CHAPTER VIII THE TRAGEDY OF SCIENTIFIC MAN The Tragic Meaning or the Irrationality of Lite RATIONALISjNfljnisunderstands the nature of man, the ^ nature of the world, and the nature of reason itself. It sees the world dominated by reason throughout, an independent and self-sufficient force which cannot fail, sooner or later, to eliminate the still remaining vestiges of unreason. ^ Evil, then, is a mere negative quality, the absence of some-1 thing whose presence would be good. It can be conceived ■ y- [only as lack of reason and is incapable of positive deter-pmination based upon its own intrinsic qualities. This phil-osophical and ethical monism, which is so characteristic of the rationalistic mode of thought, is a deviation from the tradition of Western thought. In this tradition God is challenged by the devil, who is conceived as a permanent and necessary element in the order of the world. The sinfulness of man is likewise conceived, from Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas to Luther, not as an accidental disturbance of the order of the world sure to be overcome by a gradual development toward the good but as an inescapable necessity which gives meaning to the existence of man and which only an act of grace or salvation in another world is able to overcome. Where, as in the Augustinián conception, the state is con- 204 sidered evil and the negation of the good order of things, it is necessarily connected with the ordeT nf the world because it ' participates in the general sinfulness of the world. When the preliberal writers decry the evils of man's earthly existence, they do not think in the first place of the waste of life and effort, of the disproportion between merit and reward, but of man's damnation or of his inherent inability to find peace and happiness in this world. This evil is not unreasonableness in the liberal sense, the mere negation of reason, but symbol and expression of all that, in a positive way, is fateful, sinister, and destructive in human life. In our time Sigmund Freud has rediscovered the autonomy of the dark and evil forces which, as manifestations of the unconscious, determine the fate of man. Freud shows only in the ■ optimism of his purely philosophical writings, founded upon the faith in the ultimate complete triumph of reason over the unconscious, that even he cannot escape entirely the impact of the age. Yet two of his followers, Alfred Adler and Karen Horney, by adapting his psychology to the rationalist standards, illuminate the gap which separates Freud's concept of man from the rationalist philosophy. For both, the darkness of the Freudian unconscious, pregnant with evil, is transformed into a kind of temporary lack of visibility, something purely negative, which will be overcome with relative ease by the standard devices of the age, such as education and individual and social reform. The prerationalist age is aware of the existence of two forces—God and the devil, life and death, light and darkness. good and evil, reason and passion—which struggle for dominance of the world, liiere is no progress toward the good, noticeable from year to'yeaf; but nntWiflefl conflict whjch jees today good, tomorrow evil, prevail, and only at the end 205 of time, immeasurably removed from the here and now nf our earthly life, the ultimate triumph of the forces of good-' ness and light will be assured. """ Out of this everlasting and ever undecided struggle there Í- anses one of the roots of what might be called the rrW ,^c »the awareness of unresolvable discord contradictions and conflict which ar* .nh^t in the nature of thingstnd which human reason is powerless to solve. The Ay ^fife, has completely lost this awareness. Forthis age the problems j^ich confront the human mind.^nTthe. mnthvlc ^.-.i. foturp and destroy human existence, belong oj necessity io one of two categories: those which are already being soWH fejSŽSSLggd those which are going to be solved in a not too djstantjujme. IJns^hilosophy, therefore, is incapable i recognizing the tragicöEcter of human life Th£ *-,,£ /■ character springs from three elemental experience » Man, even rationalist man, meets in his'contemplative experience the unceasing struggle between good and evil reason and passion, life and death, health and sickness, peace" and war-a struggle which so often ends with the victory of •the forces hostile to man. He also meets in his active experience the transformation of his good intentions into evil results often brought about by the very means intended to avert them As A. C. Bradley put it in his Shakespearean Tragedy Everywhere, in this tragic world, man's thought translated into act, is transformed into the opposite of itself' His act, the movement of a few ounces of matter in a moment ot time, becomes a monstrous flood which spreads over a kingdom And whatsoever he dreams nf n^ the nnce^^ struffgW^. 