CHAPTER FOUR Nature, Means and Knowledge No mythology is more familiar than that which tells how labor is due to trespass of man upon divine preroga¬ tives, an act that brought curse upon the earth and woe to man. Because of this primeval rebellion against God, men toil amid thorns to gain an uncertain livelihood, and women bring forth children in pain. The tale is touch¬ ing evidence that man finds it natural that nature should ^ support his activities, and unnatural that the burden of continued and hard endeavor should be placed upon him. Festivity is spontaneous; labor needs to be accounted for. There is a long distance between the birth of the old legend and the formulation of classic political economy; but the doctrine of the latter that labor which is the source of value signifies cost, onerous sacrifice of present consummation to attainment of later good, expresses the same human attitude.
Yet, in fact, it was not enjoyment of the apple but the enforced penalty of labor that made man as the gods, knowing good and evil instead of just having and enjoy¬ ing them. The exacting conditions imposed by nature. that have to be observed in order that work be carried through to success, are the source of all noting and recoid- ing of nature’s doings. They supply the discipline that chastens exuberant fancy into respect for the operation of events, and that effect subjection of thought to a per¬ tinent order of space and time. While leisure is the mother of drama, sport and literary spell-binding, neces- SOUTIIE-’.N CALIFORNIA SCiiOOL OF THEOLOGY LIBRARY EXPERIENCE AND NATURE sity is the mother of invention, discovery and consecutive reflection. While at happy junctures the course of ex¬ traordinary events may be bound or wheedled by en¬ joyed rite and ceremony, only work places a conclusive spell upon homely, everyday affairs. Spears, snares, gins, traps, utensils, baskets and webs may have their potency enhanced by adherence to ceremonial design, but the design is never a complete substitute for conformity to the efficacious resistances and adaptations of natural materials. Acumen, shrewdness, inventiveness, accumu¬ lation and transmission of information are products of the necessity under which man labors to turn away from absorption in direct having and enjoying, so as to con¬ sider things in their active connections as means and as signs. The same need converts immediate emotion irrelevant to everything save its own thrill into ordered interest in the movements and possibilities of natural events. Everything is done to bedeck utilities, instru¬ mentalities, with reminders of consummatory events so as to lessen their burden, but useful arts in return supply ceremonial arts with their materials, appliances and patterns.
Tools, means, agencies are the characteristic thing in industry; such a statement is tautology. By its nature technology is concerned with things and acts in their in¬ strumentalities, not in their immediacies. Objects and events figure in work not as fulfillments, realizations, but in behalf of other things of which they are means and predictive signs. A tool is a particular thing, but it is more than a particular thing, since it is a thing in which a connection, a sequential bond of nature is embodied. It possesses an objective relation as its own defining prop- NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 123 erty. Its perception as well as its actual use takes the mind to other things. The spear suggests the feast not directly but through the medium of other external things, such as the game and the hunt, to which the sight of the weapon transports imagination. Man’s bias towards him¬ self easily leads him to think of a tool solely in relation to himself, to his hand and eyes, but its primary relation¬ ship is toward other external things, as the hammer to the nail, and the plow to the soil. Only through this objective bond does it sustain relation to man himself and his activi¬ ties. A tool denotes a perception and acknowledgment of sequential bonds in nature.
Classic philosophy, was conceived in wonder, born in leisure and bred in consummatory contemplation. Hence it noted the distinction between objects consummatory or final in the fine arts and instrumental and operative in the industrial. It then employed the distinction to interpret nature in terms of a dialectical physics. Useful arts are possible because things have observable efficiencies; but they are necessary because of lack, privation, imperfec¬ tion, Non-being. This deficiency is manifest in sensation and appetite; the very transitiveness of materials which renders them capable of transformation into serviceable forms is evidence that they too lack fullness of Being. Things have potentialities or are instrumental because they are not Being, but rather Being in process of be¬ coming. They lend themselves to operative connections that fulfill them because they are not themselves Real in an adequate sense. This point of view protected Greek thought from that modern onesidedness which conceives tools as mere subjective conveniences. But the safe¬ guard was at the expense of the introduction into nature EXPERIENCE AND NATURE of a split in Being itself, its division into some things which are inherently defective, changing, relational, and other things which are inherently perfect, permanent, self-possessed. Other dualisms such as that between sensuous appetite and rational thought, between the particular and universal, between the mechanical and the telic, between experience and science, between matter and mind, are but the reflections of this primary meta¬ physical dualism.
