Texts:1977 Man and Judgment--A Prospectus: Difference between revisions

<p>Persons find themselves in a world: to live they must act, and they must act as best they can according to their judgment, be it sound or sour. To act, for better or for worse, according to ones judgment is the human condition. Hence educational policy at root pertains to forming man's powers of judgment.**</p>

<p>Nothing with respect to judgment is given, except its necessity. Where there is life there is judgment, discrimination, decision that culminates in action. But judgment does not stop at the border where action begins; judgment pervades action, all living, vital action in which there is an element of responsive control, a perception of the unfolding situation within and without as the act progresses. This perception of the situation, this effort at control, is also judgment, a most crucial form of judgment. Within us, each cell has a certain awareness, a purposeful homeostasis with its environment and certain capacities to make use of resources surrounding it to maintain itself, to perform its appointed functions. If, for some reason, the cell errs in its judgments, or if the environment and situation in which it finds itself are so extreme that they overwhelm its capacities for discrimination and control, the cell will die or atrophy—its life will end.*

<p>* Citations and annotations will be found at the end of the text, identified by page and the appropriate marking, i.e. Page 1(*). The annotations are meant primarily to amplify the text, and like their location, should be read at the end.</p>

<p>So too with the larger organism. It too must live continuously by making judgments, judgments about its capacities and purposes, about its environment and situation. Cellular judgment is largely pre-programmed; its discriminations are built into the cell through genes which produce a definite physico-chemical structure for the cell. This process of genetic structuring should be understood, not as determining, but as limiting. The physico-chemical structure puts limits on the capacities of the cell for action, limits on the environments the cell can tolerate, limits on the situations to which it can respond, limits on the purposes it can entertain. But these limits do not themselves dictate a determinate life. They are real limits, but within the limits the determinate life unfolds as the cell, so long as it can, brings the capacities, environments, situations, and purposes into mesh, a mesh that permits its maintenance and reproduction. Through its life, the cell imbues matter with judgment; it makes decisions, however pre-programmed, and lives or dies accordingly. The limits are merely limits, and within those, the drama of the life unfolds.**</p>

<p>In the cell, the limits and the repertory of possible responses are genetically programmed. Variations do occur, which are usually dysfunctional, although sometimes fortuitously constructive, allowing a more discriminating, flexible response, which, if the conditions are right, will be passed on as part of the genetic inheritance of a new species, one that moves the limits binding its potentiality for judgment. With human beings the limits become wondrously flexible, for men are beings that create culture. By creating and transmitting culture, man becomes the Lamarckian species, the one capable of inheriting acquired characteristics.*** This capacity for culture greatly enriches and complicates man’s problem of judgment. But even with culture, limits remain; the imperative of judgment still reigns supreme. As the genetic inheritance establishes limits, but is not determinate, so too does the cultural inheritance, yet the limits are far less precise. This capacity for culture is the defining characteristic of man; it means that man is at bottom <i>homo educandus</i>, better, <i>homo studiosus</i>, for culture is significant as culture only insofar as it passes from one person to another as a uniquely Lamarckian inheritance. Yet in this great transformation of life, the basic, vital problem, judgment, remains an ineluctable measure.*</p>

<p>Life is sovereign: its imperatives pervade everything, including culture. Some of the limits for <i>homo educandus </i>are programmed genetically into the being; thus the powers mature according to a general pattern. But like all limits, these are merely limits; they are not determinate, and they carry with them no sure pedagogical prescription. Culture and education not only extend judgment; they equally require judgment. Man, as the creator and transmitter of culture, must, like the hunter, forever try to lead his target properly.** Judgment is a vital imperative because the immediate situation is still unclear, still something in the process of definitive determination. Judgment exists because the acting person must anticipate consequences and seek to exert control, and men thus create culture and pass it from one to another as an aid in doing precisely this.</p>

<p>Even the pre-programmed, genetic inheritance must lead targets in this way. Many attributes do not disclose themselves until late in the life of the cell, yet if they are not there from the beginning, the cell, in certain crucial situations, may reveal a most faulty judgment. Thus genetic defects are defects only in a relative, situational sense. The situation of the cell, from its perspective is largely gratuitous, and with luck a defective cell may never have to suffer from its defect. But lead its target it must even though that means programming characteristics whose moment of significance comes late in the life of the organism. Mortality itself is undoubtedly—other causes being fortuitously avoided—so programmed into the structure of the being, for alas, natural selection, so powerful in selecting out structural deficiencies that disclose themselves up to the time for reproduction, has no power to select out deficiencies that unfold late. <i>Thanatos</i> is indeed a genetic possibility.* The same problem befuddles man as an educative being: he continually acquires culture as a tool of judgment continually prior to the moment of judgment. Life, including human life, always moves towards the future; to be in time is to slide forever out of the known into the unknown. Were it otherwise, there would be no problem of judgment, no life, all would subsist in itself like a stone. Education and culture are thus preparations for judgment, but they are also, as all else, pervaded by judgment; they are, ineluctably, examples of judgment, good, bad, or indifferent.**</p>

