By John U. Nef
(Pantheon, 1943)

(these excerpts, however, illustrate my own interests more than the key founding passages)

The modern disposition is to deny all rationality to the processes by which we attain a view of things which "are not sensible." We are fond of saying that "the American way" is the way of discussion, but we neglect general principles and the logical and intuitive thought to which their serious consideration should lead. The habit of discussion on this plane has been lost and along with it the discipline for the mind which the cultivation of such a habit encourages. This habit can only be reacquired with a very great deal of hard labor, for the intelligent discussion of the general, involving as it does the selection of relevant particulars for a purpose which while impartial is not literal, demands far more from the mind than a discussion which is limited to material particulars. We need not be surprised to find that we dislike the introduction of general principles into even our most serious discussions. For us first principles are nebulous; the appeal to them in connection with the practical matters and the concrete facts which we like to talk about is called preaching. We forget that unless there are rational grounds for good principles applicable to human beings because of their common humanity, there can be none for resisting the instincts of anger or hatred, or of cowardice as exemplified in submission to a particular race, a particular nation or a particular group. We are unable to recognize any distinction between thinking with one's mind and thinking with one's blood. We are unable to recognize any distinction between the exaltation produced by love and that produced by hate. We are unable to recognize any distinction between love and physical desire. We are unable to see that the one is more rational than the other. (13)

What has been said of beauty should be said also of abstract truth and of virtue. Philosophy is concerned with the nature of things, moral philosophy with what ought to be done. The controlling principle in both, as in art, can be found only in the realm of the transcendental. If that is not recognized, there can be no genuine metaphysics or moral philosophy, any more than there can be genuine art. This does not mean, as the vulgar suppose, that everyone can reason philosophically. The mere yearnings of the child, without knowledge or training, are no doubt excursions into the transcendental, the wonderful kingdom which can give a meaning to human life apparently denied to the animals. These yearnings are not to be confused with philosophical reasoning, though as felt by some children they are the stuff out of which it grows. Its development depends upon a profound and ordered knowledge of the world about us, of history and past learning, and of the philosophical tradition, considered as a unified whole, together with training in objectivity, taught partly by logic, partly by insistence on humility and love of humanity. To be valuable, philosophy must be rooted in the experience of the age, as great art must be. Like great art, it must make a use of the materials which the age provides. But a vast supply of knowledge is no more philosophy than a great number of documents and careful notes is a work of literature. Like great art, great philosophy can be achieved only when the man of genius, in possession of vast erudition, manages to rise above his circumstances, above his time and above himself. A prevalent opinion in certain modern philosophical schools is that any attempt at purely philosophical generalization must be either untrue or a mere verbal truism, valueless alike for knowledge and character. Another prevalent opinion is that anyone who acts on the assumption that it is possible to go beyond positive data in the search for truth is totalitarian in his influence, whatever his intentions may be. If he takes the line that the search for truth in the realm of the transcendental could provide scholars with guidance, he is likely to be charged with preparing the soil for an American Hitler.

These bogies, so frequently encountered in university circles, are largely the product of a mistaken view of history. Their exponents assume that the rise of national socialism and fascism has been preceded and accompanied by an increase in the use of men's intellectual faculties in the study of abstract problems. Actually the application to abstract problems of the intelligence combined with the love of humanity, characteristic of the Christian tradition at its best, has diminished. In so far as the intelligence and the love of humanity have been used in combination during recent decades, they have been applied increasingly to the improvement through science and invention of material conditions.

It was in German philosophy that the most attention was paid to abstract problems during much of the nineteenth century. As promising American students of philosophy and science were so often sent to Germany, they derived their impressions of the nature of abstract speculations from German masters. These masters were generally constitutionally minded; they believed in their time in the universality of law; it is therefore unfair to make them the fathers of so unconstitutional a regime as that established under Hitler. Historically speaking, moreover, totalitarianism, like representative government, is the product of a complex set of factors, among which ideas are only one. Yet there is no denying that some of the most famous German philosophers and historians (especially Fichte, Hegel, Treitschke and Nietzsche) did something to move German thinking in directions, traditionally congenial to Germans, which facilitated the establishment and the acceptance of totalitarianism in its extreme, national socialist form.