The counterpart of the conversion of esthetic objects into objects of science, into the one, true and good, was the conversion of operative and transitive objects into things which betray absence of full Being. This absence causes their changing instability which is, none the less, after the model of materials of the useful arts, potentially useful for ends beyond themselves. The social division into a laboring class and a leisure class, between industry and esthetic contemplation, became a metaphysical division into things which are mere means and things which are ends. Means are menial, subservient, slavish; and ends liberal and final; things as means testify to inherent defect, to dependence, while ends testify to independent and intrinsically self-sufficing be¬ ing. Hence the former can never be known in themselves but only in their subordination to objects that are final, while the latter can be known in and through themselves by self-enclosed reason. Thus the identification of knowledge with esthetic contemplation and the exclusion from science of trial, work, manipulation and adminis¬ tration of things, comes full circle.
The ingratitude displayed by thinkers to artists who by creation of harmoniously composed objects supplied NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 125 idealistic philosophy with empirical models of their ultimately real objects, was shown in even greater measure to artisans. The accumulated results of the ob¬ servations and procedures of farmers, navigators, build¬ ers furnished matter-of-fact information about natural events, and also supplied the pattern of logical and meta¬ physical subordination of change to directly possessed and enjoyed fulfillments. While thinkers condemned the industrial class and despised labor, they borrowed from them the facts and the conceptions that gave form and substance to their own theories. For apart from processes of art there was no basis for introducing the idea of fulfillment, realization, into the notion of end nor for interpreting antecedent operations as potentialities.
Yet we should not in turn exhibit ingratitude. For if Greek thinkers did not achieve science, they achieved the idea of science. This accomplishment was beyond the reach of artist and artisan. For no matter how solid the content of their own observations and beliefs about natural events, that content was bound down to occasions of origin and use. The relations they recognized were of local areas in time and place. Subject-matter under¬ went a certain distortion when it was lifted out of this context, and placed in a realm of eternal forms. But the idea of knowledge was thereby liberated, and the scheme of logical relationships among existences held up as an ideal of inquiry. Thinking was uncovered as an enter- prize having its own objects and procedures; and the discovery of thought as method of methods in all arts added a new dimension to all subsequent experience. It would be an academic matter to try to balance the credit items due to the discovery of thought and of logic as a EXPERIENCE AND NATURE free enterprise, against the debit consequences resulting from the hard and fast separation of the instrumental and final.
A great change took place in Greek experience between the time of Homer and Hesiod and the fifth century before Christ. The earlier period evinces a gloomy temper of life. The sense of the sovereignty of fortune, largely ill- fortune, is prevalent. The temper is shown by such quotations as the following: “Thus the gods have de¬ cided for unhappy mortals that men should live in misery while they themselves live free from suffering.” “A thousand woes traverse the abode of man; the earth is gorged with them and the sea filled; day and night bring grief. They come in silence for prudent Zeus has taken away their voice.” “Men favored by Hecate have no need for knowledge, memory or effort to achieve success; she acts alone without the assistance of her favorites.” Divination of the intent of unseen powers and pious sacrifice are man’s only resource, but this is of no avail. Reckon no man happy till after his death. The gods have indeed bestowed arts on man to ameliorate his hard lot, but their issue is uncertain. The ends rests with the gods and with fate who rules even the gods, a fate to be neither bribed with offerings nor yet compelled by knowledge and art.
By the days of the Sophists and their great Athenian successors there is marked change in mood. The con¬ ditions then existed that have occasioned the myth of Greek serenity. The Sophists taught that man could largely control the fortunes of life by mastery of the arts. No one has exceeded Plato in awareness of present ills. But since they are due to ignorance and opinion, they are NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 127 remediable, he holds, by adequate knowledge. Philos¬ ophy should terminate in an art of social control. The great rival of Plato taught that fortune “is a fantom which men have invented to excuse their own imprudence. Fortune does not easily resist thought and for the most part an instructed and far-seeing soul will attain its goal.” In short arts based on knowledge cooperate with nature and render it amenable to human happiness. The gods recede into twilight. Divination has a powerful com¬ petitor. Worship becomes moral. Medicine, war, and the crafts desert the temple and the altar of the patron- god of the guild, as inventions, tools, techniques of action and works multiply.