<p>Culture is man’s Lamarckian heritage. Its vital function is to aid in the making of judgment.*** This vital function can be seen reflected in all aspects of culture. In its entirety, culture is a set of acquired characteristics that extend the inborn powers of judgment far beyond the genetically pre-programmed limits. To be sure, the cultural heritage, both when accepted passively or when transformed actively by a new generation, notoriously induces faulty judgment on numerous occasions, but this fact of fallibility does not mean that the fundamental function is something other than the extension of judgment. Error, fallibility, can be identified only relative to the function: to have a function and to be fallible are one and the same. Faulty judgment is situational, and poor judgment induced by the deficiencies of culture is no different from poor judgment induced by genetic programming. On the cellular level, there are many situations in which the most functional, "healthy", "normal" programming of the cell becomes decidedly dysfunctional, causing the cell effectually to self-destruct. We conclude from these facts, not that the function of the programming is bad judgment, or something other than judgment, but that the capacities for cellular judgment are not adequate for all possible situations. So too with culture: its function is the extension of judgment, but it is not always adequate to this function. In the full life, judgment is always at the edge of its capacities.**** Life, through judgment, makes a cosmos from chaos.***** Danger to life comes from the unknown, the uncertain, the unanticipated. These always lurk about us, and ironically exist even within the humanly created sphere of culture. Again, we are always leading our targets: we create culture ignorant of all that we thus do. As a genetic defect may be very late in disclosing itself, waiting patiently, hidden profoundly, until an unexpected conjuncture is at hand, so too with cultural defects: numerous mores that work well for the immediate end in view bring later consequences, not at first apparent, that make the total, vital situation dire and problematic.* Thus much of culture is an effort to anticipate its own implications, an effort to make itself self-perfecting through critical selection in the same way that genetic judgment is slowly self-perfecting through natural selection. This judgment of judgment, this critical self-perfecting of culture, is not necessarily conscious and rational. It is at bottom vital, experiential, existential; it is what men do as they suffer the consequences.**</p>

<p>Let us turn from these very general considerations of the nature of culture to a brief look at some of its more highly developed branches. The great, vital problem, we have suggested, is judgment, which arises ineluctably because the living being must continually act in an immediate present; it must create the act, whatever it may be, in the ever-flowing instant of actuality. To live, we have suggested, is to inform matter with judgment, a sense of purpose and procedure. To act implies choice, an effort at control, an attempt to create and sustain a purposeful direction—these vital processes are judgment, and thus all life lives under an imperative of judgment. What judgments will be made is relatively open, especially in the cultural realm, but that judgments shall be made is ineluctable wherever there is life. The most thorough ambivalence imaginable is a vital judgment, a judgment that no coherent judgment can be made. Ambivalence is simply a form of judgment, and what is surprising is not that humans on occasion are ambivalent, but that they are so little ambivalent, that they have gone so far in unfolding developed forms of judgment, which they have used to vastly extend the arena of vital action.***</p>

 

<p>At the same time, hypothesizing that the problem of judgment is at the center of all cultural creation seems hard to reconcile with other aspects of the folk tradition. We are children of enlightenment who have come a long way from a world where superstition was sovereign —not as far as we may think, but far nevertheless.** We have learned to suspend judgment, at least in the reflective sphere, which permits us to grasp the scepter from superstition.*** Yet it is only under the conventions of reflective intellect that the imperative to act can thus be controlled. Judgment is a vital function and cannot be constrained solely within rationality. Critical judgment may at a later, more reflective stage find superstition to be the inducer of faulty judgment. But still the humanness of superstition is not to be denied, and its vital validity, in the absence of anything else, for people who must live life in its totality, needs to be recognized and understood. And so understanding the function of superstition, we realize that undoubtedly we live by it far more than we are wont to admit: wherever understanding is imperfect, uncertain, and the imperatives of action makes men base their stands on uncertain judgments, there we encounter fields where superstition can still thrive. And the test of culture is whether in the totality of life it gives a vital edge, whether it contributes through its consequences to well being, and this superstition may often do, not in the least because the causes it presumes to be at work are in fact as work, but because it does presume causes to be at work, thus giving the actor confidence where he would otherwise be wracked by a paralyzing perplexity.****</p>

<p>Our rationalistic heritage encourages us to think of judgment as an individual attribute, that of an individual mind making judgments alone—Descartes solitary by his stove assuring himself: 2 think, therefore _I am.* Culture and the problems of judgment to which it pertains have been in the sweep of history much more a plural work: <i>we</i> are, therefore <i>we</i> think together. And not only think together, but equally, we feel together, believe together, hope together, fear or love together—these, as much as thought, are aspects of judgment.**</p>

<p>All judgment, even pre-programmed cellular judgment, requires that the target be led, but this requirement is far more demanding with interpersonal, cultural judgment: the problem of anticipation becomes extremely complex. The more men become cultural beings, the more interdependent they become, the more their problems of judgment become problems of concerting perception and purpose, organizing effort and abilities. A common, shared understanding of situations becomes necessary if highly choreographed, interpersonal actions are to be undertaken.* With the want of an alternative, superstition performs this common function. It nurtures community and provides an occasion for criticism, an interpersonal evaluation of the common bases for judgment. All knowledge has its roots in a desperate, shared effort to construe the threatening chaos. The imperative of judgment, and the interpersonal character of that imperative for humans, means that the first and most fundamental criterion for culture is plural acceptance. Unanimity is not necessary, and it may be a danger. Diversity, diversities of shared views are a great leaven to cultural development, the embodied dialectic. But the solitary, the unique, the really isolated view, has no cultural significance. Socrates was tried, however unjustly, not for his <i>daemon</i>, per se, but for introducing new gods in the demos, and Galileo was brought before the Inquisition, not because he held strange theories, but because he published and taught them. The idiosyncratic may be true, but as long as it is idiosyncratic, it is irrelevant to the great interpersonal problems of judgment, and it will become significant only as it wins acceptance by a following as a basis for judgment. Truth, as a norm of agreement, is a late invention of human culture, an historical norm whose history is yet far from complete.**</p>

<p  style="text-indent: -2em;">Anno {{#counter:in2}} <i>Page 1 (**)</i> My use of "judgment" should become reasonably clear from the text. It is a somewhat broadened use of the word, however, and it seems therefore desirable to say something about the relation between my usage and various standard usages. <i>The American Heritage Dictionary</i> gives the following primary meanings for judgment: "l.a. The mental ability to perceive and distinguish relationships or alternatives; the critical faculty; discernment, b. The capacity to make reasonable decisions, especially in regard to the practical affairs of life; good sense; wisdom, c. The exercise of this capacity." Were one to drop out from definition l.b. the word "reasonable," one would have just about precisely the meaning used through <i>Man and Judgment</i>: the capacity to make decisions. Qualifying the term with "reasonable," equating it with good sense and wisdom, expresses widespread hopes that we have about our judgment and about that of others, but does not add to the definition of the term. Most acts of judgment are made under pressures that preclude careful reasoning—in making them we hope that they will lead to decisions that in retrospect will prove to have been reasonable.</p>

