it, the theorists who try to establish a purpose for power put reason on the top. They see power as something deliberately chosen for the sake of goals other than power; these goals, of course, they regard as having their source in something else unconditioned in us. How they identify the goals Morgenthau rightly objects to when he insists on the priority of power. He is right that others are wrong when the adopt this alternative reduction but fails to see that he is wrong for the same reason that they are wrong. One goal that many claim power serves is “selfpreservation.” We, it is assumed, possess a fundamental drive to preserve ourselves; so do societies. They organize to generate the ability or power to maintain their lives and themselves. The self-preservation focus induced Nietzsche to insist that power was its own purpose: “Where I found a living creature, there I found the will to power...life sacrifices itself—for the sake of power! He who shot the doctrine of ‘will to existence’ at truth certainly did not hit the truth, this will does not exist!” (1961, Nietzsche, 137-138) If all human activity involves power, then the goal of existence explains neither it nor power, for we do not act merely to continue to exist. Preservation does seem to be part of our goal at times, but it is not the goal; there is an opposite goal too—the goal of release, the death instinct, the purpose of using up one’s life rather than conserving it. In this sense, preservation of life is not the goal of life but a means to the goal of living. The most typical organizing goal set up by American political scientists is economic. We not only want to conserve life but we want spend life enjoying satisfactions. The economic goal is attractive to a large extent because it “contains” both the principle of preservation ("savings") and that of dissipation (expenditures on satisfactions). There are, however, at least two major objections to the economic explanation of politics and power. One is that, in operation, it tends to make politics primarily a matter of rational “exchange.” We are engaged in a political enterprise so that we may get what we want from others, and getting what we want is referred to as having power. Analysts persist in making this claim despite the overwhelming evidence that we do not sit down, rank hierarchically what we want in terms of our “values,” and then exchange what we have for what we have decided we want. This is not what brought people together into political societies nor how they operate once in them. The second and related objection to reductive economic interpretation is that it forces an explicit content on the “rational” deliberation each of us and each society performs when discovering goals. For example, in the United States a legitimate political or economic goal is anything whatsoever—as long as it can be defined in terms of such things as money or domination. These categories of goals are not, in fact, universal to those wanting to do something and so to exercise power. Indeed, the definition of such goals in a group or society tends to be most stultifying and blinding to the mind. For example, Marx argues that private property has made us “so stupid and one-sided” that objects exist for us only if we “can possess them or if they have utility.” (1959, Brown, 328) On the contrary, many Marxists saw the early stages of World War II as an unimportant conflict; because the struggle was only among capitalists, socialist states could ignore it. To nearly anyone outside Marxist goal definitions, “class struggle” would not be “more real than theoretical conflict” within classes. (1964, Merleau-Ponty, 148149) The establishment of such goals as fundamental in us is dangerous because they are essentially projections. You project your illusory, yet strongly felt, goal upon others in your own society; the illusions pervade the society, but illusion will inevitably be seen through. Either the society will then change or will increasingly suppress those who see through it. It will find their behavior incomprehensible, will ignore them until the anger is great, and then will act to suppress them. Or the whole deluded society will project its economic-interest illusion upon the rest of the world and find it comfortable until a Hitler, who can not be accounted for by it, overturns it. Trying to discover rationally established goals for power it itself an illusion. This is because humans are project—are open-ended—and so much so that even as broad and vague a goal as economic satisfaction is excessively constricting. Aristotle was one of the earliest philosophers of ends, establishing the human goal and human development as well as the conditions of moving toward that goal. But for Aristotle at least, there was a human good; for him it was not simply that whatever any individual wanted that was our good as long as we could define it in terms of money. An end—even one as broad as “good”—is dangerous to us, however, because it eventually we come use it as a justification for inequality. This means we can defend basic inequality among members of society according to their proximity to the end or the human good. Today, we avoid inequality by asserting that all are equal yet refuse to point to the good—we start by discussing the human good and end by discussing the human essence: If good is not something beyond us that we need seek and find but something we immediately possess without effort since we are all equal, there must be some condition already present that makes us all equal; this is our essence. Thus today the illusion arises that we can discover this essence by talking a poll and finding from it what is most common. Greed and lust for things seem most common; therefore, it is of our essence to be acquisitive. The society that fails to foster acquisitiveness is inhumane and unequal. The “new” insight of recent “existential” philosophy claims to reject the notion of essence and, therefore, liberates us from the domination of the past or future. What it rejects, however, is not Aristotle’s “essential character” or “form,” which is the original meaning of the notion of essence. (Aristotle, 1960, p. 9) Instead, it abandons all definitions of that essential character while affirming an alternative nature to it. It argues that only “things” have essences; humans have possibilities. We use our minds and our reasoning to dictate to nature: A bone is a bone—a bone is a thing; a bone has essence. The world becomes flesh—or rather, the “flesh” becomes a world. But seen from the inside, we are existence without essence. (1964, Merleau-Ponty 66) The mind cannot turn back upon and sting itself to death. Individuals, whole individuals who are the source of thought as thought are the source of essences, cannot place over themselves the dictatorship of essence. We can establish their purpose over “things,” but we cannot establish purpose over ourselves. Our minds divide nature into being and non-being and see only being. What we give names and words to is being. But the “things” we say we see, including ourselves, actually are the mixture of being and nonbeing; they are basically contradictory. The contradiction defies “definition” and boundaries. The contradictions produce something new. When hydrogen and oxygen unite in specific proportions to form water, do they remain hydrogen and oxygen or do they become something else? When water breaks down into hydrogen and oxygen, is it still water? Do we when we marry constitute a marriage or are we still independent? Like all nature, we are fundamentally dynamic, not static nor mechanistic. Our dynamism, based on the contradictions within, is not directed to “bio-psychosocio-equilibrium.” We are basically self-transcending. We can define things according to our use or purpose