This period of confident expansion did not endure. It soon gave way; it was succeeded by what Gilbert Murray has so well named the failure of nerve, and a return to the supernatural, philosophy changing from a supreme art into a way of access to the supernatural. Yet the episode even if brief is more than historically significant. It manifests another way open to man in the midst of an uncertain, incomplete and precarious universe; another way, that is, in addition to that of celebrating such moments of respite and festal joy as occur in the troubled life of man. Through instrumental arts, arts of control based on study of nature, objects which are fulfilling and good, may be multiplied and rendered secure. This road after almost two millenia of obscuration and desertion was refound and retaken; its rediscovery marks what we call the modern era. Consideration of the significance of science as a resource in a world of mixed uncertainty, peril, and of uniformity, stability, furnishes us with the theme of this chapter of experience.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE That the sciences were born of the arts, the physical sciences of the crafts and technologies of healing, naviga¬ tion, war and the working of wood, metals, leather, flax and wool; the mental sciences of the arts of political management, is I suppose, an admitted fact. The dis¬ tinctively intellectual attitude which marks scientific inquiry was generated in efforts at controlling persons and things so that consequences, issues, outcomes would be more stable and assured. The first step away from oppression by immediate things and events was taken when man employed tools and appliances, for manipulat¬ ing things so as to render them contributory to desired objects. In responding to things not in their immediate qualities but for the sake of ulterior results, immediate qualities are dimmed, while those features which are signs, indices of something else, are distinguished. A thing is more significantly what it makes possible than what it immediately is. The very conception of cogni¬ tive meaning, intellectual significance, is that things in their immediacy are subordinated to what they portend and give evidence of. An intellectual sign denotes that a thing is not taken immediately but is referred to some¬ thing that may come in consequence of it. Intellectual meanings may themselves be appropriated, enjoyed and appreciated; but the character of intellectual meaning is instrumental. Fortunate for us is it that tools and their using can be directly enjoyed; otherwise all work would be drudgery. But this additive fact does not alter the definition of a tool; it remains a thing used as an agency for some concluding event.
The first groping steps in defining spatial and tem¬ poral qualities, in transforming purely immediate quali- NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 129 ties of local things into generic relationships, were taken through the arts. The finger, the foot, the unit of walk¬ ing were used to measure space; measurements of weight originated in the arts of commercial exchange and manu¬ facture. Geometry, beginning as agricultural art, further emancipated space from being a localized quality of im¬ mediate extensity. But the radically different ways of conceiving geometry found in ancient and in modern science is evidence of the slowness of the process of emancipation of even geometrical forms from direct or esthetic traits. In Greek astronomy the intrinsic quali¬ ties of figures always dominated their instrumental sig¬ nificance in inquiry; they were forms to which phenomena had to conform instead of means of indirect measure¬ ments. Hardly till our own day did spatial relations get emancipated from esthetic and moral qualities, and become wholly intellectual and relational, abstracted from immediate qualifications, and thereby generalized to their limit.
Anything approaching a history of the growth of recog¬ nition of things in their intellectual or instrumental phase is far beyond our present scope. We can only point out some of its net results. In principle the step is taken whenever objects are so reduced from their status of complete objects as to be treated as signs or indications of other objects. Enter upon this road and the time is sure to come when the appropriate object-of-knowledge is stripped of all that is immediate and qualitative, of all that is final, self-sufficient. Then it becomes an anatomized epitome of just and only those traits which are of indicative or instrumental import. Abstraction is not a psychological incident; it is a following to its EXPERIENCE AND NATURE logical conclusion of interest in those phases of natural existence which are dependable and fruitful signs of other things; which are means of prediction by formulation in terms implying other terms. Self-evidence ceases to be a characteristic trait of the fundamental objects of either sensory or noetic objects. Primary propositions are statements of objects in terms which procure the simplest and completest forming and checking of other proposi¬ tions. Many systems of axioms and postulates are pos¬ sible, the more the merrier, since new propositions as consequences are thus brought to light. Genuine science is impossible as long as the object esteemed for its own in¬ trinsic qualities is taken as the object of knowledge. Its completeness, its immanent meaning, defeats its use as indicating and implying.