<p  style="text-indent: -2em;">Anno {{#counter:in2}} <i>Page 2 (*)</i> The view of life and the conviction that judgment is central to it on which this whole undertaking is founded has been deeply influenced by my earlier work on José Ortega y Gasset and work I have done on Jacob von Uexküll, the early twentieth-century German biologist. For Uexküll, see <i>Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere</i>, Berlin: Verlag von Julius Springer, 1909; <i>Theoretical Biology</i>, Mackinnin, trans., London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tuebner and Co., 1926; and <i>Die Lebenslehre</i>, Potsdam: Muller Piepenheuer Verlag, 1930. For Ortega, see my study, <i>Man and His Circumstances: Ortega as Educator</i>, New York: Teachers College Press, 1971. I have continued to read and reflect on the question of life, and have somewhat modified certain views. Uexküll, it now seems to me, labored somewhat unnecessarily under the burden of vitalism, seeking a sharp distinction betwwen the physico-chemical and the strictly vital. Recent work on the chemical origins of life make it possible to see a capacity for judgment as a, perhaps the, defining characteristic of life, without having to argue a rigorous distinction between the vital and the material. This is not the place to develop the idea fully, so suffice it to say that the key to the question is the capacity of matter to enter into bonding relations, that is the high valence of certain elements, elements which play an important part in organic chemistry. In reflecting on elemental valence, we see that in a certain sense matter is imbued with a capacity for judgment, for bonding, and that life, as an aspect of matter, is an unfolding of the potentialities inherent in the valence properties of matter, an unfolding guided by judgment in its manifold forms. On the chemical origin of life, see: J.D. Bernal, <i>The Origin of Life</i>, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967, which, in addition to a full and lucid discussion of the chemical origin of life, reprints important earlier essays on the subject by the Russian, A.I. Oparian and by J.B.S. Haldane. For shorter discussions, see the excellent article by Carl Sagan, "Life," in <i>The New Encyclopaedia Briatannica; Macropaedia</i>, Vol. 10, pp. 893-911, esp. pp. 900-904; and George Wald, "The Origin of Life," <i>Scientific American</i>, Vol. 191, No. 2, August 1954, pp. 45-53.</p>

<p  style="text-indent: -2em;">Anno {{#counter:in2}} <i>Page 2 (**)</i> The first five chapters of <i>Biology and the Future of Man</i>, edited by Philip Handler, New York: Oxford University Press, 1970, pp. 3-201, give an excellent survey of the recent state of knowledge about simple organisms and their capacities to create and use information. <i>The Lives of a Cell; Notes of a Biology Watcher</i> by Lewis Thomas, New York: Bantam Books, 1974, gives a vivid sense of how complicated the judgments of simple organisms often are, of how social they are, frequently depending on subtle symbiosis. It is important that we become more able to understand that the so-called pathetic fallacy, however cloying its more extreme poetic cases may be to our taste, is not technically a fallacy. It appears a fallacy only with a rigorous distinction between the natural and the human, only to a view of the world and of life still structured by a theological distinction between base nature and the divine. Rather we are learning that human qualities, without loosing an iota of their humanity, are simply manifestations, elaborations, developments of properties inherent in matter and energy, and in a profound sense we share those qualities with all the stuff of the universe. The atomic structure of an oxygen atom puts limits on what other atoms it can bond with and the conditions under which it can form a bond, but it does not determine that the bonding will in fact take place. Within structural limits the history of each atom is, not through the pathetic fallacy, but by the fact of its nature, a drama, a quest, a search for the fulfillment of its possibilities.</p>

<p  style="text-indent: -2em;">Anno {{#counter:in2}} <i>Page 2 (***)</i> Recent discussions of genetic determinants of intelligence have been, however depressing, stimulating to reflection. I do not understand why the matter keeps being raised in the rhetoric of determinism, for the logos of such rhetoric continually drives participants in the discussion to absurd extremes and extreme absurdity. Determinate realities need to be understood concretely, in their determinateness, which comes to be through the interworking of innumerable different factors. Isolated processes cannot, it seems to me, be properly spoken of as contributing this or that proportion of the actual determination, but only as putting this or that limit on the range of possibilities in the determination. That a box has been constructed with certain dimensions puts real limits on what can and cannot be put into it, but it does not determine what in fact will be put into it. I have found P.B. Medawar's very lucid essay, "Unnatural Science," <i>The New York Review of Books</i>, Vol. XXIV, No. 1, February 3, 1977, pp. 23-8, to be very helpful and I owe to it the characterization of culture as man’s Lamarkian heritage. We should note even further, that as human culture has developed, it has enabled men, through the cultivation of nature, to imbue it with certain Lamarkian qualities, a capacity which may be on the verge of revolutionary extension as men are finally understanding the mechanisms of genetic transmission.</p>

