Pragmatically, the Cartesian vision provided a powerful support for a burgeoning science. Francis Bacon had already indicated the animating motive and the effective reinforcements for the scientific enterprise when he disposed of the idea of knowledge for its own sake as synonymous with using "as a mistress for pleasure what ought to be a spouse for fruit." The ultimate aim of science, no matter how many its wanderings may be, is technological: The reason for plundering nature's secrets and for solving the riddle of the great machine- for even conceiving it as a riddle to be solved-lies in the promise of increased human comfort and authority. The famous chicken, refrigerated in the snow, held out the hope of fresh meat more widely available to a larger number of dining tables; and refinements in gunpowder, gains in military might. And the discovery and clarification of the laws of both refrigeration and explosives exalted man's place in nature, according him the role of the machine's governor, giving him the status of the regulatory device holding dominion over the rest of the mechanism.
It was (and is) a conception as high in attractiveness as in potency, and we need pause only briefly to make two points to illumine its darker corners. First, as Ashley Thorndike has pointed out, science and its machine-model of the universe developed in the West contemporaneously with magic. Both were phenomena primarily of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; both were devoted to bending the contours of the world to the yearnings of men, and both put a major premium on technique. Both, in other words, had their origins in longings for dominance and ease; and if science survived and flourished while magic became an anachronism and a curiosity, it was probably largely because science better served those motives. Second, the notion of nature as a machine, the workings of which are potentially fully comprehensible to human minds, whatever its very real advantages, is first of all a conception and not a fact; also, it is only one of the conceptions men have evolved from their experience of the world. The Taoist idea of the Orient, for example, paints nature not at all as a mechanical contrivance to be mastered, but as an endlessly diverting series of events to be appreciated. One is grateful to tall mountains for the panoramas they permit and to rivers for their cool waters that sparkle in the sunlight. While questions of building roads or operating water-driven mills certainly arise, they are considered within the context of this very different view of nature, not as issues arising inherently from the Baconian or Cartesian propositions that have now become the familiar assumptions of Westerners.
The purpose of drawing this contrast is obviously not to force a gratuitous choice between conceptions, but simply to underscore the fact that "nature" is a man-made concept. In its history and its various cultural settings, it reflects wide-ranging and significant differences in its character, and it is intimately interwoven in the fabric of the particular culture of which it is a part. When we deal with a concept of nature, then, we deal less with an immutable truth than with a culturally embedded hypothesis, the working validity of which must be judged at least partly in terms of its context as well as in the light of perhaps more culturally transcendent considerations.
What has been said so far is prologue, a setting of the stage for an examination of science, conceived as it has been in the West as a technique for the ransacking of nature, as applied to man. The motive for this application has been consistent with the original Baconian one- a need, as our sway over the external world has been marvelously extended, to gain a greater degree of control over ourselves. This need has been intensified by two major factors. One is a pattern of social developments-urbanization, population growth, the emergence of economies that are highly dependent for their maintenance on generated human wants, etc.- all of which demands an increasing degree of regulation to preserve a decent order in human affairs. The second is a function of the anxiety provoked by our enlarged powers over nature. Nuclear weaponry is only the most dramatic illustration of the way in which our progress in understanding the world- machine has exposed us to mortal dangers. Surcease from such threats lies, it is said, only through a comparable progress in understanding ourselves, thus enabling us to control those impulses in us which could be our wholesale undoing.
Thus motivated, it is not hard to understand our readiness, given our seventeenth-century conceptual heritage and our awesome triumphs in all types of engineering and medicine, to apply the methods of science to human nature as well as to the external world. That readiness, moreover, has been conformed by the very real achievements of psychology and the other behavioral sciences, which have been by no means unproductive of solid knowledge about social structures, communication processes, the nature of human abilities, the conditions affecting learning and perception, and a host of other topics. There remain, however, problems of sweeping scope and significance.