206 tween his understanding, on the one hand, and the riddles of the worlcf and of his existence in this world, on fhf nrtipr— a struggle which offers with each answer new questions, with each victory a new disappointment, and thus seems to lead nowhere. In this labyrinth of unconnected causal connections man discovers many little answers but no answer to the great questions of his life, no meaning, no direction. These three experiences make man aware of his ignorance in the face of the unknown and unknowable and of his impotence in the face of the superior and insuperable; they give him the sensation of the tragic element inherent in human life. This element finds in the tragedy of the Greeks and Shakespeare its foremost artistic expression. Goethe was aware of it when he said to Eckermann: "Man is not born to solve the problems of the world but to search for the starting point of the problem and then to remain within the limits of what he is able to comprehend.....The reason of man and the reason ot the divinity are two very different things." The lack of tragic art in our age is but another manifestation of the rationalist unawareness of the tragic element in life. The same unawareness expresses itself philosophically in the belief m continuous progress and m the trivial optimism for which life dissolves into a series of little hurdles which, one after the other, increasing skill cannot fail to overcome. That frustration, defeat, and ruin might be as intrinsically1 interwoven into the plan of the world as success and progress, rationalist philosophy will not admit, fípnrp.^^gpp^al inability to deal with the problem of death, the most shirking of all failures of human existence. In prerationalist philosophy death fulfils a positive function for human existence. It is the ever present reminder of the vanity of human life, \ -A 207 the ever present threat of punishment and sufferings in another world, and still the ever present expectation of a crowning fulfilment, the hope of reward, and the promise of salvation. Even apart from these religious implications, death can be conceived as the organic limit of human existence, the natural conclusion of a preordained span of life, a warning to the limitless aspirations of man, a tie with those laws of the universe which are beyond man's control. And underneath these interpretative thoughts there is in the minds of believers and unbelievers alike the wonderment at the spectacle of an animal endowed with conscious intelligence coming, as it seems, from nowhere and destined to sink into the night of death as though it had never been. While the believer does not accept this apparent destiny, the unbeliever, unable either to accept it or to have faith in an alternative, keeps wondering. í Rationalist philosophy does not even wonder; for it misses f the significance ot death altogether. It sees in death simply | the negation of life, an accident to be avoided and delayed to I the utmost. It is a disturbance of the rational order of the j* world, different ih magnitude but not in kind trom the ôtEér disturbances with which reason deals with ever increasing success. Hence, death is nothing but a problem to be solved like shipwrecks, unemployment, or cancer; and its significance tor man consists in nothing else. The Illusion of Rationality | The contrast between the actual nature of world and man, on the one hand, and the picture rationalist philosophy draws ofjt, on the other, deals the final blow to the utilitarian manifestation of rationalist ethics and to the rationalist conception of education. Those conceptions are valid only nndpr 208 the assumption that the essence of world and man is rational throughout; for only then is it possible to do away with a normative sphere altogether and to reduce ethics to calculations of utility. It is only under this same assumption that one can hope to solve all the problems or the modern world by a quantitative extension of knowledge through education. If, however, the world is conceived as the scene of a tragic struggle between good and evil, reason and passion, the mere advice to follow the commands of reason will not measure up to the nature of the problems to be solved. Without recognition of these tragic antinomies of human existence, the counsel ot reason becomes the counsel of unreason; the promise of success turns into the certainty of failure; the goodness of the virtuous unmasks itself as the self-righteous egotism of the hypocrite; and prlnratjop js reduced to the "objective" communication of facts, unable to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evi], tr^p and fqlsp On the other hand, the nonutilitarian ethical standards of Western civilization have their roots in the tragic condition of human life. The very existence of a normative sphere, in contradistinction to the sphere of mere facts", is" due to the antinomy between what men are inclined to do under utilitarian considerations and what they feel they ought to do according to the standards of nonutilitarian ethics. In other words, the ethical norms which men feel actually bound to follow conform by no means to the rational calculus of utility but, on the contrary, endeavor to satisfy nonutilitarian aspirations. The Decalogue is a code of ethical norms which cannot be derived from premises of rational utility. The concept of virtue as the sum of human qualities requirecTby ethics bears no semblance to the standard of utilitarian rationality. The modern conception