for us, but we can give neither purpose nor definition to ourselves. Power and purpose are bound in the insoluble marriage called life; life itself is destroyed when they are put asunder. Power is a means only, but to ends that are not external to it. Power as No-thing 1. Source of the Illusion of Power. The question, “What is power?” is unanswerable. Power, like we ourselves, is no-thing; “it” has no nature; there is no “it.” The term or symbol “power” is an abstraction from what is, an abstraction whose reality dissolves as it is abstracted. The problem of social power has a twin in physics where scientists have long puzzled and eventually have given up on some aspects of the relationship between objects. One instructive example is the nature of light. Some described light in terms of a “thing” or “particle"; others insisted that the waves consisted of nothing material at all but only represented probabilities. (1954, Reichenbach, 174) Thus, the unsettled dispute over the nature of light ended by concentrating only on the effects of light in terms of mathematical probabilities. Similarly, students of society end up discussing the outcome rather than the nature of power. Light for the physicist and power for the social scientist become problems because of the temptation to, and perhaps the human necessity for, abstraction. Action puts us in a very peculiar relationship to things. We act in hundreds of ways. A uniformity that we find we can abstract from all our actions is power. We fit diverse activities under a category, the category of “power,” and thereby make them all more familiar to us and more mastered by us. One distinction that could clarify our abstract understanding of power is the difference between power and action. We say that the term “power” contains a prediction. We say that power is not a state but an ability. You claim to have the power to move the paper clip across your desk with your finger. If you do so, you can no longer claim to have the power to do so; the paper clip is already now on the other side of the desk. The potency has resolved itself in the action. Your whole ability to describe power in this way is based on abstract, not concrete, categories. One of these is time sequence. You want the paper clip to move across the desk and it moves. Partly because one piece of information came before the other, you can proudly claim the power of moving the clip—surely the clip itself and the surface it slid over are bases of “your” power. (1890, James, 422-485) A second abstract category giving rise to this notion of power is the “cause/effect” prejudice. As the difference between cause and effect is shaky, so “the distinction, which we often make between power and the exercise of it, is equally without foundation.” (1961, Hume, 157) In both cases, you separate one piece of “an event” from another and call one the “source” of the activity and the other the “result” of it. You are the source of the clip’s motion; it is the recipient of your energy. Every explanation of power in current use by political scientists is based on one fundamental false assumption that must be overcome if political science is to escape its conceptual morass. C. Wright Mills suggested that “power refers to the realization of one’s will even if others resist.” (1959, Mills, 37) Power, according to Morgenthau, is “man’s control over the minds and actions of other men.” (1960, Van Dyke, 140-141) And Herbert Simon suggests concerning the assessment of power “that the phenomenon we wish to measure is an asymmetrical relation between the behavior of two persons. We wish to observe how a change in the behavior of one (the influencer) alters the behavior of the other (the influencee).” (1957, Simon, 77) The fundamental assumption lying behind these seemingly diverse statements concerning power is separation between people, separation that, when assumed in life, must be bridged if society is to survive. 2. Conflict and Consensus Transcended. One perennial dispute reflecting the apparent incapacity to overcome subject-object separation concerns the alternative images of the political order as power or authority. The “conflict/consensus” school of political study has not been reconciled to the “consensus/integration” school. (1957, Connolly, 382) Each by itself is untenable, yet we have found no way to bring them together. Numerous attempts have been made, but none has actually succeeded. One attempt was to connect the two by means of the concept of “socialization.” Individuals and groups fight one another and are in conflict until they are socialized—until they “internalize” standard norms for all parties whereupon the concept of conflict and coercion “become inapplicable” to them. (1968, Wrong, 673) In effect, this position consists of nothing more than the conclusion that where there is conflict and competition, there is conflict; and where that conflict stops, we call that lack of conflict the effect of “socialization.” The concept of “socialization” here is not an explanation but merely an observation. The viewpoint of society based on socialization, despite its illusory character, is a real and serious danger. It is a two-edged sword. Fostering an internalized moral code to replace coercion as the manipulator of behavior may, on the one hand, be praised for establishing peace. On the other, such internalization may be condemned. A society may use the excuse of socialization to destroy those who are seeking to bring it needed reforms to it. If only socialization preserves the human group from chaos, any individual who suddenly stands up and refuses to abide by the moral code not only is begging society to coerce him into silence, but also inviting annihilation. “Society,” Nietzsche pointed out, “has never regarded virtue as anything but a means to strength, power, and order....The State organized immorality—internally: as police, penal code, classes, commerce, family; externally: as will to power, to war, to conquest, to revenge.” (1967, Nietzsche, 382) Opposition between authority and “power,” consensus and conflict, is not overcome in society by the idea of “socialization.” The major alternative to the socialization theory is some image of a “rational” way of living together. If custom and socialization do not make for peace and order, society must have another basis. The basis, allegedly, can only be rational recognition of the necessity of cooperation.2 You get along with others for the products you can manufacture together; you get along because you know that otherwise you are likely to be hurt by others. Knowing these things, you behave yourself so that coercion need not be used against you. You are even supposed to have signed a social contract rationally surrendering individuality to the military mastery of General Will. Each of these fails, of course, because your conforming behavior is only rationally guided but not ultimately rationally motivated. To be rational in a way that requires moderation and restraint in your conflicts with others is only to use reason as a means to ends that are not, and cannot themselves be, completely rational. That is, while it may be rational for the sake of “economic ends” to cooperate with others in labor and to restrain yourself from theft, the “economic ends” themselves can never be entirely rational. You may ignore your “economic well-being” or you may not care about the risks of pain and death. At that point the coercive element in the society steps forth perhaps to annihilate you, not just for pointing out that obedience is not sacrosanct and thereby threatening the stability of the society but also for being inhuman because supposedly all of us in the society know that the human individual will be persuaded by wealth or by the fear of pain and death. Unfortunately, we