German philosophy led towards tyranny not because leading German philosophers dealt with the abstract, but because they sometimes dealt with it in a peculiar way. They combined the use of their intelligence with instinct and feeling, based upon the ancient German folk tradition, rather than with a love of humanity. Instinct and feeling, without humanity, may help to forge a common bond between a group of individuals, a race or a nation. Unlike love, art or abstract truth, they cannot help to forge a common bond between all human beings. They thrive on hatred, prejudice and a willingness to submit blindly to orders. They are less in accord with rational thought than is the spirit of Christian humanism, for hatred is less rational than love. It was partly the decline in the use of rational thought for abstract purposes (both by learned men and by the population of the Western countries generally) that enabled German philosophy in the late nineteenth century to gain prestige and to exercise a great influence throughout the world. If we are searching for the intellectual causes of the rise of totalitarianism, are they not to be found in the weakening of the rational process for speculative purposes at a time when its value for natural science, medicine, industrial technology and the handling of statistical data was being emphasized as never before?

Our American fear of speculative thought comes partly from the growth of irrationalism. This is not a result of the cultivation of abstract knowledge and of the search for wisdom, as university men so often assume. It is rather a product of the loss of belief and even of interest in non-material values and meanings. In a recent essay, Dr. Dewey makes the somewhat surprising assumption that Americans have a peculiar gift for discussion, which distinguishes them not only from the Germans but even (he appears to think) from Europeans generally. This is true, if at all, only in connection with the literal discussion of concrete experiences and above all of facts and figures. The example which Dr. Dewey offers is from engineering. It is both because Americans do not take easily to the serious discussion of general principles, and because their idea of the nature of such discussion is largely derived from nineteenth-century Germany, that they fall so readily into the error of assuming that the crisis of the twentieth century has been brought about by too much speculative philosophy.

Unless it is possible to reach with the mind, objectively, rough generalizations concerning what men ought to do, and concerning the nature of ideas which cannot be reduced to sense impressions, we are left with two alternatives. Guidance for action and even for thought will be derived exclusively from some authority," like the national socialist leader, an authority which is treated as above reason, or else everyone will be left to do whatever he thinks his tissues prompt. In the realm of moral philosophy the choice will be between government by decree or anarchy. Either orders will supplant free decisions on all issues that matter or the decisions will be determined by hunches without any regard for principles. In either case the learned profession will have abdicated its share in determining the course of men's moral conduct, or even the nature of the standards toward which they should aim.

The work of the philosopher, like that of the artist, has been rendered more difficult by the rise of modern industrialism. Just as the nature of labor and even of recreation partakes less of artistry than before the general adoption of machinery, so the hail of publicity and advertising, made possible by modern science and industry, beats upon the public and even upon the learned man right through the university walls that are supposed to shield him. It interferes with disinterested, informed reasoning. Modern men respond less to the normal promptings of their tissues than to the slogans and the half-baked advice dinned into them by the radio and the headline to drive their tissues into the kind of response that business or politics demands. The materials of the modern world might be incorporated into true philosophy as well as into genuine art. But with philosophy, as with art, it has become more rather than less necessary to cultivate a transcendental purpose independent of the world about us. The adjustment that we are urged to make to this industrialized world is exactly what the philosopher must avoid.

If there is any truth in Aristotle's statement that man is a rational animal, if all men possess at least a spark of rationality, then the advantage of permitting wise men, with their minds, a share in determining the meaning of existence and the standards of moral conduct is very great. If men are to live in free societies of any kind, and especially in great societies like those of modern times, it is indispensable that there should be standards against which they can measure their day-to-day conduct. When these standards have been determined with the help of reason, it is possible for all men and women, according to their intelligence and training, to recognize with their minds the soundness of the principles. They can get an inkling of the processes by which the principles are arrived at. That is the only basis for an enduring democracy, for government based not on fear but on assent. It is said that human beings generally are incapable of exercising the necessary intelligence. This may be true. If it is, democracy is doomed. The natural scientist, with all his knowledge, cannot supply the principles that are necessary to establish a rational moral order, unless there are philosophers capable of absorbing and integrating his knowledge and of relating it to moral purposes.

There is danger when the philosopher withdraws from the physical world, when he ignores the recent work done in the natural sciences just as there is when he ignores the aspirations and the needs of the groups, races and peoples of his age. There is danger when he speculates without reference to the new discoveries of history and of the many analytical and theoretical disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Such withdrawals by the philosopher are especially conspicuous when knowledge in the physical and biological sciences increases rapidly, when the aspirations of the common people are made more vocal with the extension of the suffrage and the multiplication of printed matter, and when the materials dug up by social scientists and historians multiply from one year to the next. It was partly a wholesome sense of the need for contact with the discoveries in the sciences that prompted the best of the pragmatists in their teaching and writing. Aristotle was undoubtedly a greater philosopher than he would have been had he not acquired a complete knowledge of science. A great modern philosophy can hardly be built without an understanding of the science of our age comparable to that which Aristotle had of his. But the tendency in the universities in recent times has been to suggest that science, or still worse some particular science, can operate in the place of philosophy.