Said William James, “Many were the ideal prototypes of rational order: teleological and esthetic ties between things...as well as logical and mathematical relations. The most promising of these things at first were of course the richer ones, the more sentimental ones. The baldest and least promising were mathe¬ matical ones; but the history of the latter’s application is a history of steadily advancing successes, while that of the sentimentally richer ones is one of relative sterility and failure. Take those aspects of phenomena which interest you as a human being most...and barren are all your results. Call the things of nature as much as you like by sentimental moral and esthetic names, no natural consequences follow from the naming...But when you give the things mathemati¬ cal and mechanical names and call them so many solids in just such positions, describing just such paths with NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 131 just such velocities, all is changed. Your “things” realize the consequences of the names by which you classed them.”1 A fair interpretation of these pregnant sentences is that as long as objects are viewed telically, as long as the objects of the truest knowledge, the most real forms of being, are thought of as ends, science does not advance. Objects are possessed and appreciated, but they are not known. To know, means that men have become willing to turn away from precious possessions; willing to let drop what they own, however precious, in behalf of a grasp of objects which they do not as yet own. Multi¬ plied and secure ends depend upon letting go existent ends, reducing them to indicative and implying means. The great historic obstacle to science was unwillingness to make the surrender, lest moral, esthetic and religious objects suffer. To large groups of persons, the bald and dry objects of natural science are still objects of fear. The mechanical or mathematical-logical object presents itself as a rival of the ideal and final object. Then philosophy becomes a device for conserving “the spiritual values of the universe” by devices of interpretation which converts the material and mechanical into mind. By means of a dialectic of the implications of the possibility of knowledge, the physical is transformed into something mental, psychic — as if psychic existence were sure to be inherently more ideal than the physical.
The net result of the new scientific method was con¬ ception of nature as a mathematicai-mechanical object. If modern philosophy, reflecting the tendencies of the 1 James, Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, pp. 605-06.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE new science, abolished final causes from nature, it was because concern with qualitative ends, already existing objects of possession and enjoyment, blocked inquiry, discovery and control, and ended in barren dialectical disputes about definitions and classifications. A candid mind can hardly deny that sensory qualities, colors, moist and dry, hard and soft, light and heavy are genuine natural ends. In them the potentialities of the body are brought into functioning, while the activity of the body thus achieved brings in turn to completion potentialities in nature outside of the body. Nevertheless the theory that final objects are the appropriate objects of knowledge, in assimilating knowledge to esthetic contemplation had fatal consequences for science. All natural phenomena had to be known in terms of qualities. Hot and cold, wet and dry, up and down, light and heavy were things to know with and by. They were essential forms, active principles of nature. But Galileo and his scientific and philosophical followers (like Descartes and Hobbes) reversed the method by asserting that these sensory forms are things to be known, challenges to inquiry, prob¬ lems, not solutions nor terms of solution. The assertion was a general one; it necessitated search for objects of knowledge. Dependable material with which to know was found in a different realm of being; in spatial relations, positions, masses, mathematically defined, and in motion as change of space having direction and velocity. Qualities were no longer things to do with; they were things already done, effects, requiring to be known by statement and description in mathematical and mechanical relations. The only world which de¬ fines and describes and explains was a world of masses in motion, arranged in a system of Cartesian coordinates.
NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 133 When we view experientially this change, what oc¬ curs is the kind of thing that happens in the useful arts when natural objects, like crude ores, are treated as materials for getting something else. Their character ceases to lie in their immediate qualities, in just what they are and as directly enjoyed. Their character is now representative; some pure metal, iron, copper, etc. is their essence, which may be extracted as their “true” nature, their “reality.” To get at this reality many existent constituents have to be got rid of. From the standpoint of the object, pure metal, these things to be eliminated are “false,” irrelevant and obstructive. They stand in the way, and in the existent thing those qualities are alone significant which indicate the ulterior objective and which offer means for attaining it.
Modern science represents a generalized recognition and adoption of the point of view of the useful arts, for it proceeds by employment of a similar operative technique of manipulation and reduction. Physical science would be impossible without the appliances and procedures of separation and combinations of the industrial arts. In useful arts, the consequence is increase of power, multipli¬ cation of ends appropriated and enjoyed, and an en¬ larged and varied flexibility and economy in means used to achieve ends. Metal can be put to thousands of uses, while the crude ore can only be beheld for whatever esthetic qualities it happens to present, or be hurled bodily at game or an enemy. Reduction of natural existences to the status of means thus presents nothing in¬ herently adverse to possessed and appreciated ends, but rather renders the latter a more secure and extensive affair.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE Why then has it been so often assumed in modern philosophy that the advance of physical science has created a serious metaphysical problem; namely, that of the relation of a mechanical world as the object of knowledge to ends; the reconciliation of antithetical worlds of description and appreciation? In empirical fact, the advance of mechanistic science has multiplied and diversified ends; has increased wants and satisfac¬ tions, and has multiplied and diversified the means of attaining them. Why the problem? There are two his¬ torical empirical reasons to be given in answer. In the first place, the Aristotelian metaphysics of potentiality and actuality, of objects consummatory of natural proc¬ esses, was intricately entangled with an astronomy and physics which had become incredible. It was also en¬ tangled with doctrines and institutions in politics and economics which were fast getting out of relationship to current social needs. The simplest recourse was to treat the classic tradition as the Jonah of science and throw it bodily overboard. The method was imperious and impatient, but it served a need. By a single act it relieved scientific inquiries of notions that were hamper¬ ing, even paralyzing investigation into nature and that were limiting new practices by outworn sanctions.