in society tend not to know that the all-encompassing and final authority of the fear of death exists only because we have repressed our will to die and must pathologically hide that from ourselves.3 Others do not coerce us; we let ourselves be coerced. We allow ourselves to be compelled primarily because of our preconceptions and abstractions. We need not accept these preconceptions, and from time to time large groups in every society rejects them. If the whole society could recognize that they were unnecessary and accept revision where revision was good, then most of the conflict believed to be inherent in society and the individual could be eliminated. Society organized under power, whether the notion of power is founded on the pernicious idea of socialization or “pure” coercion, is a creation of the mind—a creation returning to haunt us. The notion of ordering society through power when power is understood as something exercised by some over others can be traced at least as far back as the Greeks. One of the central points of dissension between Plato and the Sophists had been over their attempt to define the state in terms of power. The Sophists took the position that the state was ordered by power; Plato held that the state was ordered by a principle of harmony. Aristotle disagreed with his teacher, Plato, by arguing in favor of power—not power expressed as the arbitrary domination by leaders over followers carried out by means of socialization or coercion but as the domination of the higher humans over the lower. Christianity, in the beginning pointing to a realm of harmony, quickly relegated that realm to the kingdom of Heaven to come after death; the kingdoms of the earth, both churchly and secular, were to consist of power exercised by those who were closer to knowledge of God over those who were farther from it. Perhaps only now, after so many centuries, can we not merely rediscover, but renew the Platonic notion of harmony. The nature of crime in the context of social power is instructive. It is probably true that society cannot live without the power of coercion but only because society itself generates crime and evil. Crime is the dark side of the artificial sphere of light we create when we build societies. We punish criminals not because they do something bad but because they see the defined “good” as “bad” and the defined “bad” as “good.” Moreover, the punishment of evil in criminals is not to improve them but to improve the other members of society since criminals did what the others consciously or unconsciously desire to do; “good citizens” enjoy crimes vicariously and must punish criminals all the more severely, not so much for committing the crimes but for tempting the good citizens. They are tempted to the horrible evils, not by inborn inclination, however, but as the consequence of flaws in the socially-established notion of good. The temptation to crime that afflicts both the wrongdoer and the pillars of the community is of common origin—it is not so much that society leads people to crime but that by establishing the category of “good,” it forces all to relegate much within themselves to unconsciousness as “evil.” Society induces repression, and repression induces crime and punishment. This is why the utilitarian attitude towards crime is so illusory. Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and the rest argued that humans were dominated by dread of pain and attachment to pleasure, and they obeyed these two tyrants rationally; therefore, punishment should inflict just enough pain to overcome the pleasure the potential wrongdoer anticipated in the criminal act. In Totem and Taboo, however, Freud demonstrated that many criminals perform crimes because it gives them “meaning” for a prior overwhelming sense of Dostoevskian guilt (Freud, 1946) and Sartre said the same thing about the poet-homosexual-thief, Jean Genet (Sartre, 1963). However invisible, the belief in the use of force remains entrenched as the ultimate in persuasion even in the most “enlightened” of nations. The decisiveness of force itself, however, is being challenged by the attitude of some people that they would rather be dead physically than spiritually. Again, the reason for the present situation is that politically, people are still seen as others, alien, isolated centers of consciousness upon whom order is imposed from the outside. Social science, in studying “power” conceived of as something operated by one upon another, is not only studying but fostering an illusion. Objective social scientists at best consider themselves physicians visiting a patient; they see themselves as subject and the patient as object, rather than recognize that they are in the patient and are attempting to capture themselves with their minds. They then assume that all in the society are related to each other as they (outside analysts) are related to the object of their studies. Upon the basis of these errors, they are doubtless going to come to the analytical illusion of power. We are not about to suggest that students treat their objects as themselves as subject; rather they must overcome the subject/object division. This point directs attention to the final topic of the discussion of power—how do we “know” the relationship in society that we have labelled “power.” Illusions are not absences but mistakes; there is something to be known underneath power, the concrete, but how do we come to know it? Knowledge of Power To those for whom the study of society is the study of the interaction of objects and the study of power is examination of a relationship from the outside measurable in terms of the behavior of one person towards another, society and power will remain a mystery. If they ignore conceptualizations such as power and claim to study only behavior, they will find it impossible to describe what is going on. They will discover themselves turning back to synonyms for the very words they rejected; “influence,” for example, might replace “power.” But what they wish to discuss will always elude their study. Like physicists who cannot truly move from the event “lightning” and “smashed tree” to the conclusion that the lightning “caused” the smashing or had the power to smash the tree, so, too, behavioral social scientists will never get from the event “John helped Joe on with his coat” to knowledge of the event: “Joe had power over John.” 1. Power as Utility or Mystery? We look at political society. What is there? Surely not only or even primarily a “community of interests.” Political society cannot be understood as a system of exchange. We live in it not in order to use it or others; we live in it and only then may we discover we can use them. Were the core of political society a mutuality of interests and were interests absolutely fundamental, there would be by now a single international society. Politics depends on a staying together that is neither merely “implanted” consciously or unconsciously nor merely a trading between individuals. It is rather a sense of unity that depends on acceptance of a “beyond ourselves” that we serve together. It is not that we get or give to this larger whole as individuals but that we are an integral part of it and it is an integral part of us. Pressing problems of contemporary life derive from both a loss of the sense of community by means of immersion in the cult of the separate individual and at the same time an intense longing for communal existence. (1960, Wolin, 366) A curious twist of irony has led us to indoctrinate each other in the religion of rational utilitarianism. I, separate and sedate, live in this society because I can get the things that give me pleasure. All of a sudden the pleasures I have sought have evaporated upon their achievement. The wealthy society emerges because of a