Philosophy ought to draw exhaustively upon the discoveries of science, it ought to make use of scientific methods in so far as they are appropriate to its subject matter. But to expect to govern philosophy by the scientific method is rather like expecting to govern the mind simply by taking care of the body. It is standing the natural order of knowledge on its head. Philosophy puts together experiences, including the results of scientific investigations, in ways which are determined by the excursions of great minds into the transcendental. Just as the artist needs to draw his conceptions from the realm of the transcendental in the interest of beauty, so the philosopher needs to draw on his knowledge of it for the different, yet closely allied, purpose of truth. Abstractions and even parables and allegories are hardly less valuable to philosophy than to poetry. The value of a philosophical work depends among other things on the maintenance of appropriate proportions and relationships between transcendental propositions and the results of experiments or observations of concrete data. It depends also upon a happy combination of logic and intuition in the formulation of abstract propositions. Since the truths of modern science are always dependent upon verifiable material evidence, they are almost inevitably narrower and more partial than philosophical truths. If the scientific point of view is the final guide in dealing with philosophy, it is bound to limit the scope of the inquiry and to neglect altogether the methods of reasoning which are appropriate to a different order of knowledge. Is it less one-sided to assume that scientific results and methods should determine philosophical procedures, than to assume that the scientific results and methods of Aristotle should be accepted and followed by modern scientists--a position taken in most European universities at the end of the Middle Ages? Only a society failing to recognize transcendental in addition to material truth could have been led to the position that science might swallow philosophy or art. It is more reasonable to regard the sciences as subordinate to philosophy than to regard philosophy as subordinate to science. if they are to become allies in the search for truth, it cannot be by inverting the sequence of the relationships which exist between them.

Why should it be necessary to lose the objectivity which comes from a recognition of the transcendental, and from the training of men to grope by reason towards transcendental truth, in order to gain the less comprehensive objectivity which is the fruit of experiments with, and observations of, the physical world? Knowledge in the kingdom of the transcendental and knowledge in the realm of the physical are generally treated as incompatible. They could coexist to their great mutual advantage, and to the advantage of the legitimate aspirations of men and women throughout the world. To bring about their coexistence and bridge the gap between them is the central problem of learning. (21-26)

It is difficult to see how the principles which are needed can be found and given a place in scholarship without a new plan of graduate study, in which the aim of research and training is to examine the relation of knowledge as an entity to man's universe as an entity. That is what theology and philosophy are supposed to do. But in the universities, theology and philosophy have become specialties themselves like other departmentalized subjects. Much of the work done in the philosophy departments is valuable to scholarship because it contributes to knowledge of the history of ideas, but only a few individuals, here and there, treat even that subject philosophically. Still fewer are those who consider metaphysics, moral philosophy and aesthetics, each as a whole and also in its relation to the others. Departments of philosophy, as such, make no effective effort to bring all learned university work into communion with philosophy. It is improbable that a mere requirement for graduate students to take courses in the local department of philosophy would encourage the kind of communion we are seeking. what is needed is a recovery of the subject-matter of philosophy in the broadest sense, examined in its relation to all the important special disciplines which have been opened up and developed by Western scholarship during the last four hundred and particularly during the last hundred years.

Such an examination is a gigantic task. Needless to say, the mere establishment of a new plan of graduate study or a new form of graduate school would not, by itself, bring it about. All that such steps might do would be to set young graduate students and older scholars, whose minds are still young, thinking in the right directions. It might set them to thinking how to reconcile knowledge of diverse sorts, how to reduce such knowledge, whenever this is possible, to some common denominator. It might help them to seek common concepts and propositions for ideas which are essentially the same, but which are now expounded in a number of mutually exclusive dialects. It might help them to seek agreement, in so far as agreement can be found. Careful research into new subjects would not be discouraged, but the object would be to bring all subjects which are investigated into their proper relations to each other and to the great central and transcendental problems of man's existence as an individual and a member of society. Research for its own sake, without relation to wisdom, has been pushed farther than is fruitful by the last two generations. The search for new words and jargons, which has gone on for some decades, has led to the impression that there is some advantage in complicated words for their own sake. New words are valuable only when they illuminate a subject that is clearly understood and deeply felt, and the kind of illumination that is most needed today is that provided by simplification and unification. Nor is disagreement of advantage for its own sake, as a means of demonstrating one's "originality" or free will; it is of value only when it is creative, when it is a means to firmer, more substantial agreement than would be possible without it. (28-30)