of education and the confidence 209 in its reforming powers stand and fall likewise with the rationalist philosophy of which they are the logical application. This conception of education is bound to fail for the same reasons which are responsible for the failure of the utilitarian conception of ethics, junce according to the rationalist premises the deficiencies of human action stem from lack of knowledge, enlightenment, dissemination of knowledge, education will overcome the "social stupidity" which alone stands in the way of progress and reason. Lack of knowledge is indeed the sole; source of folijrp in all those fields of human action which are "neutral" fromIhe point of view of human interests and emotions, that is to say, in all those fields where there is permanent harmony between reason, on the one hand, and interests and emotions, on the other. This holds true to a high degree for those activities which are of a technical nature or which belong in a general way to the natural sciences. Here is, then, the proper domain of this kind of education. In the social sphere, however^the dissemination of knowledge through education can bring no decisive result since the deficiencies of social action are not due to a lack of knowledge, or at least of that sort of knowledge which modern education is able to provide. On the one hand, man is confronted with the intricacies of social causation; and all the education and information which the social sciences can offer would perhaps enable him to follow up the threads of social causation a little bit here and a little bit there yet would bring him no closer to the solution of the social problem, that is, to unraveling the inextricable maze of intertwining threads in which form society presents itself to the analytical mind. There is rio indication that the trained social scientist as actor on the social scene is more competent than the layman to solve social problems, with the exception 210 of technical problems of limited scope. A knowledge of a aifferent and higher order is needed to solve the problems of the social world. On the other hand, however, past and contemporary history alike offer abundant proof of the irrelevance, for success or failure ot social action, of the kind of knowledge the social sciences offer, birst of all, the practical application of Jhis "Tcnowledgeis dependent upon the irrational conditions of interests and emotions operať"fi "pnn ***** will of man. In other words, man is likely to act according to his interests_and | emotions even though his knowledge of social causation sug-1 gests to him a HitterenLcomse. Thus lawyers and physicians will give competent advice to their clients and will act quite foolishly when the same problem arises in their own persons, in members of their families, or in friends, that is, whenever interests and emotions interfere with rational judgment. "But certainly physicians," says Aristotle, "when they are sick, call in other physicians, and training-masters, when they are in training, other training-masters, as if they could not judge truly about their own case and might be influenced by their feelings." The journalist will be a reliable and penetrating reporter of eventsaňa situations m winch nels not involved through his emotions or interests. Yet when he has to report on labor or monopolies, on France or Russia, he becomes a partisan who sees at best only part of the truth. No technical improvement in news-reporting and no international guaranties of free access to the sources of news everywhere in the world, not even the bestowal of diplomatic status upon foreign correspondents, will alter this elemental subordination of factual knowledge to interests and emotions. The historian and political scientist will give the most brilliant analysis of a 211 i~ «vk l¥lY * ^ * „OJ** *> «^=ÄL-* *~^~ political situation which occurred in distant times or lands, but the records know of few if any historians or political ^ ^scientists who have been at the same time successful statesmen, that is, able to apply professional knowledge successfully to a situation in which their interests or emotions had a stake. fylachiavelli was unsuccessful in pnlifi™. y*f ft wns not knowledge, that is, the education of the political scientist, that failed him. Furthermore, while fundamental social problems are im-" pervious to scientific attack, they seem to yield .to the efforts of ilj-informed men who, while devoid of scientific knowledge, possess insights of a different and higher kind. Lord Rosebery quotes a remark of Walpole to Henry Fox, upon seeing the latter with a book, to the effect that he, Walpole, had so neglected reading all his life that he could not read even a few pages. Justice Holmes, according to one of his biographers, found it "extraordinary that a woman like Mrs. Whitman without study, without work, could arrive at large social conclusions that he himself had found only after years of conscious search!" Lord Bryce and many scholars before and after him had a command of facts on the American scene much superior to what De Tocqueville knew in a factual way about America. But thdatter's Democracy in America turned out to be