One of these problems has to do with the relationship between the investigator and the investigated in the human as opposed to the natural sciences. In physics, chemistry, biology, and even in engineering and medicine, the research worker and practitioner stand outside the field of their inquiry, regarding something conceived as different from themselves. This distance lends both perspective and leverage to their enterprise, and it implies that the thing or process studied is unchanged by the results obtained. Presumably, E equaled mc2 long before Einstein wrote his famous equation or the first atomic pile was built under the bleachers at Stagg Field in Chicago. The laws of internal combustion engines were as valid before the extraction of gasoline as a fuel from oil permitted us to discover them as they are now. Further, the process of discovery does not change the laws or their working; it merely allows us to progress to other discoveries of how the world-machine functions in its grand regularity. We do not alter the behavior of sound waves or gravitational fields or neutrons; we simply harness their activity to our own purposes. Our ability to do so is a consequence of the systematic fit between the verification operations of science and what we have here called the Cartesian conception of nature: What is "natural" is completely lawful, i.e., determined by the character of the mechanism; the verification procedures are merely the rules of observation and inference by which the postulated regularities may be noticed and stated in generalized terms.
Our question is one of whether this highly effective system retains its power when extended to human beings; the response is one of massive doubt. whereas a highly accurate proposition about the physical universe has no effect on the thing described, propositions about the social world are likely to function as what Merton has designated as self-fulfilling prophecies. As the trends in the popular literature on child care suggest, the sheer assertion, backed with the authority of science, that frustration evokes aggression has an effect on the frequency and intensity with which parents frustrate children-at least within those categories of action that define frustration as it is presently understood. The famous Footnote 11 in the Brown decision of the Supreme Court represents the way in which even poor social science becomes both a determinant and an instrument of social policy; and if the first two Kinsey reports were, as is possible, more expressions of the sexual Zeitgeist than shapers of it, it is also highly probably that they were taken by many as a license to behave in a manner that had been relatively inhibited prior to their publication. Whatever errors Kinsey's volumes may have contained, it is likely that they were smaller after they became public property than they were before.
There is still another way in which behavioral science has the properties of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Every psychological theory contains within it an implicit image of man, a conception- more or less Cartesian in its quality- of what the human species is. In the case of psychoanalysis, the model of man is that of a kind of hydraulic system in which psychic fluids under pressure must be kept in equilibrium through the opening and closing of various psychic valves. while it is important not to overstress the point, it can be cogently argued, as LaPiere has tried to do, that the widespread diffusion through society of this image of the human beings has done much to break down older notions of personal accountability and to promote a freer expression of aggressive and erotic impulses. In most forms of stimulus-response psychology, like that of B.F. Skinner, the vision of man is that of a highly complex slot-machine: Program the person through controlling his reinforcement history; drop in a stimulus, and out comes a predetermined response. In computer-based information theories, on the other hand, men are perceived as somewhat inferior electronic devices. In so far as the mechanical and electronic models are persuasive- and they are likely to be persuasive to the extent that they pragmatically accomplish some designated task- one may at least hypothesize that they facilitate a strangely utilitarian set of attitudes among people. Individuals, being machines, are to be evaluated as machines. They are to be used, repaired, reused, and discarded, depending on their efficiency. The criterion of efficiency, however, draws its authority in this context not from science but from ethics, and we are suddenly confronted with a moral dimension of science that never appears in physics. The so-called "sin of the physicists," charged against the inventors of the atomic bomb, has to do with the social use made of a product of science, not with the exercise of a self-fulfilling prophecy through the promulgation of an implicit model of man. It seems reasonably clear that the fit of verification operations to the conception of the domain to be studied is far less tight in psychology and sociology than it is in biology and chemistry. The investigation of men, since it is carried out by men, has a significant probability of changing the object of inquiry, and the changes are subject to moral evaluation. Something quite different from the discovery of the laws of the timeless world-machine is at work here, and it challenges the fundamental idea that the methods of "natural" science can be imported wholesale to extend our knowledge of ourselves, particularly of ourselves as judging, evaluating beings.