tremendous drive for goods. The goods achieved leave us empty, and not all of us are so stupid as to believe that the emptiness can be filled by more goods. Yet we insist that we have a right to intense individual pleasure, a right to get it from society, and a right to destroy the society that fails to deliver. This contradiction is not economic but spiritual; it is not in “capitalism” as opposed to “socialism,” but is born out of the utilitarianism that gave birth to both of them. Until we are ready to look at society and power as a mystery to rational thought, they will remain mysterious. “Visible society is, indeed, literally a work of art, slow and mostly subconscious in its production.” (1927, Cooley, 21) If we do begin to look at it as if it were a deep, slow mystery, the rewards might be tremendous. There may be much to be learned, for example, in the pre-scientific medieval view of correspondences and affinities or of the influence of psychic and magnetic fluids. (1948, Hyde, 55) We are likely to find that the ultimate structure of matter is much closer to mind than anyone expected. (1948, Hyde, 13) We may even see, in returning to these and in the intriguing talk of “vibrations,” the possibility of renewing both social and physical sciences, and, in that renewal, a startling union of the two may become apparent. Whether any of these are possibilities we cannot be certain, but we can be certain we will not fine out unless we look with an air of mystery at those things we think we understand. We do know that power, the abstraction, does not exist; we know that we usually speak of power as if it were concrete, and we know that the abstract power is based on some concrete. Modern behavioral science borders on blindness. It tends to see power on the basis of activity, suggesting that power relationships, like all relationships, are “determinate ways of acting towards or in regards to one another,” (1964, Nadel, 8) but patterns of action omit too much. As we suggested a moment ago, upon the basis of action there can be no judgment of the nature of a human relationship. No one, for example, can perceive whether love exists between two people—not even if the two say it does when polled nor even if they think it does; never having experienced love, they may wrongly identify it. Neither from their behavior alone nor from their words and thoughts alone nor from these together can the existence of love be adduced. The same thing holds true for a relationship of power. Power is never measurable in quantitative terms; at best, only manifestations of it are. We can never, moreover, say with assurance that these quantified qualities are truly manifestations of power. When using the term “power,” behavioral scientists have tended to refer to more than their investigations warranted. They investigate one thing and refer to something else. This is not a reaction of behavioralists alone but appears in practically all political science, especially in its utilitarian elements. In reducing us to an observational category and assuming the pretence that behavior is all that words such as power refer to, social scientists, like the Greek Sophists, dehumanize us. They take as their points of departure separated, categorized, interviewed, and spindled humans rather than the universal human of Socrates. They insist the universal is only a philosophical fiction derived by adding up the qualities of individuals, but Socrates looked for the concrete, not the generalized, universal. Individuals and generals are abstractions; the universal is concrete. Power is essentially spiritual. It flows from what things mean to us, not from what they are in themselves. Meaning is as evanescent as air. Air we cannot capture with any conceptual net however fine. Both utilitarian liberalism and behavioralism have materialized the spiritual, have reduced us and the activity of philosophers to the level of their own activity. They have seen politics and power in terms of practice rather than in terms of meaning. (1960, Wolin, 5) As a result, the good they seek to propagate through government activity, however beneficial their motives, is only likely to pour our more poison down our throats. 2. Power as Concrete. To know power we must take steps leading to the concrete. Power is knowable only in experience. Therefore, power can be known only by the experiencing agent, and only after experience can this knowledge be applied to other situations. Human knowledge of electricity in physics is derived indirectly and abstractly. It is known by its “effects” as the movement of electrons, by the light it produces, or by the shock felt when it is discharged into the body. Scientifically, electricity can be known only from the outside or indirectly. This indirection is a defect in knowledge that can be overcome by suspension of the subject-object division as far as human and nature is concerned. The indirect nature of knowledge of social power is also a defect, but one that may be more easily overcome. (1963, Gibson, 9) We must see the interior of things to see them concretely. Seeing electricity from the interior entails the overcoming of the division between mind and matter, but seeing social power from the interior may entail overcoming, initially at least, only a division in mind. It may be achieved by making the interior unconsciousness conscious. When you are interviewed by your employer, when you visit the President in the Oval Office, when you speak to the judge in court, you are likely to experience power from the inside. Your experience depends on who “you” are to yourself and who the other is to you—both refer to meaning, the meaning of self to you and the meaning of the other to you. By listening within you are able to feel your mind manipulate yourself to give the appearance that there is some visible interchange between the other and yourself. Instead, you become aware that generating in this whole, not between two separate objects and contingent upon their exchanging words or things in a particular way, is a “reality” that we may call “power.” “It” always operates, but we tend to notice it only when a part of us resists—only when there is a contradiction over what is to be done. Everything we do, everything we think or feel is tinged with it, but we become aware of it only when there are contradictions. Absolute power is the perfect imitation of God. Like anything that is everywhere, power is nowhere. Thus, the inevitable error of those who say, “Here is power; there it is.” What they isolate are those elements of ourselves-in-society that make us conscious of contradictions. The discomfort of the contradictions, we have tended to call power and to be interested in. It is not those who have always “held” power who tend to pursue it most madly, but those who have experienced the contradiction of being under the power of others. We can become conscious of it at these moments and then move to know how it is everywhere.4 “Power” in this sense expands awareness not as an “analytic” or divisive and reductionist tool but only as a synthetic one. "Only by virtue of the recovery of a sound ontology and an adequate epistemology will political theory be able to flourish as it once did; this will require an abandonment of the physicalist interpretation of experience that has for decades been dominant in political science.” (1963, Germino, 437) “Concepts are empty when they cease to be closely connected with experience.” (1959, Reichenbach, 32) The concept of power has become increasingly empty as it has grown more abstract. But the concept of “experience” itself becomes empty when it is not closely connected with experience. The experience we usually call “experience” in social science is itself an abstraction. The major idea behind an experiment, supposedly