Many history courses in the colleges enumerate facts and events without any serious attempt to extract meaning from them in connection with problems that are of importance to modern man as an individual and in society. It should be a leading task for philosophical study with the help of the modern disciplines, of which we shall speak in a moment, to formulate the nature of these vital problems, and for the historian to bring such evidence as his materials provide to bear on their solution. What the graduate student needs is a thorough knowledge of the character of some particular civilization in a particular epoch, rather than a general smattering of information about history generally, such as is provided by survey courses and textbooks. It should be an important object of historical research to consider the various conditions and activities of a period and country: the geography, climate and natural resources, the industry, trade and finance, the political events and constitutional development, the religion, philosophy and thought in general, literature, music and the visual arts. Each of these aspects of history should be treated in its relations to others. By exploring all of them in their mutual interrelations, an integral history might eventually emerge. Such explorations give significance to the thought and art of past ages that they would not otherwise possess.

In order to approach the goals of a new and integrated graduate program, it would be necessary to group the teaching and research of many members of the faculty in relation to a number of historical civilizations--for example the civilization of ancient Egypt, of classical Greece, of imperial Rome, of the Western Middle Ages, of the Renaissance, of eighteenth-century Europe, of the United States, of China or of India. Scattered about the faculties of most universities are scholars concerned with the history of the visual arts, the history of music, the history of literature, the history of philosophy, the history of geographical thought, the history of science, etc. Most of them are without connections with the departments of history. The knowledge of these persons and that of professors of history might be brought to bear upon the examination of the civilizations that concerned them. Thus a historical, along with a philosophical, view of man in society might be diffused through the universities. It would offer another bond between specialists and between specialties. The student might be encouraged, when it is appropriate, to concentrate his historical studies and his studies in philosophical values in the same period.

History and philosophy are far less damaging to each other than nineteenth-century scholarship has led many to suppose. Doubtless a history cannot be a philosophy, nor a philosophy a history. The two must be kept distinct, just as philosophy and art must be. But a man is a better historian if he has a firm knowledge of philosophy just as another man is a better philosopher if he has a just and discriminating knowledge of history. The aim of history, at its best, is to give a true description of what is important about the past, to explain, when possible, why development took place as it did, and, where reasonable evidence exists, how thought and action affected development for the better or the worse. Philosophy can help the historian to know what is important and to understand cause and effect. Moral philosophy and aesthetics can provide him with a hierarchy of values on which to base his judgment of what is good. Integral history of the kind toward which the historian needs to work can help the philosopher. It can show him how thought and action have encouraged or hindered the attainment by societies of objectives which philosophy indicates to be desirable.

All students embarking on investigations of historic civilizations would be expected to have some historical training, in addition to the general philosophical training derived from their study of past thought and art. They would be expected to have some general knowledge of world history, to be acquired if possible before they start graduate study and even before they enter college. In the graduate schools they would be given, first and foremost, thorough drill in the nature of historical evidence for different periods, and in the methods of criticizing and using this evidence. They would consider, in addition, the special problems in the interpretation and use of evidence raised by the attempt to find the interrelations between various aspects of history, to treat the history of some country or civilization as an integral unit. One object of this training would be to help them avoid unwarranted inferences. These can be drawn too easily from information concerning the past, when the attention of undisciplined students is directed towards the possibilities for correlations. If facile inferences were encouraged, the fruits of the new types of historical study might be barren. They might produce even greater confusion in the learned world than already exists. Rigorous discipline concerning the limitations, as well as the possibilities, of historical sociology are therefore indispensable.

Students should be made to see clearly, for example, that while a knowledge of a particular period of history helps us to understand its thought and art, no amount of knowledge concerning external conditions can explain thought or art. The object in teaching and writing integral history is not to reach philosophical conclusions except when such conclusions strike the mature mind with compelling force. There must be firm evidence to support them, evidence derived from both the scientific handling of historical data and from philosophical reasoning. Conclusions with sound foundations alone can help in the unification and simplification of knowledge. (33-35)