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.[[#A1|A1]]</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.A2

<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.A3</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.A4 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.A5</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.A6 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.A7 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.A8</p>

<p>Culture is man’s Lamarckian heritage. Its vital function is to aid in the making of judgment.A9 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.A10 Life, through judgment, makes a cosmos from chaos.A11 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.A12 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.A13</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.A14</p>

<p>Popular culture shows clearly how the vital problem of judgment is central. Through folk wisdom, people pass to one another their accumulated experience in dealing with the mundane situations of which they must judge. This wisdom is situational, in large part, and thus it varies according to time and place: the works and days of the tropics are not the same as those of the desert or the uplands of Greece. What is found wise will vary, but the vital function of finding certain things wise nevertheless remains constant —that function is simply to help us all judge our daily circumstances. And what is perhaps most surprising is not the fact of variation according to situation, which we should expect as a natural outcome of the Lamarckian flexibility of culture, but rather the remarkable continuity and stability of certain features of the folk tradition. There is a kernel in common between the Book of Proverbs, Hesiod’s <i>Works and Days</i>, <i>Poor Richard's Almanac</i>, and the sayings of Confucius, and all of these can still be read, albeit with the exercise of selective judgment, as a source of significant advice.A15</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.A16 We have learned to suspend judgment, at least in the reflective sphere, which permits us to grasp the scepter from superstition.A17 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.A18</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.A19 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.A20</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.A21 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.A22</p>