to draw us nearer to experience, is an abstraction. To know concrete “power” is to turn to whole human experience and not abstract experience. This we can do. Chapter 12 CONCLUSION: THE NEED FOR RENEWAL Nihilism Young and Old Circumstances have coalesced during our era not only to make the renewal of knowledge a goal for comfortable academics but an absolute requirement for all of us if we are to survive. Renewal is required since thought has strayed from truth. This age of relativism, however, fails to find arguments from the standpoint of truth convincing. Although relativism makes such arguments only less persuasive and not less valid, it may be wiser to point to something we may all be willing to see—the nihilism of the present age and, in the midst of deathly despair, the floundering for a sense of meaning. The germ cells of nihilism have been fertilized by the very expressions that made earlier generations hopeful. As religious faith declined during recent centuries, our predecessors either became lost and lonely in the world or found a new hope in rationalism. Its most recent and culminating form, scientific rationalism, taught that if only science devoted enough attention to our problems we could overcome them and enter an era of peace and perpetual progress. But now discredited, scientific rationalism has turned against hope. We learned rapidly in this century that, even though the end goal of rationalism might be a good and peaceful world, each step in the movement toward that end does not bring an equivalent escalation in good or peacefulness but merely makes the possibilities for both good and evil greater. Therefore, we were willing to surrender belief in perpetual progress, but we refused to surrender an almost fanatic belief that the future will bestow upon us the solutions we have been unable or unwilling to produce in our own time. Therefore, one of the aspects of scientific rationalism continues to threaten us. It is regularly confirmed by our scientific achievements: At one time we were unable to set human foot on the moon; now we are able to. At one time Mars was unapproachable; now we approach it. We stand puzzled—if we can place a rocket ship on the planet Mars, why can we not end poverty? The answer, of course, is not that we cannot but that we will not. We demand that the future confer a solution to poverty upon us rather than create that solution for ourselves. We live not in the present but for the present and expect the god of the future magically to take care of us. At the same time we are killing our future not only by living for the present but by means of the very science—especially that of society—that gives us our dreams. The enterprise of knowledge has become one that intends to find out what is not known now—that is our primary concern. In doing this we tend to ignore or forget what we know now or have known. Such ignorance as is likely to occur from our focus on the unknown may be our downfall; what we discover out there in the bright future will be based on ever more crumbly sand foundations from the present and past. Although what has been is immortal and undying, we have sought immortality in the continuation of life rather than in its fulfillment. We treasure not what we are accomplishing but the dream and too often only the dream of what we might accomplish. In both our lives and science we idolize youth because youth has that indefinite character of millions of shining future possibilities but no accomplishments. Youthful indefiniteness has become our greatest treasure and the young our greatest resentment. Most fantastic of all, we have convinced ourselves and our young, those most dangerously so convinced, that youth is the fountain of life and truth. We have failed to teach youth that every possibility, every bit of their indefiniteness that becomes definite, and every bit of knowledge possessed they derive from the past—their own and the past of all humanity. Youth is a hope because of indefiniteness; that indefiniteness is valuable because it is open to accept the best of what age offers while age tends, though not necessarily so, to become defined and ossified. The worth of youth depends, however, on willingness and ability to discriminate between the best and worst in the old while relativism in scientific and humanistic thought, simply because it denigrates absolute standards, has made the standard of youthful choice whim rather than the good. Rather than be culled for what is good, age has become the obstacle to the fulfillment of youthful spontaneity; age, therefore, must be destroyed. Of course, the destruction of age will also constitute the destruction of youth, but that matters only to wisdom and, according to the absolutist bias of the relativist, all things are relative. Futurism, arising from scientific rationalism and from the direction of life during the era when such rationalism has become dominant, ultimately turns destructively back both against scientific rationalism itself and the society dominated by it. Within scientific rationalism and current liberalism, its social equivalent, reside a restrictive element. The future is everything as long as “future” is defined in terms acceptable to scientific reason. In this way, current intellectual approaches foster a subtle nihilism of youth and precipitate, paradoxically, a similar nihilism of age. The nihilism of age accepts indefiniteness but only as contained within a certain system and through a specific method. All things are relative, but this does not free us for our whims. If all things are relative and chaotic, then all we have is that order that scientific reason establishes, and there is no valid argument against the imposition of a system that represses all desire for indefiniteness or liberty save scientific indefiniteness and scientific liberty. The least danger from the scientific enterprise is the emergence of societies where democracy has become impossible. Democracy, for all practical purposes, has already become impossible in the United States. There is no way that citizens can judge issues or their own elected officials. Elections are not utterly blind but are without valid rational or emotional bases. Essential in democracy is a broad common awareness of what is what. The concentration of direct information about what is going on in the hands of experts in the specific areas of happenings and the complexity of issues has produced a society of elite, and not just elite but expert-elite, control. They dribble out information to the rest of us conditioned by their own biases. The only hope for a good society is the sense of integrity and responsibility of all of is, including that elite. At worst, of course, and much more likely because of confrontation between the nihilism of youth and that of age is the rise of the closed society permitting indefiniteness but only within the strictest boundaries of scientific rationalism. The vague illusion that such a society is impossible based on the assertion that science must be free has been rapidly fading. True scientists may have to be free spirits, but there is little reason to believe that the true scientists need be any more than a handful in number in any society today (the evidence is that there are very, very rarely more) and less reason to believe that true scientists are in fact necessary to the technocratic society. After a certain point, technicians are sufficient to maintain and “develop” societies. No need to dwell further on the image of the technocratic society. While its actual form is likely to be non-technological and even anti-technological in ideology, its reality has been adequately sketched by Orwell, Huxley, Burgess, and others. Still, a quotation from a seer even older than they is appropriate. Nietzsche predicted: “Once we possess that common economic management of the earth that will soon be inevitable, mankind will be able to find its best meaning as a machine in the service of this economy—as a tremendous clockwork composed of ever smaller, ever more subtly ‘adapted’ gears; as an evergrowing superfluity of all dominating and commanding elements; as a whole of tremendous force, whose individual factors represent minimal forces, minimal values.” (1967, Nietzsche, 463) There are two sides to this problem of technology today. It is easy and comforting to see only one side because then the answer to the problem is simpler. It is easy for youth to see the nihilism of age and to see tightening fists of suffocating suppression around their throats—to experience the feeling that age both insists on actualization and at the same time opposes the actualizing choices of youth. It is easy for age to see the nihilism of youth—complete indefiniteness, no actualities, only possibilities. It is hard to comprehend that both sides are really one and, after that, still harder to understand how the apparent opposition can be transcended. