A Humanist Science

Values and Ideals in Social Inquiry

Philip Selznick

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780804779692
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Politische Philosophie

Providing a capstone to Philip Selznick's influential body of scholarly work, A Humanist Science insightfully brings to light the value-centered nature of the social sciences. The work clearly challenges the supposed separation of fact and value, and argues that human values belong to the world of fact and are the source of the ideals that govern social and political institutions. By demonstrating the close connection between the social sciences and the humanities, Selznick reveals how the methods of the social sciences highlight and enrich the study of such values as well-being, prosperity, rationality, and self-government.

The book moves from the animating principles that make up the humanist tradition to the values that are central to the social sciences, analyzing the core teachings of these disciplines with respect to the moral issues at stake. Throughout the work, Selznick calls attention to the conditions that affect the emergence, realization, and decline of human values, offering a valuable resource for scholars and students of law, sociology, political science, and philosophy.

Part One The Humanist Imagination

1

The Humanist Tradition

THE IDEA OF HUMANIST KNOWLEDGE goes back at least to the thought of Socrates, as presented in Plato’s dialogues; it is prefigured in ancient religious ideas about human nature and the imperatives of a human life. The humanist tradition is or should be more definite than either of these; humanist science requires more direction and warrant. Like other moral and intellectual traditions, such as rationalism, romanticism, liberalism, and conservatism, humanism is a loosely woven fabric, composed of varied strands. As one or another strand predominates, a “new” humanism is proclaimed.

We need not be distracted by the many different voices that are prepared to say: “I too am a humanist.” This claim has been made by Marxists, Catholics, and many students of “the humanities.” Some historians have traced humanism to Renaissance thinkers, like Erasmus (1466—1536), who rekindled admiration for ancient Greece and Rome, brought to Europe a deep regard for learning, and used Latin to transcend national and linguistic boundaries. Today humanism is mainly associated with rejection of supernaturalism and with confidence in the human capacity to find moral truth without the aid of divine revelation.

There is substance in all these claims, but there is also a risk that humanism becomes so large a tent, so spacious an idea, as to lose all distinctiveness. Therefore we need to make plain the animating principles of the humanist vision. Here I emphasize the principles that lead to “humanist science.” These have important connections to major themes in Western intellectual history: the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, Judeo-Christian beliefs, Renaissance art and learning, the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment project, nineteenth-century romanticism, historicism, and existentialism, twentieth-century thought, especially in cultural anthropology, and the humanist naturalism of American pragmatism. All have contributed to the humanist tradition; all have added genuine understanding of human frailty, suffering, and potentiality. Three main components of the humanist tradition are: (1) belief in and quest for objectively grounded moral truth about social and personal well-being, (2) liberation from ignorance, superstition, and uncritical acceptance of custom and authority, and (3) rejection of whatever threatens the wholeness and intrinsic worth of human persons.

The Examined Life

In Plato’s Apology we learn of Socrates’ thoughts after he was condemned to die for allegedly corrupting the youth of Athens. Invoking Apollo’s creed,¹ Socrates says, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”² The examined life is informed by our best efforts to know what virtue requires and what obstacles must be surmounted.

The Centrality of Ideals

In the Platonic vision, our lives should be governed by appropriate ideals or standards. We compare our choices, projects, and customs with the ideals to which they should aspire. For this we need sound knowledge of human virtues and the forms of life that lead to their realization or undoing. We must ask what is the distinctive excellence or virtue (arete) of a craft or institution, a son, father, mother, teacher, or ruler. The virtues are known by the ideals they foster and the excellences they demand. These are the criteria by which we judge what we do and how we think.

For Socrates, and more generally for Greek paideia, education is not an unreflective process of enculturation by which one generation exercises its power over a dependent and receptive successor. Rather, an ideal of critical inquiry prevails. We know it today as the ideal of liberal education.

Here we see, if only dimly, the chief feature of humanist science: analytical and empirical study of ideals, understood as at once latent in and threatened by the vagaries of social life. The ideals we should treasure are necessarily precarious, often frustrated or distorted by unwanted pressures and temptations. Yet they are also grounded in social experience—that is, in impulses, fears, hopes, and opportunities.