a greater store of knowledge than Lord Bryce's American Commonwealth and is still today unsurpassed in its understanding of American society; for while De Tocqueville did not have a great deal of knowledge, he possessed in a large measure those higher faculties of the mind in which his more scientific successors were lacking. Aristide Briand was more deficient in factual knowledge than most of his contemporaries on the international scene, but he was more successful in politics than most of them. 212 ~Js~J> -t-/tfiv. co-A, |x*^4UO t** ^r*^ /yrAi~tj Education in our time has givea man a store of factual / knowledge in the social Self vastly superior to what he has ./ ever known before. Yet man's faculties in the realm of action ^ have not increased correspondingly. It can even be maintained that the reliance upon tactual knowledge, far from improving the quality of social action, has actually contributed to the decadence of the art of politics. Of this decadence we are the witnesses and victims; for the liberal belief in the essentially rational nature of social action and the reforming powers of education has obscured the true character of social action and the function education is able to fulfil for it. Had the influence of interests and emotions upon social action been recognized, it.would have been easy to foresee, as Jacob Burckhardt, William Graham Sumner, \#fredo Pareto, and Thorstein Veblen actually did foresee, ftat oyr agp vm ^oc-tined to experience a decisive change in the proportional part which reason, on the one hand, and interests and emotions, on the other, have in determining social action. It would also have been easy to foresee that this change would put reason at a considerable disadvantage and thus completely shatter the rationalist assumptions of liberal political philosophy. The revival of religious"wars in the form of warfare between political ideologies, with the concomitant torture, punishment, and extermination of the dissenters, illuminates the degree to which that change has taken place in our time. As Sumner put it almost forty years ago: "The amount of superstition is not much changed, bnt ft nnw aH-grhps to politics, not to religion." Of tfys decadence of the political art, the reliance npnn | factual knowledge is the cause as well as the result. The mis-1I \ \ 7K taken belief, rooted in the philosophy of rationalism^ that j V political problems are scientific problems for whichthe one \ 213 correct solution must be found through the investigation of relevant facts is reflected in the political practice of the age. The rare successes of this political practice have no connection with its fact-finding endeavors, while its frequent failures grow out ot the misunderstanding of the nature of political action, of which the scientific collection of facts is the outward manifestation. As it orten happens when a mistaken course of action results not from the error of individuals or from the ignorance or misinterpretation of certain facts but from a basic and firmly held philosophic conviction, political failures have only tended to deepen the influence of scientist philosophy upon political practice. Forgetful of the inherent uncertainty of social action and searching in its social endeavors for a security of which even the natural sciences know nothing, modern man has taken refuge in a bastion of facts; for, after all, "facts do not lie," and they, at least, aje "reaL" Wilson, bewildered by the power politics of the Versailles Peace Conference and incapable of meeting the political problems of the peace with political means, cried out for a settlement on the basis of the facts. The federal government, unable to reconcile its laisser faire philosophy with the exi-gencies of modern labor conflicts, compiles statistics and appoints fact-finding boards to collect more statistics. As if in facts there were enshrined a secret power of wisdom and of pacification which needs only to be discerned in ordeiLto solve the conflicts of the social world. Actually, the resort to facts is here not so much a source of hew knowledge as a device for concealing ignorance. With the knowledge' of many irrelevant facts, scientific man tries to banish the fear rising from the urgency of unsolved problems and from the 214 ignorance of that knowledge which counts in the social world. , ^The new realists are undismayed by the wreckage surmising them.lfthey have taileoTirivisTecauseuieqflan- j* titvOTfacts available to them was not enough. The_answer to minimize the psychological causes ot social conrlict, such as insecurity, fear, and aggressiveness; and, finajly. a moral climate which allows man to expect at least an approximation to justice here and now and thus offers a substitute for strife as a means to achieve justice. —' 217 To bring these three factors to bear on a specific social problem is the task of reason in the social world. This task is infinitely more complicated and its fulfilment is infinitely more uncertain and precarious than the mode of thought prevailing in our civilization is willing to admit. For while the philosophy of rationalism is founded upon a one^dimen-sional conception of the social