<p  style="text-indent: -2em;">Anno {{#counter:in2}} <i>Page 3 (*)</i> Too little serious attention in American discussions of education is being paid, it seems to me, to the fundamental question of what being human entails. Of major educational thinkers, John Dewey came the closest to having a considered position on this question: to be human entails experience that leads to growth, but the concept of growth, which was central for him, was in the end left rather vague. Post-war German educational theory has advanced much further towards making a conscious conception of man, or more precisely a systmemmatic inquiry into the character of man, central to educational theory and practice. Much of the best work in this effort appears under the heading of "<i>padagogische Anthropologie</i>." An excellent summary of pedagogical anthropology is by Heinrich Roth, <i>Padagogicsche Anthropologie</i>, 2 vols., Hannover: Hermann Schroedel Verlag, Vol. 1, 3rd ed. , 1971, Vol. 2, 1971. A shorter introduction to the subject, one surveying the various contributions to it from biology, medicine, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and theology, has been edited by Andreas Flitner, <i>Wege zur padagogischen Anthropologie: Versuch einer Zusammenarbeit der Wissenschaften vom Menschen</i>, 2nd ed., Heidelberg: Quelle &amp; Meyer, 1967. There is also a good essay on the subject in the <i>Handbuch padagogischer Grundbegriffe</i>, Josef Speck and Gerhard Wehle, eds., 2 vols., Munich: Kosel Verlag, 1970, Vol. 1, pp. 1-37. It would be a worthwhile contribution if some of this work were translated into English, for it is work of high stature performed by some of the best among contemporary German thinkers.</p>

<p  style="text-indent: -2em;">Anno {{#counter:in2}} <i>Page 3 (**)</i> The metaphor of leading the target like the hunter has been well exploited by José Ortega y Gasset. It is pervasive in his whole outlook and can be found well summarized in <i>Meditations on Hunting</i>, Howard B. Wescott, trans., New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972. Ortega's writings are, of course, fundamental to my whole project of <i>Man and Judgment</i>, having entered profoundly into the formation of the outlook on which the project rests. The theme of judgment, however, was not one <i>explicitly</i> central in Ortega's thought. He spoke primarily of reason and knowledge, insisting that they should be vital. In this, he remained bound by the vocabulary of Western epistemology, which has put a far higher premium on reason and knowledge than on judgment. Without rejecting the epistemological heritage, which is essential, it nevertheless seems potentially possible to clear up many difficulties that complicated matters for thinkers like Ortega, Wilhelm Dilthey, John Dewey, and a host of others, by shifting attention from the problem of knowledge to that of judgment.</p>

<p  style="text-indent: -2em;">Anno {{#counter:in2}} <i>Page 4 (*)</i> I am not using the Freudian term in a particularly technical sense, if it can be said to have a particularly technical meaning within Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud's fullest statement of the death instinct is <i>Beyond the Pleasure Principle</i>, James Strachey, trans., New York: Bantam Books, 1959. It does not seem true to life to connect aggressiveness primarily with a death instinct—many forms of death seem to have an altruistic character, a quiet fatigue, a resignation, a making room for those younger and more energetic. One can understand the opposition of eros and thanatos, but one should also give due weight to their connection. It is interesting in this connection to note that death of the individual organism appears as a biologic characteristic at the same time that sexual reproduction appears and the two are in a way integral to one another. As long as cells reproduce by division, each individual cell, if one can so speak, is potentially immortal, that is, in jeopardy of death only from external causes. Sexual reproduction seems to bring with it the mortality of the individual, if not from external causes, then from internal. This would seem necessary: cell division itself is too fecund; sexual reproduction without individual mortality would be even more excessively fecund—thus it seems that individual death is the biologic price of sexuality. What is the quid pro quo? Surely it is the possibility of greater complexity in the individual that sexual reproduction makes possible. Lewis Thomas has some very interesting reflections on the biologic character of death in <i>The Lives of a Cell</i>, op. cit., pp. 55-61.</p>

<p  style="text-indent: -2em;">Anno {{#counter:in2}} <i>Page 4 (**)</i> Time is a fundamental human experience, and I think that all people have a common sense of it, one in which certain features are universally shared. Beyond that root distinction between immediate past, immediate present, and immediate future, however, there are vast differences in the way time, natural and human, is conceived. These are important matters for historical and philosophical investigation. The human orientation to time has been a widespread concern in twentieth-century thought. My views about time have been influenced by diverse sources. For some time, the growing understanding of the biologic influence of time has fascinated me. A most important work in this area is <i>Time’s Arrow and Evolution</i> by Harold F. Blum, 2nd ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955. G.F. Oster, et al., relate the problem of time to the question of the origin of life in <i>Irreversible Thermodynamics and the Origin of Life</i>, new ed., New York: Gordon, 1975. Such scientific inquiries relate fundamentally, albeit not explicitly, to the growing importance of time in ontology, which is best known through Martin Heidegger’s seminal work, <i>Being and Time</i>, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, trans., New York: Harper and Row, 1962. As the importance of time to being, as being becomes understood as existence in time, not as substance that perdures through time, time has become more important to the criticism of life and to attempts to reform it. A far more existential sense of time is beginning to affect the writing of history, in which the effort is not to trace the development of x, y or z, each conceived more or less as a substance that endures and develops through time. Rather, in this new history, the effort is to describe something in time, not as a process of development, but as an indelible reality in time, a time that may be close to instantaneous or that may stretch over millenia as with the opening sections of Fernand Braudel’s <i>The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II</i>, 2 vols., Sian Reynolds, trans., New York: Harper and Row, 1972, Vol. 1, pp. 25-352. Such concern to elucidate the human meaning of concrete existence in time is also reflected in important aspects of criticism and agitation—the critique of everyday existence, perhpas best reflected by Henri Lefebvre, <i>Everyday Life in the Modern World</i>, Sacha Rabinovitch, trans., New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971, and Enrico Castelli, <i>L'enquete quotidienne</i>, Enrichetta Valenziani, trans., Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959. As the importance of existence in time has become clearer, so has the historic and social significance of the conceptions of time held by people existing in time, for these can then be understood as crucial means through which people define their existence. Georges Poulet’s <i>Studies in Human Time</i>, Elliott Coleman, trans., New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959, has done much to turn attention to this side of the history of culture, and 3.G.A. Pocock, in <i>The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition</i>, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975, uses changes in the conception of time as a major analytical means for tracing the spread of certain political theories.</p>