By itself alone, however, this cause would hardly have created more than a passing historic episode. The reason that rendered the abandonment of any theory of natural ends something more than a gesture of impatient haste lies in the persistence of the classic theory of knowledge. Greek thought regarded possession, contemplation, as the essence of science, and thought of the latter as such a complete possession of reality as incorporates it with NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 135 mind. The notion of knowledge as immediate posses¬ sion of Being was retained when knowing as an actual affair radically altered. Even when science had come to include a method of experimental search and finding, it was still defined as insight into, grasp of, real being as such, in comparison with which other modes of experience are imperfect, confused and perverted. Hence a serious problem. If the proper object of science is a mathe- matico-mechanical world (as the achievements of science have proved to be the case) and if the object of science defines the true and perfect reality (as the perpetuation of the classic tradition asserted), then how can the objects of love, appreciation — -whether sensory or ideal — and de¬ votion be included within true reality?
Efforts to answer this question constitute a large part of the technical content of modern metaphysical thought. Given the premises, its import covers almost every thing from the problem of freedom, ideals and ideas to the relation of the physical and the mental. With re¬ spect to the latter, there is the causal problem of their existential relation; and there is the cognitive problem of how one order of existence can refer to the other in such a way as to know it. We are not concerned here with the voluminous literature and various (controversial and controverted) points of view that have emerged. It is pertinent, however, to recall the source of the problems; and to register the statement that without the underlying dubious assumption, we are not called upon to find solu¬ tions; they cease to be perplexities as soon as certain pre¬ mises are surrendered. The premise which concerns us here is that science is grasp of reality in its final self- sufficing form. If the proper object of knowledge has the EXPERIENCE AND NATURE character appropriate to the subject matter of the useful arts, the problem in question evaporates. The objects of science, like the direct objects of the arts, are an order of relations which serve as tools to effect immediate havings and beings. Goods, objects with qualities of fulfillment are the natural fruition of the discovery and employment of means, when the connection of ends with a sequential order is determined. Immediate em¬ pirical things are just what they always were: endings of natural histories. Physical science does not set up another and rival realm of antithetical existence; it reveals the state or order upon which the occurrence of im¬ mediate and final qualities depends. It adds to casual having of ends an ability to regulate the date, place and manner of their emergence. Fundamentally, the as¬ sertion that this condition of ordered relationships is mathematic, mechanical, is tautology; that is, the meaning of anything which is such that perception and use of it enables us to regulate consequences or attain terminal qualities is a mathematical, mechanical — or if you please — logical order. If we did not discover those which we have found, we should have to find another, if deliberate planning and execution are to occur.
If science be perfect grasp, or envisagement of being, and if science terminate with a mathematico-mechanical world, then, in the second place, we have upon our hands the problems of reality and appearance. In ancient thought, the problem occurred in a simple form. There were higher and lower forms of knowledge; but all stages of knowledge were alike realizations of some level of Being, so that appearance in contrast with reality meant only a lower degree of Being, being imperfect or not fully NATURE, MEANS AND KNOWLEDGE 137 actualized. In modern science, with its homogenous natural world, this contrast of perfect and defective Be¬ ing is meaningless. It is a question of knowledge or error, not of differences of cognitive grasp in one to one correspondence with different levels of Being. In the ancient view, sensation and opinion are good forms of knowledge in their place; what they know, their place, is just an inferior grade of Being. To the modern mind, they are not knowledge of anything unless they are brought to agree with the deliverances of science. Is matter an appearance of mind as true reality? Or is the mental only an appearance of the physical as the final reality? Or are both of them appearances of some still more ultimate reality?