This consideration brings us to a second major problem. In a world in which the tension between democracy and totalitarianism has a grim and commanding reality for most of us, Professor Skinner has pursued far more bravely and candidly than most the implications of the view of "natural" science for our social life. Briefly, he bluntly concludes that it is increasingly "at odds with the traditional democratic conception of man" and that as deterministic explanations
. . .become more and more comprehensive, the contribution which may be claimed by the individual himself appears to approach zero. Man's vaunted creative powers, his original accomplishments in art, science, and morals, his capacity to choose and our right to hold him responsible for the consequences of his choice- none of these is conspicuous in this new self-portrait.
Or, as Skinner has put it on another occasion, "Men may be free to do as they please, but they are not free to please."
Such may well be the case, but the thing to note is that Dr. Skinner's statement is a proclamation of faith, not a demonstration of truth. As a proclamation of faith, it is entirely legitimate, but it leaves ample room for other faiths like that of democracy, which assumes a measure, however restricted it may be, of free choice and individual responsibility in the conduct of human affairs. Meanwhile, the competition between behavioral science, conceived in Skinner's terms, and democracy merits closer examination.
Technologized, behavioral science- fulfilling the usual scientific objectives of description, prediction, and control-leads to cultural engineering. Through operant conditioning and psychopharmacology, through advertising-cum-propaganda and carefully controlled forms of child rearing, and through subliminal suggestion and hypnopedia, the conduct of men is to be shaped into forms congruent with the demands of some fair new world. Furthermore, they are to want the benefits of such manipulation; through the management of their motives, they will feel no pain, only joy in being dwellers in utopia.
But who are to be the cultural engineers, and according to what principles are they to decide the human moulds into which the rest of us are to be poured? Whoever they are, how are the motivators to be themselves motivated? These questions are not merely factitious, and they point again to the serious discontinuity between science as applied to the nonpersonal world and science as applied to persons. When man is both the object of science and the class to which the scientist belongs, then whatever power may be generated is not the property of man but of particular men in relation to other particular men. It becomes an instrument of control in the hands of the few.
How is this instrument of control to be wisely exercised? In one conception, the trick would lie in analyzing the specific behaviors that define a democratic repertoire and then, by managing the nature and contingencies of reinforcement, systematically shaping a population of "democratic personalities." Leaving aside for the moment the question of why the conditioners would bother with such an exercise, one is entitled to doubt that the specific operants appropriate to a democratic way of life are knowable. Given a social frame of reference like that of democracy, it can be argued that specificity in the behavioral repertoire is precisely what is not a central desideratum. Rather, the aims of teaching and learning in this context must be phrased in some kind of vague but hardly meaningless language like the application of critical intelligence to interpersonal and societal affairs. Instead of specific responses, this kind of objective puts a premium on a highly general behavioral flexibility, controlled by a process called reflective thought, informed by the imagination of possibilities as yet unrealized, and subjected to relatively articulate criteria of value. For the moment at least, the hypothesis is tenable that such a goal is not only difficult to achieve through cultural engineering; it is essentially incompatible with such a method.
If, for example, we examine the element of value in our tripartite formulation, we may ask if the conditioners are to construct a society in which a strong sense of, say, honor is to mediate the relationships among men. The idea of honor, however, is derivable from neither the Cartesian world-view nor the verification procedures of science. If it has meaning, it comes from a scanning of human experience and an act of judgment by a person using the imperfect but distinctive instrument of his species- his critical imagination and intelligence. Like George Eliot's conception of justice, honor is not "without us as a fact, but within us as a great yearning," and, acting upon that yearning, each of us in his quest for honor may find and consider many objects. In the course of our seeking, we progressively clarify our functioning notions of honor (or justice, or integrity, or any of the great moral ideals that are unique to men); and regardless of the consensus we achieve among us, our normative conceptions are still very much our own by virtue of our special experience in the search for the conduct and the style of life that best satisfy the yearning within our individual breasts. A strong and operating sense of honor (or justice) is almost certainly learned; but there is space to doubt that it can be directly taught, and one again suspects that its conditioning or engineering is quite unlikely.