<p  style="text-indent: -2em;">Anno {{#counter:in2}} <i>Page 4 (***)</i> Read in a certain way, as if implied is some presumed canon defining the content of ’’good" judgment, this statement can have a very bourgeois ring to it. I do not assert it, however, as an ideological norm; I do not mean merely that the function of culture <i>should</i> be to aid the formation of "good” judgment. To be sure, I would accept that proposition, as long as it carries with it the recognition that among the ever-present problems for judgment is to judge rightly what good judgment may be. What I claim here, however, is something that goes beyond ideology, beyond any and all particular ideologies, for it asserts that whatever the particular content, the vital function of culture is to aid in the making of judgment, which is inherent in all living action. With such a proposition, historicism, understood as the recognition that all culture, natural science included, exists in time and ultimately can be understood only relative to its historical conditions of existence, acquires a non-relativistic grounding. There are within culture no absolute standards and everything must be understood relative to historic time and place, concretely, with the mediation of as few reified abstractions as possible. Yet within life, all culture serves life according to an absolute standard, that of indelible, real exstence in time, that of the actual consequences of the judgments it has helped to make. There can be no absolute evaluation of these consequences retrospectively, but rather there is an absolute evaluation of historically relative evaluation through the quality of judgment the relative evaluation gives rise to and the consequences in real experience that it brings. Before too long, as one of the major pamphlets in <i>Man and Judgment</i>, I want to reexamine the whole problem of historicism. Karl R. Popper’s <i>The Poverty of Historicism</i> , 3rd ed., New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964, seems to me to be completely on the wrong track, defining the problem of historicism as an absolutist holism, whereas the real difficulty of historicism, if any, is its susceptibility to a relativistic particularism. Central to such an endeavor will be a careful encounter with the work of Wilhelm Dilthey. The classic discussions of historicism—Ernst Troeltsch, <i>Der Historismus und seine Probleme</i>, Tubingen, 1922; Karl Mannheim, ’’Historicism," in <i>Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge</i>, Paul Kecskemeti, ed., London: Routledge &amp; Kegan Paul, 1952; and Friedrich Meinecke, <i>Die Enstehung des Historismus</i>, Carl Hinrichs, ed., <i>Werke</i>, Vol. 3, Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1965—do not for the most part give enough consideration to the great attempts such as Dilthey’s to clarify the system methodologically. Meinecke, of course, was concerned to trace the development of the historical outlook in an earlier period in this work, and in essays gathered in <i>Zur Theorie und Philosophie der Geschichte</i>, Eberhard Kessel, ed., <i>Werke</i>, Vol. 4, Stuttgart: K.F. Koehler Verlag, 1965, esp. pp. 358-363, he shows himself very well aware of Dilthey’s significance.</p>

<p  style="text-indent: -2em;">Anno {{#counter:in2}} <i>Page 4 (****)</i> We need to understand far more fully than we do the role of error in development, be it biologic, historic, pedagogic. On the latter, <i>The Possibilities of Error: An Approach to Education</i> by Henry J. Perkinson, New York: David McKay Company, 1971, is of value.</p>

<p  style="text-indent: -2em;">Anno {{#counter:in2}} <i>Page 4 (*****)</i> The transformation of the chaos into a cosmos is a fundamental conception on which my study of <i>Man and Judgment</i> will be based. Three literatures have been important for my understanding of this transformation: philosophical idealism, the history of science, and the cultural history of the Greeks. The sources that have been significant to me in each of these areas are too numerous all to be cited here. Greek cultural history catches the transformation at an early stage and displays it in rapid motion, in a rapid, more or less self-aware motion, which is why, I think, the Greeks have been exemplary teachers in our cultural tradition—they teach through deed as well as word. The history of science, as it has come to be analyzed by Thomas S. Kuhn, Stephen Toulmin, Charles Coulston Gillispie, and others, has some of the same qualities, and the great theories, which confound everyday experience and organize realms, both utterly vast and incredibly minute, do not really touch nature in itself but profoundly transform the world of lived experience. Finally, philosophic idealism, using the term loosely, brings one to the problem of the thing-in-itself. We cannot know it—true—but what might it be to itself? The more I ponder this impossible question, the surer I become that it is merely the totality of stuff utterly undifferentiated, choas. The thing-in-itself, the incoherent sum of stuff, would potentially be a standard of knowledge only in a purely negative sense, as the complete other, the absolute absence of distinction, form, discrimination, understanding, judgment, knowledge. Life transforms the chaos, the thing-in-itself, into a cosmos, a habitable universe.</p>

<p  style="text-indent: -2em;">Anno {{#counter:in2}} <i>Page 5 (*)</i> The notorious current example is the possibility that the culture of economic and demographic growth may be, some say is, unsustainable, yet at the same time it does not provide us with the intellectual and political capacities to adapt without upheaval to a culture premised on a steadystate in economics and demographics. An unflinching reflection on these possibilities is <i>An Inquiry into the Human Prospect</i> by Robert L. Heilbroner, New York: W.W. Norton, 1974, which leads on to many other sources.</p>

<p  style="text-indent: -2em;">Anno {{#counter:in2}} <i>Page 5 (**)</i> A central problem of a theory of education, it seems to me, is to relate conscious efforts at educating to the school of life attended as one suffers the consequences. Because of this, it seems to me that <i>The Education of Henry Adams</i>, Henry Adams, (1918) New York: The Modern Library, 1931, is one of the profounder contributions to a theory of education, for this problem is central to it, as to so much of Adams’ other writings. pp. 108-9: ’’The picture of Washington in March, 1861, offered education, but not the kind of education that led to good.... Not a man there knew what his task was to be, or was fitted for it; every one without exception, Northern or Southern, was to learn his business at the cost of the public. Lincoln, Seward, Sumner, and the rest, could give no help to the young man seeking education; they knew less than he; within six weeks they were all to be taught their duties by the uprising of such as he, and their education was to cost a million lives and ten thousand million dollars, more or less, North and South, before the country could recover its balance and movement.” There is a tendency to dismiss Adams as the crabbed purveyor of sour grapes, but every upheaval in history could be described as such an educational problem, and it is one that putative educators too rarely face.</p>