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that one uniting element in both is nihilism with its implicit undergirding presumption, relativism. Perhaps age cannot help but oppose the indefiniteness of youth; perhaps youth cannot help but to rebel against the definiteness of age, yet hostile feelings may be minimized if age ceases to hate the very definiteness it clings to and youth the very indefiniteness it clings to. The possibility of moderation depends on our willingness to revise our approach to life and its meaning. This, in turn, requires a revision in scientific rationalism. Secondly, if hostility cannot be eradicated and youth and age cannot rejoin in love since they cannot replace self-hate with self-love, at least the consequences of the feeling—the disastrous consequences—can be avoided. In other words, even if youth rebels, it will be deterred from annihilating age if it recognizes the valid claims to life of its parentage and ancestry despite their weaknesses by seeing them not only as human but as the precondition of its own arising. Likewise, even if age finds its definiteness threatened, it will not repress and an impose a closed system if it recognizes youth as human and so as spiritually equal. It is unfair that the greater, if not the whole, burden of renewal falls to age rather than youth. This is, of course, contrary to the ideas of the times that hold that the new comes from youth while age is but a cesspool of decayed life. While youth must not seek to destroy age, age must give youth room and a place equal to its own and on youth’s terms, not those of age. Youth seeks to destroy age only because of what age implants in youth; a reversal of this poisonous implantation can come only through the creativity of age. Age must deliberately and fruitfully revise its approach to what is. It is only age that can reverse the relativistic, value-free, nihilistic nature of contemporary life. Renewal comes from age, but youth’s contribution is threefold. Youth offers the inestimable value of irresponsibility; it pressures age to reform; and it proves that age acts not for itself alone but for all together. Values in the Study of Society It seems almost ridiculous today to attack the idea of value-free social science—almost no one believes it possible any more. Even behavioralists appear ready to admit that “to speak of human actions at all, we must describe behavior in moral terms.” (1966, Louch, 234235) Rather than the language of social science being value-free, we find it value-laden. Sometimes the value judgment is disguised by changing a familiar word into one that is less familiar and, apparently, factual. For example, instead of “good” you can say “welfare,” in place of “end” you can say “function,” for “norm” you can say “law.” (1960, Gibson, 66-67) Most striking of all, the whole attempt of social science to reform and change society reflects a prejudicial value judgment in favor of “improvement” and of some particular kind of improvement at that. Social scientists often adopt a pretense similar to their kin in the physical sciences when they suggest that there are basically two kinds of questions, questions of fact and questions of value, and that ethical questions involve a “different activity which neither physical nor social enquiries need enter into.” (1960, Gibson, 59) The very existence of a scientific culture is, however, the assertion of value. We know culture in the United States is science-oriented; its prejudices favor examining the world and it believes and expects that problems should be settled by scientific techniques—few deny that we should find the scientifically best (that is, the “most efficient") solutions to our problems. (1968, Sternberger, 124-125) Just as when it deals with social “power,” reason cannot isolate you from goals and values even though it can develop a social scientific definition of power that is “value-free.” If you try to isolate yourself, you end up making your means (for example, “power,” “efficiency") into goals or arbitrarily asserting them without intending to do so. But the problem as far as the future of social knowledge and human beings are concerned is not the recognition of the inevitability of values. It is rather their nature and origin. We know that all of us, scientists included, have and assert values in all that we do, but the problem of nihilism is its notion of the relativity of those values. Rather than combating relativism in society, social scientists have added to it. They first noted values, recognized the universality of valuation, discovered differences in values from society to society, and decided that values were not human givens but were established through culture or cultivation. The pragmatists and logical positivists apart from those in the social sciences insisted similarly on the arbitrary creation of values by arguing that to “judge value is to engage in instituting or determining value where none is given.” (1931, Dewey, 22-23) They tried to exchange values or norms for “laws.” The standard of evaluation was derived not from life or from us but was arbitrarily established with the establishment of social organization either in the social mechanism itself or in its “rational” deliberations. The social sciences have ultimately denied that value is derived from the spiritual in us and have asserted instead that it is derived from the social. “The moral life is,” on the contrary, “the explanation of the social and not vice versa.” (1960, Berdyaev, 20) On the basis of the assumption that value is established by, and originates in, society, social scientists have at best been able to derive standards either of based on determining whether something produces “more life” or “more goods in life.” They have, however, been unable even to comprehend “life”—to establish any but quantitative evaluations in regards to it. The attitude that values are established rather than discovered and that their basis is either arbitrary or biological has led to the relativism both of using force to maintain a specific set of values and of using force to tear them down. Fortunately, the discovery of the variability of strongly held values can lead to two different conclusions. It can lead to surrender to relativism or to a search for the value behind values. Social scientists, unfortunately, take one direction, accept relativism and reality, and thereby embark on a destiny of passivity and preservationism. Seeing the variability of values and yet driven to seek “universal laws” or security and certainty, social scientists accept the current value system as established—their current set of values or the group’s they live