world—reason, goodness, and right vs. ignorance, evil, and wrong, with the former necessarily winning out—the primordial social fact is conflict, actual or potential, with reason and ignoranceT good and evilr right and wrong blended on both sides and with the outcorpé hanging in the balance. The eventual victory of the better j cause is not due to an innate tendency of human nature which needs only to be reminded of its existence in order to ŕpike itself prevail, j^or does it depend upon the amount of Knowledge imparted through education. It is rather the ré* Suit of a struggle between moral and social forces which loperate both within and between the members of socje As Goethe's wisdom put it: "While trying to improve evi. in men and circumstances which cannot be improved, one loses time and makes things worse; instead, one ought to accept the evils, as it were, as raw materials and then seek to counterbalance them." ' ■ Within man those moral forces will win out which carry with them the stronger expectation of justice, of happiness, of sanctions, and of rewards. The victory of conflicting moral aspirations is determined by the relative strength of these factors. The same holds true for social action. The social world in motion presents an intricate pattern of pressures and counterpressures, composed of the elements of power, balance, and ethics. There is stalemate, victory, and defeat, but rarely, and then only within the span of centuries, is 218 , t cut solution which decides a contest definitively 'g^^^p'roblem once and for all. Defeat aJ4 V^pry rA^S^SÍ^^r:---, j.r-i.___:-z 4.líTw0 n( ™r1r>rv ffi^T^viking, defeat čaSviĎg the hope, of victory üig^rgfaWdefeat: fora slight change in the rela- 'K^^^hjiopposing forces mav reverse the positions, S^4-rrr^W^s precarious because of the ever changing oiliirn nľ Hlwor, ľ----------------------- ^ttérnóf^ejocialjabnc. «^ ^•f^npe^itiTsocial problems thus understood, it isnot ,-r^X^l Vnowledg'e,lhe general deductions, and the "cor- ;ffi■ «nliilionsi of the "social engineer" that are called for. /y^lnal knowledge may beuseful as an instrument of ideol- f r7fmŕó5gFwhich antagonistic social pressures justify them-, ldfcer5ěfořě"the scientific spirit of the age, demonstrating / ťhpir superiority before and after the decision. Such is indeedj IthTmämpôIitical function of statistics and of the scientific! /memorandum. For the action and the decision of the conflict ' itšěífTthis function is largely irrelevant. It precedes and succeeds action and decision in point of time; it adorns, conceals, or elaborates it, as the case may be; but it is not the stuff of which action and decision are made. The idea of "social engineering." bv oversimplifying and distorting the relation between reason and the social world, holds out a hope for a solution of social problems which is bound to be disappointed over and over again. By encouraging faulty social action or, what is more frequent and also worse, the easy optimism of inaction or of perfunctory action in the face of overwhelming social problems, this idea is ret^jng rather than advancing man's mastery over the social world. The Statesman vs. the Engineer To be successful and truly "rational" in social action, knowledge of a different order is needed. This is not the 219 -* knowledge of single tangible facts but of the eternal laws by which man moves in the social world. There "are, aside' from the laws of mathematics, no other eternal laws besides' . these. The Aristotelian truth that man is a political animall V ~^T is true forever; the truths of the natural sciences are true only until other truths have supplanted them. The key to those laws of man is not in the facts from whose uniformity the sciences derive their laws. It is in the insight and the wisdom by which more-than-scientific man elevates his experiences into the universal laws of human nature. It is he who, by doing so, establishes himself as the representative of true' reason, while nothing-but-scientific man appears as the true dogmatist who universalizes cognitive principles of limited validity and applies them to realms not accessible to them.. It is also the former who proves himself to be the true realist; I for it is he who dnes jnstire tn the true nature nf things. He is embodied not in the scientist who derives conclu-sions from postulated or empirical premises and who in the social world has either nothing but facts or nothing but theories but in* the statesman who recognizes in the contingencies of the social world the concretizations of eternal laws. "A^tatesman," sagely remarks Edmund Burke in his "Speech on the Petition of the Unitarians," ".djfj^ggfroma professor in an university; the latter has only the general view of society: the former, the statesman, has a number of circum-y Jr stances to combine with those general ideas, and to take into his consideration. Circumstances are infinite, are infinitely combined; are variable and transient; he who does not take them into consideration is not erroneous, but stark mad,—dat operám ut cum ratione insaniar,—he is metaphysically mad. A statesman, never losing sight of principles, is to be guided 220 bv circumstances: .and, judging