<p  style="text-indent: -2em;">Anno {{#counter:in2}} <i>Page 5 (***)</i> <i>The Ascent of Man</i> by 3. Bronowski, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973, gives a vivid picture of the role of science and reflective thinking in extending the arena of vital action.</p>

<p  style="text-indent: -2em;">Anno {{#counter:in2}} <i>Page 6 (*)</i> Sporadic reading in anthropology has entered into the formation of these views, but more important to me has been the study of efforts to understand the early Greek mentality, best summed up so far in the first part of Eric A. Havelock’s <i>Preface to Plato</i>, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963, pp. 3-193. Also important is Volume 2: <i>Mythical Thought</i> of Ernst Cassirer’s <i>The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms</i>, Ralph Manheim, trans., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955. While I think the neo-Kantian interest in symbolic forms brought to fruition in Cassirer's work is extremely helpful in understanding thinking, caution should be exercised not to be content with the symbolic for the sake of the symbolic. It is thus important to follow out how the symbolic, as it mediates judgment, results in action.</p>

<p  style="text-indent: -2em;">Anno {{#counter:in2}} <i>Page 6 (**)</i> I have reflected briefly on the contemporary problem of superstition in <i>Man and His Circumstances: Ortega as Educator</i>, op. cit., pp. 372-383. Superstitions can arise whenever abstractions are reified and take on an apparent life in history as self-subsistent, acting entities. In recent years among the most susceptible have been those working on "the modernization process," who seem drawn to conceive of it as one of the major agents in recent history. See, for instance, R. Freeman Butts, <i>The Education of the West; A Formative Chapter in the History of Civilization</i>, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1973, esp. pp. 516-562.</p>

<p  style="text-indent: -2em;">Anno {{#counter:in2}} <i>Page 6 (***)</i> It would be interesting were a good history of the suspension of judgment in Western thought were to be written. It might begin with Heraclitus, with his fragment, "to God all things are beautiful, good, right; men, on the other hand, deem some things right and others wrong." Fragment 106, as numbered and translated in Philip Wheelwright, <i>Heraclitus</i>, New York: Atheneum, 1964, p. 90. Eric A. Havelock in <i>Preface to Plato</i>, op. cit., has suggested that the mimetic consciousness of the pre-literate Greek did not permit ethical reflection and that Platonism was a necessary step in bringing such thinking into being. Such reflection is not the same as suspension of judgment, but it does entail abstraction, making judgment conscious and at least partially systemmatic. The suspension of judgment in a more thorough-going sense seems central to the rise of modern science, and is a point in common to both the empirical, Baconian side and the rationalistic, Cartesian side. Too much emphasis with Bacon is put on his insight into the power of knowledge, which makes this strange man far more amenable to our pragmatic proclivities. More centrally, Bacon’s greatness lay in his role in the secularization of reason, opening the way to the systemmatic suspension of judgment in the naturalistic realm. On this, his distinction between moral knowledge and natural knowledge, and his contention that only the former was implicated in Adam's fall, was fundamental. See <i>Of the Advancement of Learning</i>, First Book, VI:6. By the same token, Descartes radically secularized the process of thinking, despite the faith in God arrived at through his thinking, in the Second Part of his <i>Discourse on Method</i>, in which he systemmatized the principle of suspended judgment, and in the third part he even went so far as to set forth rules for living while rigorously following that principle. Galileo's notorious abjuration before the inquisition needs to be put in the context of the growing awareness of the power of suspended judgment, and his aside, <i>eppur si muove</i>, whether really uttered or apocryphal, catches the spirit of the principle—judgment can be suspended with respect to natural phenomena because the stuff does not care what we think of it. But as the human power to manipulate the chaos has so greatly increased, it is becoming increasingly clear that whatever nonchalance the stuff itself has towards human judgment, the suspension of judgment can be but an artificial suspension, for increasingly what we think about the natural realm comes to matter profoundly to human life. Hence, there is a strong movement towards rediscovering the role of judgment in science, the function of values in it, as is evidenced by the work of Thomas Kuhn, Stephen Toulmin, Jerome Ravetz, and many others.</p>

<p  style="text-indent: -2em;">Anno {{#counter:in2}} <i>Page </i><i><i>6 (****)</i></i><i> </i>Willis W. Harman, <i>An Incomplete Guide to the Future</i>, Stanford: Stanford Alumni Association, 1976, is an interesting contemporary example of the relation of the imperative to act and the susceptibility to superstition.</p>