Ideals and Knowledge

The Greek preoccupation with ideals is accompanied by two doctrines that have long intrigued students of mind and nature. The first is Plato’s strong contrast between a pristine, unchanging world of forms or ideas and a more clouded, elusive, less reliable world of perception and conduct that obscures the pristine realm. According to Plato, inconstancy is the hallmark of ordinary experience, whose underlying reality is veiled by uncertain images and filtered through the contingent circumstances of everyday life.³ Since those experiences produce only appearances, they have dubious value as sources of knowledge. To achieve true knowledge, Plato tells us, we must leave the blinkered world of cave-dwellers and enjoy the sunlight of reason. Only pure intellect, undimmed by distorting senses, can reveal the eidos—the “form” or “idea”—that gives an object its special character. Truth is not fathered by our senses; instead, its parents are reflection and analysis, which must prevail. Everything worth knowing has an eidos, which, once discovered, permits us to clarify meanings and identify objects, for example as “portraits” or “landscapes.” We thus discern the special qualities of justice, piety, love, or beauty. These “ideal types” are truer than perceptions of unanalyzed experience. In Platonic metaphysics there is no reality apart from the form that gives a phenomenon its name and nature.

A scientific or theoretical ideal loses its innocence and its moral neutrality when it becomes a basis for criticism and a guide to conduct. Although in theory the Platonic doctrine speaks to all of nature, and the foundations of all knowledge, it comes into its own when human ideals and their vicissitudes are examined. The “ideas” of justice, piety, love, and beauty are normative as well as cognitive. The distinctive virtues of each are clarified, and standards leading to those virtues are fashioned. In effect, what was a device for advancing natural science becomes, for the moral philosopher, a vision of the good.

Greek Naturalism

Plato’s great pupil, Aristotle, shared his master’s view that moral ideals should be based on objective knowledge. However, he was more sensitive to and respectful of the texture, promise, and troubles of social life. For Aristotle, a central idea is telos or “end-state.” The telos of a structure, process, or organism is an ideal condition that realizes special values and the capacity to survive and flourish. Telos is natural in that it draws on resources that the system itself produces. For Aristotle, as for Plato, an ideal is an animating principle, not a construct of the intellect; it is summoned and sustained, or threatened and impaired, by recognizably human desires and needs.

An example is physical and mental health, which necessarily includes standards of well-being. The telos of a person, a college, or a community is a state of well-being. The criterion of that state is some special competence, such as, for persons, emotional maturity; for schools, intellectual discipline; for families, care and commitment. To know a telos is to know the relevant ideals and the possible congenial or uncongenial conditions. This is where “nature” comes in.

For Aristotle, eidos and telos are related ideas. Telos without eidos is an incoherent notion because telos presumes or predicates eidos. An eidos cannot be realized or understood without knowing what human life makes possible and what it forecloses.

Seen in this light, “experience” is not flux and disorder. Instead, recurrent and orderly patterns are discovered. We can learn what ideals make sense in a given context, what disciplines they require, and what makes their realization possible, likely, or unlikely. In his Politics, Aristotle studied the variety of regimes and their significance for self-government and the abuse of power. This understanding of an empirical and grounded connection between ideals and realities is Aristotle’s distinctive contribution to humanist thought.

Ideals and Self-Knowledge

When Socrates explored the nuances of virtue, he obeyed Apollo’s dictum “Know thyself.” At its core this doctrine is an ideal of humility. Visitors to Delphi were enjoined to remember that they were humans, not gods, and that they should not aspire beyond their limits. Only gods can do wonders; humans must learn the virtues of moderation, whether in drinking, fasting, or expressing emotions. Moderation was, however, a somewhat cramped understanding of what self-knowledge entails. A broader vision is found in the Greek commitment to self-awareness. “Know thyself ” is more than a principle of restraint. It is a key to the human spirit. The virtues of humility and self-control may sometimes take quite primitive forms, such as unreflective subordination to rulers or priests. We should, instead, scrutinize the values that we cherish but only dimly understand and mindlessly defend. Socratic self-knowledge attends to nuance and irony, to meanings that reveal what ideals demand and what they cost.

Humanity Unchained

The Greek dedication to reflection and self-knowledge—especially in the legacies of Plato and Aristotle—gave great authority to philosophical learning and set standards for two millennia of humanist scholarship. The Greek texts honored rigorous thought about human nature, including its varieties and troubles.

This commitment to critical inquiry would, in time, weaken the authority of tradition. Although the main concern was human virtue, ideals of piety were also threatened. This was the charge against Socrates, a charge not without foundation. That reflection is dangerous and potentially subversive is a thought expressed, with characteristic eloquence, by Thomas Jefferson: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”⁴ The chief source of this tyranny is the claim to a monopoly of truth and a right to suppress dissent.