in—and feel justified in defending them to the death since they see no super-ordinate principle to worry about that might rank different values as higher or lower. The opposite path is open, however, the variability of values can teach us the need, first, to surrender or at least examine those values we tend to hold most dear and, second, to develop or change our social values. We may at least, then, be able to gain a few pre-eminently important insights: First, value and valuation do not consist of a code of rules but are the “establishing movement itself” (1962, Levi, 25) that leads to rules. Second, the variability of values from society to society and the obvious manipulation of peoples by appealing to values should lead us along with Nietzsche to take the logical step beyond positivism—values themselves can and should be re-evaluated and in the light not of the abstract but of the concrete. Positivism teaches us that being as such is intelligible; we must learn, to the contrary, that being is a radical mystery (1961, Strauss, 151) because it is grounded in an ultimately unfathomable depths. Renewal The renewed social science must be whole. It must not depend on the arbitrary fragmentation of analysis. It must be synthesis. It must be unafraid to refer questions and issues to concrete experience for validation. It must be unwilling to cut itself off from knowledge as apparently “foreign” as that deriving from the physical sciences. We find, for example, a universality in some principles that transcends the boundary between physical and social science—the law of complexification1 may help us to integrate the two. The one is not to be reduced to the other but the substance of both may be better comprehended by principles transcending them. It may very well be, with respect to some of the statements made here, that the reconciliation between physical science and the humanities can come about only through the intermediary of social studies. But re-integration will not occur if those who pursue social studies ally themselves with one or another side, disparaging their opponent in the controversy with obfuscating, unprovable epithets. The study of society confronts a future of enormously important possibilities. It may end as a technocratic tool in the hands of social manipulators or it may provide the key to a dual reconciliation—the great reconciliation of science and the humanities and the still greater reconciliation of conflict between individuals and nations. The problem rationalism faces is not merely a crisis in theory but a crisis in culture.2 The re-examination of rationalism and the renewal of theory serve not only the aesthetics of mind but the requirements of life. Crises in culture provide impetus for the new theory that gives the crisis meaning. There are some contemporary cultures that rest on the most dangerous precipice of all—the precipice of not knowing. All former philosophies and eras were driven to propose explanation and to claim knowledge and wisdom concerning what is. The historic development of philosophy, certainly from Plato through Hegel and the existentialists, has driven us to see how little we actually know. The whole of science and its philosophical foundations have been built on the principles of use and usefulness; we now reach a situation where usefulness is no longer useful. We have societies where expanding knowledge of “truth”—which was not actually “truth” but usefulness—is not needed; they have all they required from the “world.” It is time to accept a critique of former “knowledge” in order at least to liberate us from the shackles of the concept or the idea as the image of reality. Just as the morality of moral codes is outdated so, too, is the morality of scientific codes. Scientific codes, like moral codes, assume that we can “mentally” know being and define it (or else can ignore the whole question of being or “what is” in favor of the question “what is useful?"): moral codes do this so that the “individual” can better approach the transcendent god and scientific codes so that transcendent goods can better approach us. For exactly the same reason both moralities must be rejected. We can never grasp being purely “mentally,” and if we push ourselves down the long-trodden paths of the mental that are oriented to use, we alienate ourselves through both science and morality. In seeking the “concept” of morality or in searching for the “goods” we can use, we lose ourselves, we destroy ourselves. This analysis that has looked forward to the possibility of integrating knowledge on a higher level that brings together the humanities and physical science has also extensively and at length criticized the scientific aspects of the social studies. This is because these aspects have become dominant in recent years, and the entrenched error is more subtle and, therefore, harder to ferret out. Long-established students of any subject, no matter how “liberal” about other subjects, become intensely protective as far as their own fields of expertise are concerned, so that in spite of the clarity of the need for renewal, current resistance is strong. One question that we must attend to if theory is to respond to the present crisis and that may point the way to reconciliation is that of meaning. Confronting the question of meaning can lead away from the “abstract, partial realities,” and bring us closer to the “world as a whole.” (1960, Berdyaev, 5) The one overwhelming gap in social and physical science, and among ordinary citizens as well, is a lack of meaning, and this lack is exactly why “science” at its apparent pinnacle is faltering in the eyes of humanity. The social sciences, in their attempt to explain, have persistently tended instead “to explain away.” Life is explained away as psychological struggle, as economic strife, as constant conflict for survival, and these explanations have help make life meaningless. No despair is deeper than the despair of meaning. To lose meaning is to lose spirit; to lose spirit is to lose life. Life today has been “shown up” for “what it is” — it is “nothing but.” “Nothing but” has destroyed the meaning that human beings, up to our era, had found; meaning must be rediscovered. It may be true that we seek “pleasure” or that we seek “power,” but, above all, we seek meaning. To use as metaphoric some of the theories presented in recent anthropological treatises,3 we humans emerge from animal or “ape” as a great refusal to die. The process that led pre-human primates to move from the forest to the plains, competing with the “cats” and “dogs” that were better equipped to survive there was based on an unusual refusal of that primate to die. In Freudian terms, it demonstrates repression of the “death wish.” Life seems to have been inordinately attractive to it. The refusal to die may also explain the extreme push in this unique primate to separate itself from the rest of nature—to separate and then re-unify selectively for the sake of avoiding death. We “fell” from the animal state and were driven out of the garden of animality into the dry plains of humanity, to the clarity of second-level or “use-” knowledge so that we took the form of the neurotic animal. All these separations and illusions may have been created for the sake of avoiding death and of achieving life—the life that was re-unification with nature. Now there comes a time when the repression of the death wish and the striving for life bring death not life. At this point, renewal is needed. The deathinstinct may have to be unrepressed at least temporarily and we may have to return to our starting point—some of us will return to the earth, some to the sun, all must return to the spirit. All must return, in other words, to meaning. Social or cultural life may yet learn much from biological