<p  style="text-indent: -2em;">Anno {{#counter:in2}} <i>Page 7 (*)</i> There is underway, I suspect, a shift in the way we locate the processes of thought and feeling. One of the fascinating things that one notices in intellectual history is the degree to which men have been uncertain about not only what thinking is, but also about where it takes place. The Cartesian paradigm that thinking occurs <i>inside</i> our minds, which are located in our brains, still seems the natural way to speak of the matter. And Gestalt psychologists and brain physiologists have greatly extended our knowledge about the localization in the brain of various perceptual and intellectual centers. Yet the brain is by no means self-contained in all its functions, and there is still much uncertainty about how best to locate thinking and a strong movement towards revising the Cartesina paradigm, one driven from many quarters. To begin with, the difficulties with the theory of the individually contained mind have been made apparent through criticisms such as Gilbert Ryle's influential study, <i>The Concept of Mind</i>, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949. Such criticism has been reinforced by the impact of behaviorism, which has shown that scientific psychology proceeding without recourse to a concept of mind can be fruitful. At the same time, the development of high powered computers, which can far out-perform the human brain in certain operations, have disposed those intent on making human intellection the defining characteristic of man to look beyond the brain and its powers for the key to this intellection. Furthermore, diverse students of language— philosophical analysists, structuralists, historians of philosophy—have shown that many questions formerly understood as questions about the reasoning powers of the mind are better understood as questions about language. All these influences may be coming together in a new theory of thinking, one which sees it much more as an act of the total human organism, not only of the isolated individual organism, but of the interpersonal community of human organisms. One sees this outlook strongly reflected among certain psychologists and cultural historians who have come to understand psychic abnormalities, not as failures of individual psyches, but as manifest stress points in complex interpersonal conditions, and thus madness becomes an anguished, truth-telling, personal reflection of interpersonal situations structured by an inadequate, inhumane culture and civilization, politics and society. See for instance, Michel Foucault, <i>Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason</i>, Richard Howard, trans., New York: Vintage Books, 1973, and R.D. Laing, .... Many are likely to think Foucault and Laing too tainted by a cult of irrationalism and to conclude therefore that an interpersonal locus to thinking is to be shunned. Parallel reconceptualizations are taking place, however, in the philosophy of science, where scientific rationality is coming to be understood as an interpersonal property of the community of scholars. Jerome R. Ravetz took a major step in this direction with <i>Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems</i>, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, and Stephen Toulmin made it explicit in <i>Human Understanding</i>, Vol. 1, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972, where, particularly in his General Introduction, he criticized the epistemological tradition for unduly and erroneously conceptualizing the understanding, thinking, knowing, as an internalized, individual attribute. In the whole matter of the locus of thought, an earlier departure, but a very significant one, should be seen in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s <i>Phenomenology of Perception</i>, Colin Smith, trans., New York: Humanities Press,1962, where he insisted on understanding perception, not merely as the work of the brain, but as a corporal phenomenon, one in which the corporality of the perceiver, and also that of the perceived, is an integral part of perception. Much more might be said about understanding thinking, not so much as an inner experience, but as an interpersonal phenomenon, at once "inside" and "outside," but it is best to leave it for another occasion, adding only that a thorough, deep-probing history of the various ways men have located thinking and of their reasons for so locating it, would be a very interesting history.</p>

<p  style="text-indent: -2em;">Anno {{#counter:in2}} <i>Page 7 (**)</i> There has been a strong tendency historically to deal with judgment primarily in relation to rationality, which may well derive from the first discussions of judgment by Plato, where the problem of judgment was put as a problem of explaining how false judgments were possible (see <i>Theaetetus</i>, 187b-210d, and <i>Sophist</i>, 264a-e). As observed earlier, the most extensive discussions of judgment historically have treated it as a topic in logic. Twentieth-century philosophers have, however, been trying in diverse ways to take as the basis of philosophy, not reason or knowledge, but human life, and three movements within contemporary philosophy are of great value in keeping before us the range and complexity of judgment, namely, philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and the philosophy of symbolic forms. Thus works such as <i>Lebensformen: Geisteswissenschaftliche Psycholoqie und Ethik der Personlichkeit</i> by Eduard Spranger, 5th ed., Halle: Verlag von Max Niemeyer, 1925, <i>Wesen und Formen der Sympathie</i> by Max Scheier, <i>Gesammelte Werke</i>, Vol. 7, Bern: Francke Verlag, 1959, and <i>The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms</i> by Ernst Cassirer, Ralph Manheim, trans., 3 vols., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953, 1955, 1957 remind us that, without being anti-intellectualistic in a base sense, we cannot rationally reduce judgment to a problem of reason alone.</p>

<p  style="text-indent: -2em;">Anno {{#counter:in2}} <i>Page 8 (*)</i> As an aid to penetrating into the deeply interpersonal aspects of the problem of judgment, I think Edward 0. Wilson's <i>Sociobiology; The New Synthesis</i>, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975, and the general concern it represents, is very helpful. Many, it seems, fear that through a recrudescence of reasoning from analogy, so popular among political theorists of the sixteenth century, the upshot of sociobiology may be to legitimate one or another authoritarian collectivism, one modeled on the ants and the bees. This, it seems to me, is a false fear. What sociobiology offers is not ready-made answers through analogy, but rather certain methods of analysis and help in bringing to conscious awareness real, vital problems in social experience, and as we become more aware and better able to analyze, we learn better how to choose and shape our own unique path within nature. It seems to me to have become less and less fruitful to try to define human uniqueness in contradistinction to nature. Rather, the fruitful course is to accept our continuity with nature, to welcome our submersion in it, our inclusion in it, and to work out to the fullest of our natural potential the distinctively human solution to the many problems nature puts to us in common with all other organisms. All species share the problems of life; they are unique by virtue of the distinctive ways they tentatively solve those problems.</p>