Enlightenment Humanism

Eighteenth-century intellectuals in Europe and America, building on the earlier writings of Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Descartes, Luther, and Calvin, flocked to the banner of freedom. Liberties of conscience and expression were extolled: freedom is protected when people can think without constraint and speak without fear of political or clerical repression. “Man is born free,” said Rousseau, “and he is everywhere in chains.”⁵ The most burdensome bonds are ignorance, superstition, and uncritical subordination. Enlightenment humanism sought to break these fetters and thereby reclaim an ennobling heritage. It expressed confidence in reason and regarded humans as rational beings, thus creating an icon of modernity. From now on, it was thought, the legitimacy of authority would depend on how well it was justified by the good sense of humankind. This outlook can be seen in the Protestant Reformation and its sectarian offshoots. Protestants of every stripe demanded freedom of conscience, belief, and worship. They argued that a public policy should respect the individual’s quest for redemption. These claims led to a great flowering of theological discussion, which helped create a culture of disputation. People bowed to religious precepts and clerics; they welcomed enforcement of conventional morality. However, they also embraced the idea that religious identity is a chosen state of grace, a manifestation of the self-forming human spirit. At once critical and constructive, this doctrine became part of the humanist tradition. Renaissance humanists—Dante, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Spinoza—differed from earlier writers in thinking for themselves and seeking the support of an international community of independent scholars. They celebrated learning and unfettered thought, which required freedom from established authority. Although Enlightenment humanism⁶ spoke loudly on behalf of the human spirit, its vision was dimmed by a fateful overreaching : rationality in human affairs was exaggerated, a defect that produced an intellectual upheaval in the nineteenth century as rationalism was offset by romantic and historical ideas.

The Menace of Abstraction

A basic failing of the Enlightenment project was its inability to grasp the concreteness and variety of human existence. The idea of humanity withers when a narrowed conception of reason becomes the chief virtue and main criterion of human achievement. Though an appeal to reason can be uplifting and ennobling, by itself it cannot do justice to the aspirations and sufferings of humanity, and especially the human need for attachment and identity. As the humanist tradition developed, it came to embrace some of the Enlightenment perspectives. Sapere aude—“dare to know”—was a motto of Immanuel Kant. Yet humanism had to distance itself from ideas that derogated tradition, passion, and sentiment and that celebrated only rational choice and logical argument. For some humanists, Enlightenment philosophy was more menacing than attractive. The abstractions of the Enlightenment could not see the value of diversity or appreciate the knotty texture of the social fabric.

“Glory be to God for dappled things.”⁷ This pious verse gave thanks for “pied beauty”—that is, for a mixed and multifarious natural world. Gerard Manley Hopkins saw beauty in open fields and the flourishing abundance of species and habitats. He saw divinity vividly displayed in brambled hillsides, self-renewing pastures, and virgin woodlands, not in unvarying stands of wheat or other single-species crops. In a theological idiom, God’s plenitude is a humans-friendly world, where people can feel at home and live in full awareness of diversity in unity. A yearning for concreteness and the diversity it brings is at the core of the humanist tradition.

Organic Unity

Some humanist writers have relied on the concept of organic unity to explain what they have in mind. This idiom is sometimes explicit, as in the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,⁸ but more often “organic unity” is an implicit idea, not very clear or well understood. It is, however, a key to the humanist ethos.

Organic unity is readily apparent in biological systems that experience growth, adaptation, and close integration of structures and functions. The parts are connected to each other and help sustain a living whole. Applied to social life, the idea of organic unity points to vital structures and processes such as the creation of persons, beliefs, communities, and cultures. All are mainly products of adaptation and self-renewal ; they are not necessarily designed or purpose-driven. Human persons, for example, are formed by unchosen relationships and unplanned interactions. Habits, attitudes, and self-conceptions are formed, which in time distinguish individual beings. Yet selves and identities are only more or less well integrated; they are sometimes riven by enduring conflicts. Human personalities are not assembled mechanically like clocks or computers. Rather, they are formed by unique histories of attachment or trauma.

We should distinguish organic unities from other unities, such as rationally designed systems of coordination and cooperation. The latter may be held together by specific benefits or by coercion and command. These are indeed kinds of unity, but they are not organic unities. The latter draw on quite different sources of stability and cohesion, including shared beliefs and practices. The prize sought is more than bare survival or minimal levels of incentive and morale. Organic unities often supplement more artificial or mechanical forms of integration. Both kinds of unity abound, and both are needed. A major challenge for science and policy is to learn how mechan...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part One The Humanist Imagination
• Part Two Realms of Value
• Part Three Philosophy and Social Science
• Notes
• Index