But if one argues that traditional values, frankly muzzy as they are, provide a poor base for deciding the contours of the good society, then we can quite properly shift our ground. If we assume, a little dubiously, that all men fundamentally want and prize the same things, we can draw up a list of central human desires: food, drink, amusement, sexual gratification, aesthetic experience, opportunities to acquire knowledge, health and longevity, etc. When the list is settled upon, then the problem becomes the sheerly technical one of how to condition men in the behaviors that most probably assure the attainment of these objectives. Ignoring the singular lack of success so far in the history of psychology in formulating lists of basic wants, we can still worry. If these motives are indeed the fundamental ones, on which ones are the cultural engineers acting in turning the rest of us into more effective pursuers of what we like? Or to the extent that their task imposes a restriction on the degree to which they enjoy these basic gratifications, what reinforcement supports their altruism? It cannot be because of obligation or responsibility; like honor, these terms refer to values and lie outside the strict scientist's lexicon. Neither can it be because of an affectionate concern or humanity, for humanity is what they are trying to shape, not a tradition to which they hold themselves subject. Could it be for the straightforward delight of wielding power? Quite possibly. But if so, then man has certainly not "won dominion over himself"- that catchphrase which confers public popularity on the behavioral sciences in this tense age. Rather, a few men, possessed of the potent means, have won dominion over other men, and the triumph of social science becomes the groundwork for oligarchy.
It is possible, of course, that the oligarchs may be benevolent, although "benevolence" is once again one of those terms of value that seem so hard to avoid despite the positivistic interdict against them. The probably benevolence of the cultural engineers is suspect, however, on two counts. First, there is the evidence of history, which turns up few if any instances of men who, having placed themselves outside the reach of their fellows' law and above the shared traditions of civility, have used large powers benignly. It is hardly an accident that the words dictator and despot connote precisely the exercise of force and control beyond the limits set by conventional concepts of humaneness, wrung a little vaguely but with many tears and much thought from the racial experience. Second, for those who, like the cultural engineers, are liberated from the illusions of value and the myths of moral tradition, there is little basis left for preferring one of their impulses to another except the relative strength of the impulses themselves. Freed of personal conscience and social loyalty, decisions with respect to the goals of conditioning become whimsically subject to whatever yen is uppermost at the time in the Triebe of the conditioners- things of the very chance that it is the business of science to minimize if not eliminate. The newly found control of man as a part of nature, then, turns out to be the control of many men by a few men, and those few men turn out, in turn, to be remarkably "natural"- that is, essentially subject to their own rawest impulses. Where is the analogue to unlocking the mysteries of the world- machine for the sake of greater human ease and extended human dominion?
This analysis is reminiscent, of course, of Emerson's
two laws discrete,
Not reconciled,-
Law for man, and law for thing;
The last build town and fleet,
But it runs wild,
And doth the man unking.
The implied objection cuts deeper, however, than the humanistic caveat against the anti- democratic character of a completely deterministic science applied to human affairs. Such a science is likely to be a defective one; for while it is certainly true that man is a part of nature and therefore obedient to the "law for thing" that runs the great machine, it is simply inaccurate to say that he is nothing but a part of nature in this Cartesian sense. We have already reminded ourselves that nature is a notion of man's own making. We can now extend this observation by contending that the concept of nature is in fundamental ways a product of man's experience of what is different from himself.
Out of this experience of difference comes the condition which, in Norbert Wiener's view, makes possible the surest and most spectacular successes in natural science- the high degree of isolation of observed phenomena from the observer that obtains, for instance, in astronomy on particle physics. In the social disciplines, on the contrary, observers are inevitably and inextricably bound up with their observations. Consequently, says Wiener,
Whether our investigations in the social sciences be statistical or dynamic. . .they can never. . .furnish us with a quantity of verifiable, significant information which begins to compare with that which we have learned to expect in the natural sciences. . .There is much which we must leave, whether we like it or not, to the "unscientific," narrative method of the professional historian.