contrary to the exigencies of ^moment he may ruin his country forever." •~Ä^ťhe scientist creates a new natureout of his knowledge nf TKeforces of nature, so the statesman creates a new society ^TnTmTknowledge ot the nature of man. The insight and tEěwisdom of the statesman gauge accurately the distribution and relative strength of opposing forces and anticipate, however tentatively, the emerging pattern of new constellations. The statesman has no assurance of success in the ím-mediate*task" and not even the expectation ot solving the long-range problem. Look at Alexander, at Caesar and Brutus, at Washington and Lincoln, at Napoleon, Lenin, and Hitler. No formula will give the statesman certainty^no_caP| culation eliminate the risk, no accumulation of facts open the( future. While his mindfyearns for the apparent certainty off science, his actual condition is more ««n to ft« ffamhleťs) than to the scientist's. 'YnJ-his unsolvable con*™«* between what he needs and wants and what he is able to obtain, the statesman is indeed the prototype ot social man himself; for what the statesman experiences on Eis exalted plane is the common lot ofjdl mankind. Suspended between his spiritual destiny which he cannot'Tulfil and his animal nature in which he cannot remain, he is forever condemned to experience the contrast betweěňlhTlongings of his mind and his actual condition as bis personal, eminently human tragedy. TnjjjWn* wavs all agesT^™™ to escape recognition nf Tí^S. An age, in particular, whose powers and vistas Í^Tí^ľ^nltipliedby science is liable to forget for a moment this perennial hümänjragedy andto exalt in the engineer a new man who_se"p^wp™ fiH"al his aspirations and who masters human destiny as he masters a machine. Yet it 221 can do so only for a moment, and this moment has passed. The pleasant interlude of the Victorian age has come to. an end. Fate, by giving man the experience of his powers through reason, has not for long withheld from him the experience of his limitations.. The old hybris has reappeared in the new yest-ments of a sdenKfip age and has bppn broken, as it has been ever since Icarus tried to reach the sun, by the very instruments which it had forged for the exaltation of man beyond the limits of his nature. Reappeared, toof has the old despair which, with fierce and feeble passion, hunts for security where there is none: accepts nothing but reason or rejects reason altogether; and, distrustful of the higher f acuities, of the human mind, either sacrifices the fulness of man's human lieritage on the altar of science or else laments with Herodotus: "Of all the sorrows that afflict mankind, the bitterest is 'this, that one should have consciousness of much, but control over nothing." And, finally, there reappears the aňsteia of man, his heroic struggle to be and to be more than he is and to know that he is and can be more than he is. Pitting his reason against the secrets of the universe and recoiling from the darkness of his own soul, he triumphantly detects the limits of nature and faces, hapless, the social forces which his own limitless desires have created. A giant Prometheus among the forces of the universe, he is but a straw on the waves of that ocean which is the social world. In his struggle with nature, he is like a god. In his struggle with his fellow-men, he is more powerful than a beast but not so wise; for he has exchanged the wisdom of nature for a science which, in the social world, sees but does not comprehend, touches but does not feel, measures but does not judge. Having lost the blind security of the wisdom ot nature, he has yet to gain the. 222 1:n2»m^jnSecuritv of the wisdom of man T£eex£ejiejice V^ľtg^jTj; is the premise of aluTwluch exhausts the ^iblhlieroThumanjxistence. The achievement of the fedoln by whlčlTinlecurity is understood and sometimes T^w^lTtT^lnlment of human possibilities. -ÄHhTčÔňditions of insecurity are manifdda_so_are_the waľs of wisdom. Wh"ere the insecurity ot human existence clSI^pTthTwisdom of man, tWis the meerinr-ppint .of fate andjregdorn^QJjiexfSSityandctoiirf fífľfí, to, is the i ^n^-T^flgfiěidw^ man takes up the challenge and joins battle <~*~* ^-^p-p^c^not^rP htTfcTlnw-men's Inst fpr power, a~r7ärthé""corruption of hismyn soul. IHs.becanse of his free-ď^^^iňiike^oAQJLĚŘ^hP is liable to err in the choice of his weapons. Thus, scientific man errs when he meets the challenge of power politics with the y^apnn nf science, and the freedom of man is challenged to renew the fight with othermeans. Without assurance of victory and with the odďTôgáimt him, man persists in the struggle, a hero rather than a searcher for scientific truth. Above this struggle, never ended and never decided in the perpetual change of victory and defeat, of life and death, a flame burns and a light shines,^ flickering in the vast expanses of human freedom but never \ extinguished: the reason of man, creating and through this \ creation illuming in the triumph and the failure oFsaenfafic A r^n" thesvmbol oflnln himself, of what he is and of what he «-wants to be. of his weakness and of his strength, of his free-\ dom and of his subjgtion^ofjisiniser^d of his grandeur. \ 223