life. There “the completion of every existence is a coming back to the beginning, and every departure contains a return.” (1967, Bachofen, 34) We know that the society facing death becomes radical— turns back to its roots—and that this very radicalism contains the promise of rebirth. The rotting, decayed, and desiccated branches need not be pruned; they fall off, and the root gives new life to the tree. Many contemporary societies witness a flowering radicalism that is not, of course, to be identified with revolutionary sentiments exclusively nor is it to be understood in terms of its outward manifestations. Dance, music, concerns with mysticism are all radical. We are returning to those roots that have given our lives meaning after having been exiled too long in the realms that “scientific” analysis has rendered empty and lonely. We are in essence trying to return to the concrete. All societies are rooted in the concrete, and the abstract only grows fungus-like on their branches. The place of the abstract in society and the individual has become too large. Unless the society can return to the concrete, it will wither. Ultimately, with the withering of both, chaos may become permanent. The Dark Age that is beginning to engulf us reminds us that night is born at mid-day; we may yet be able to reply that day is born at mid-night. ENDNOTES Chapter 1 1 This is why dreams are a key to unconsciousness— they connect the organism to the whole of what has happened. 2 Primitive symbols seem to be almost entirely religious in the precise sense of that word. They link us back (re-ligio: “to link back) to the concrete. 3 Aesthetics become possible only after we reach the secondary level. Beauty consists of a reconciliation between second-level divisiveness. Beauty must contain that part of “what is” that the particular level of civilization is concentrating on (for example, “goods” or “abstract ideas") and reveal how that part is at one with the whole. Chapter 2 1 Wittgenstein was subtler than most in revealing the issue. He paraded first the traditional belief that words named “objects” but then turned everything upside down by pointing out that for him the “objects” that words named were “meanings.” Object-meanings are created, not discovered. (Wittgenstein, 1953, 2e). Note: While there is a vast difference between signnames and symbol-names, here I ignore most of the difference. Chapter 3 1 By living at these various levels, of course, we do not necessarily mean working at simple jobs as opposed to complex jobs or living simple country lives as opposed to complex city lives. In addition, there is the problem of unconsciousness of primary self and so little conflict is experienced when role changes occur because subjective self changes in tandem with it. Chapter 5 1 Wittgenstein gives an example: “Consider for example the proceedings that we call ‘games.’ I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? --Don’t say: ‘There must be something in common, or they would not be called “games.”‘ --but look and see whether there is anything common to all—For if you look at them then you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that.” (Wittgenstein, 1953, 31e. Chapter 6 1 The actions of those of simple and isolated cultures confronted with devices from other cultures or the creativity of small children who find fantastic uses for ordinary objects are instructive here. Chapter 7 1 For example, “What we mean by explaining an observed fact is incorporating that fact into a general law.” (Reichenbach, 1954, 6); “An explanation of a phenomenon consists in subsuming it under general empirical laws.” (Hempel, 1942, 45); “A scientific explanation which is complete is one that has assumed the status of a law.” (Di Renzo, 1966, 251). 2 This is not really surprising since “chance” and “cause” depend on each other. Chapter 8 1 It may be that some recent political theorists try to deny ontological status to the nation-state exactly because they are searching only for “rationallyestablished” organizations. 2 Neither the charge of reductionism, nor, therefore, the charge of a contradiction here can be made against Marx himself. Certainly, his philosophical manuscripts make clear that he starts from an assumption of the possibility of transcending both alienating economic systems and history. 3 Eulau suggests that the value of novel behavioral methods lay in techniques and not in the theories entrapping social studies; he seems to indicate a wish for the concrete, but he will never attain it through his idea of empirical research: “But I do not think that, in the long run, the behavioral movement will be judged by these theoretical perishables; it will be judged by its empirical staples.” Eulau, Spring, 1968, 26. Chapter 10 1 Why do dreams tend to vanish as the day wears on? It seems as if the explanation of their instability resides in that consciousness is at the expense of the unconscious--that is, we can be conscious only if we relegate part of ourselves to the realm of unconsciousness. The price of second-level consciousness is unconsciousness. Thus, dreams, which are manifestations of unconsciousness, must dissipate if we are to go about and as we go about our daily lives. Thus also, week-ends, when we may play out our fantasy world, roughly and uncomfortably end in Monday morning blues even though we feel we like our work a lot. Chapter 11 1 A “new” psychological theory came out in the late 1990’s called “power therapy.” It claimed that the key to psychological health was giving the person a feeling of being powerful. (Aleksiuk, 1996) 2 Si la systemization des comportements ne releve plus des coutumes, elle doit reposer sur un autre fondement: ce ne peut etre que sur la connaisance rationelle. En s’immiscant dans les structure du comportement, le pouvoir s’exerce sur la connaisance.” (Dumont, Avril-Aout 1966), 17. 3"If we are to take it as a truth that...everything dies for internal reasons...then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and, looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones.’” (Freud, 1967, 70-71). 4 Children raised without strong authority over them will be less power-striving than those very under control. This is how the 1950’s in the United States were “subverted” in the 1960’s. Neither the necessities of life nor the character of parents had made controlling demands on the young; they, therefore, became little interested in grabbing for power. Yet we must wonder whether social or natural authority over us once we have reached the second level of knowing is not necessary in order for us to discover the contradiction within and whether discovery of the contradiction is not the prerequisite for transcending it. Chapter 12 1"In its own way, matter has obeyed from the beginning that great law of biology...the law of complexification.” (Teilhard de Chardin, 1959, 48. 2"...crisis in culture is the world ground for crisis in theory.” Meadows, 1967, 77-103. 3 See, for example, The Naked Ape, African Genesis, The Territorial Imperative. BIBLIOGRAPHY Aleksiuk, Michael, Power Therapy. Toronto: Hogrefe & Huber Publisher, 1996. Aristotle, Metaphysics. (Richard Hope translation) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960. Bachofen, J. J., Myth, Religion, and Mother Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967. Right. Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man. New York: Harper and Row, 1960. Berger, Peter Construction 1966. and Lockman, Thomas, The Social of Reality. Garden City: Doubleday, Bergson, Henri, Matter and Memory. London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1962. Bigger, Charles P., Participation: A Platonic Inquiry. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968. 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