<p  style="text-indent: -2em;">Anno {{#counter:in2}} <i>Page 8 (**)</i> An unfashionable matter, but an important one all the same: we pay too little attention to understanding how certain elements of culture attain general acceptance. We shy from studying this process because it impinges ominously on our rightly treasured protections for the freedom of dissent, of opinion, of assembly, on the hard-won and ever-threatened achievement of basic human rights. Yet the effective protection of dissent rests, ironically, on the achievement of common assent to the mutual provision of such protections. We shy away from the study of how cultural agreement is in fact achieved, for we fear that it will lead to manipulation, propaganda, the control of opinion and thought. The very opposite may be true: forceful manipulation and control may be desperate measures taken by people who have not attended with forethought to their real needs for agreement. And under normal conditions the attainment of cultural agreement does not seem a very painful or threatening experience. The process by which this occurs has been widely studied under the head of acculturation, socialization. The cultural content of socialization seems to have been widely studied, but the driving force behind it seems to have been something by and large taken for granted. The surprising thing about socialization is the almost universal docility men display towards it. People highly sensitive to all forms of manipulation and propaganda nevertheless, in myriads of matters, easily submit to socialization without a whimper or a whine. Those inclined to ideological criticism, who attribute this docility to the conspiratorial subtlety of the powers that be, seem to me to looking in the wrong direction, not always wrong with certain particulars, but wrong if they hope to find the animating principle of it all. Rousseau, in <i>Emile</i>, gave the clue when he admonished that if one must manipulate the child, make sure the demand appears to be a demand of nature, not of man, for only in that way can one achieve one’s end without inducing resentment. To find the force driving acculturation, one needs to look, not so much to cultural phenomena, but to the brute, elemental environment in which men live. In doing this, one needs to go back behind Marx, one needs to look not only at the material conditions of production, but to the human geography, the climatology, the ecology of micro-organisms. Before there is an elementary education, there is an elemental education: it is the basic force that has historically driven acculturation, and how it produces cultural agreement needs far more study. When I say we need to know much more about this elemental education, which in all likelihood is fundamental to understanding most examples of broad cultural agreement, I do not mean to suggest that we know nothing about it. On the contrary, we are beginning to know enough to realize that we need to know a great deal more if we are to make sense of our cultural past. Let us take, to begin with, a small matter, the Salem witch trials. These have been a puzzle, a blotch on Puritan culture, a problem for historians who do not give credence to witches and have great difficulty understanding how people, who were otherwise sound of mind and prudent in conduct, would suddenly lend themselves to such a persecution. Recently, in <i>Science</i>, Vol. 192, No. 4234, 2 April 1976, pp. 21-6, Linnda R. Caporael published a fascinating article, "Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem?", which suggests that a certain mold that grows under damp conditions on rye may well have contaminated bread eaten in certain parts of Salem and caused the symptoms, psychic and physiological that set the trials in motion. If this was the case, and the evidence seems strong that in Salem it was, and that perhaps the same etiology was at work where other witch crazes took place, the terms of the problem confronting the historian of culture, of judgment, are radically altered. The problem is no longer one of sheer, incomprehensible delusion, but rather one in which men were faced with real but incomprehensible phenomena, phenomena they could not then correctly understand, but that they somehow had to construe, and under these elemental conditions the witch hypothesis seemed to many to be more compelling than anything else and won extensive, real agreement. This is but one small instance of a much more general process that has fundamentally influenced the cultural repertory that men have accepted. Historical geographers and climatologists, historians of technology, nutrition, and disease, are all beginning to break open vistas on such elemental experiences, which radically effect processes of acculturation and the patterns of judgment formed through it. Our own growing consciousness of the delicate environmental balance, of the real possibility of resource depletion, is disposing us to seeing how men of the past coped with analogous phenomena. Studies such as Rhys Carpenter's <i>Discontinuity in Greek Civilization</i>, New York: W.W. Norton &amp; Co., 1968, will force us to attend to the relation of climate and culture, which, opportunely, specialists are beginning to provide us with the means for doing as in Harlow Shapley, ed., <i>Climatic Change: Evidence, Causes, and Effects</i>, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965 (primarily on a geologic, not historic, time scale), H.H. Lamb, <i>The Changing Climate</i>, London: Methuen &amp; Co., 1968 (more on an historic time scale), and the issue of <i>World Archeology</i>, Vol. 8, No. 2, October 1976, devoted to climatic change. Such study of climate, of the elemental education is important, not to spin some grand theory of cultural determinism, but rather to define accurately, sensitively, the basic problems men had to cope with historically, to set the context for comprehending their most compelling problems of judgment. To comprehend the formation of judgment in the past, we need to attend closely to what Fernand Braudel calls the material life, the compelling presences in everyday existence, that drive the process of acculturation; see <i>Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800</i>, Miriam Kochan, trans., New York: Harper and Row, 1973. But it is not only for the sake of understanding rightly the formation of judgment in the far distant past; it is equally important for understanding the most basic problems of judgment in our collective present. We need many more studies such as Braudel’s, such as Walter Prescott Webb’s <i>The Great Plains </i>(1931), New York: Grosset &amp; Dunlop, n.d., such as Redcliffe Salaman’s <i>The History and Social Influence of the Potato </i>(1949), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, not only to put long-past events into a better perspective, thus becoming better able to understand previous problems of judgment, but far more to learn how to get a grasp on complicated present situations that may actually carry with them some of the most serious contemporary problems of judgment. If we can better understand the way elemental education works, however, we may be able to define a significant contemporary cultural problem. If historically, the elemental, <i>given</i>, environment has performed the function of engendering a general acceptance of one or another cultural repertory, what, if anything, needs to be done with respect to this function as the human relation to the environment becomes less and less elemental and given? Let us put this question a bit more concretely. Let us assume that the great eighteenth-century environmental speculations, as best represented by Montesquieu’s <i>Spirit of the Laws</i>, were in essence sound, and let us formulate the fundamental proposition as follows: the temperate zones have been the most culturally dynamic because there the elemental environment is the most inherently dialectical, uniting within single areas geographically and climatologically distinct environments, which ineluctably elicit a generally shared culture that necessarily combines diversity within unity. If such a proposition is true, and it seems sufficiently plausible to be worth serious investigation, then the question follows, what long-range effects should we expect upon the character of the culture we generally share from the leveling and the standardization of the environment that has proceeded apace during the last hundred years or so in the temperate zones of the world? I am not at all sure what the answer to such a question is, for the number of factors that would need to be taken into account are immense —I am not even at all sure that such a question can be answered with any degree of confidence. I pose it here, however, to drive home the fact that we are subject to powerful forces that impose one or another form of general acceptance on culture, and that it may behoove us to make these processes a subject of serious study.</p>