If we take "professional historian" here as an omnibus category that also includes poets and philosophers, artists and theologians, literary critics and students of politics, then we may understand Wiener as saying that science has no monopoly on the angles of regard from which it is fruitful to examine the human condition, i.e., the condition of the only inhabitant of the globe who is inveterately given to self-scrutiny and self-evaluation. Any attempt by men to study themselves that does not attend fully to these tendencies toward self-scrutiny and self-evaluation is at once a contradiction in terms of a denial of the basic experience of difference on which the scientific world-view is founded. When man treats himself as he treats heat, light, and electricity, he denudes himself of the very traits that make him distinctive in the universe, and his efforts at understanding are therefore sharply curtailed. If he loses his identity as a member of the old, proud pageant of human history, he also loses the sources of provocative insights about himself.
In many ways, the difficulty here seems chargeable to the peculiar susceptibility among the behavioral sciences, especially in psychology, to logical positivism. Established as an essentially descriptive portrayal of the logic of natural scientists, psychologists, eager for full membership in Solomon's House, have taken this philosophical position as a prescriptive set of procedural rules. Whatever the advantages of this act, one outcome has been the strengthening of a kind of mystique of empirical research. According to this positivistic myth, the only problems and materials which are defined as significant are those which the current canons of investigative method and the current canons of investigative method and the current quantitative techniques can handle. Conversely, any question which cannot be dealt with in positivistic terms is put aside as technical "nonsense." The result has been a trivial but long-standing flirtation with reductionism and a voluntary wearing of intellectual blinders. If we know something about anxiety, we know next to nothing about joy, zest, or love. Our attack on the riddle of the schizophrenias, a poignant set of puzzles defined by social evaluations not unmarked by heartbreak, still proceeds through anagram-solutions and differential reaction times. The urgent problem of population control is as yet untouched by a psychologist, and what passes for the psychology of art ordinarily is offensive to artists. While we have spilled ink by the hogshead in reporting studies of learning, we are only now coming to grips with the processes by which children acquire skill in language or an interest in biology, and the formal contribution of psychology to the improvement of race relations is small and far more dependent on the liberal spirit of psychologists than on the solidity of the knowledge produced by their science. Personal responsibility is inadmissible as a trait concept, and there have been few investigations of character, despite Peck and Havighurst, since the Hartshorne and May studies of more than thirty years ago. And if we have some glimmerings of usable insight about our behavior, we are still very much in the dark about the qualities of our experience and the way it interacts with our overt conduct.
But to recite this only illustrative catalogue of shortcomings for which a too ready acceptance of positivism may be responsible is in no way to impugn quantitative methods or empirical approaches to the human scene. As an aid to our understanding of ourselves, they are indispensable, and as a means of explaining the actions of men, they are powerful if strikingly limited. Psychology's great opportunity lies not in discarding its sturdily expanding methodological apparatus, but in informing it with the humanistic vision, the quest for an even fuller statement of the "law for man" as against the "law for thing." What this transformation most profoundly demands is a revised focus on the source of problems. Rather than coming from the structure of a science modeled on physics, problems could more fruitfully be derived from direct experience- of self, of interpersonal relations, of society, of education and art, of science and religion, etc. If this is the stuff which poems are made on, it is also the basis of humane scholarship defined as the critical examination of human experience and behavior in the light of history and in a context of explicit values. It is quite conceivable that psychology, concerned more with humane scholarship than with the status of a formal science, could become the first of the humanistic disciplines to apply systematic empirical observation to the comprehension of the human condition.
(This paper has been presented as it appeared in The Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Vol. V, No. 2, Fall 1965, pp. 210 - 218.)