Texts:Rom-E-77a-D-MnJ-1

A Prospectus for

Studies of Educational Experience and Aspirations

Man and Judgment

Truth and reason are common to everyone and are no more his who spoke them first than his who speaks them later. It is no more according to Plato than according to me since both he and I equally see and understand it in the same manner. Bees pillage the flowers here and there, but they then make honey of them which is all their own; it is no longer thyme and marjoram; so the fragments borrowed from others he will transform and blend together to make a work that shall be absolutely his own; that is to say, his judgment. His education, labor, and study aim only at forming that.

¶1

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.**

¶2

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.*

¶3

* 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.

¶4

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.**

¶5

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 homo educandus, better, homo studiosus, 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.*

¶6

Life is sovereign: its imperatives pervade everything, including culture. Some of the limits for homo educandus 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.

¶7

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. Thanatos 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.**

¶8

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.**

¶9

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.***

¶10

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 Works and Days, Poor Richard's Almanac, 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.*

¶11

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.****

¶12

With peoples who have a cultural history, properly speaking, folk wisdom and its attendant superstition soon give way to more elaborate cultural forms. In large part, the history of culture is the history of enlightenment, an effort to push the boundaries of superstition further and further into the background. The problem of superstition and the urge to enlightenment are both primarily interpersonal in their relation to the imperative of judgment. We should recognize both the individual and the society as abstract constructs of sophisticated thought, neither of which exist outside of thought. Persons, human beings, existentially exist entwined with other persons; persons live always in community with other persons, and one of their most imperative problems of judgment pertains to concerting, harmonizing, and coordinating their varied actions. In lived experience, neither the individual nor the society exist as such, both are constructs of men thinking; in lived experience, most judgments are profoundly interpersonal, pertaining to and emanating from persons in the plural, and most of culture, and particularly the dialectic of superstition and enlightenment, relates to interpersonal problems of judgment. The purely personal, the individual, insofar as it exists, consists in a combination of common sense and individual eccentricity, neither of which give rise to a cultural heritage unless they somehow take on interpersonal value and significance. Culture, man’s Lamarckian heritage, exists only as it passes from person to person; it is an interpersonal inheritance pertinent primarily to interpersonal problems of judgment.

¶13

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: we are, therefore we 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.**

¶14

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 daemon, 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.**

¶15

Culture serves to sharpen, inform, extend judgment, which is a vital function of the living being. Folk culture starts as a mixture of practical wisdom and superstition —the distinction is a late projection back upon the situation, for from the vital perspective of the primitive folk, the two are indistinguishable. The superstition is vital wisdom that we, from our vantage point, find unwise; yet there is an element of wisdom in it for the people who live by it: it empowers them to make judgments they might otherwise be unable to make, and that is all that life demands. This, however, is no mean demand, and as we have suggested, truth does not enter as a standard of judgment until a later point. Nevertheless, the dialectic of cultural development can proceed, and continues to proceed, independent of an abstract pursuit of truth: norms of critical discrimination are brought to bear on the mixture of wisdom and superstition, imperfect norms, but functional ones, all the same. Charisma, inspiration, simple competence create exemplary authorities whose leadership permits the elaboration of culture. Problems of judgment become more clearly identified, divisions and specializations arise, and fundamental fields of what we call thought emerge.

¶16

At bottom, these fields are not fields of thought, but fields of action, fields of action that call for ever more elaborate means of judgment—ethics, law, economics, politics, art, craft and technology, all emerge rooted to the problem of judgment. These judgmental roots are most apparent in the field of law. Law is judgment, solemn judgment on matters of dispute, potential and actual, civil and criminal. With law, the interpersonal character of human judgment is patent, as is the necessity of general acceptance. Law functions most powerfully where legal actions seem least apparent, that is, where persons have internalized its norms and standards and act unbidden according to its rules. In these situations, the law has effectively formed the judgment of most of the community’s members, and woe to the community where this formation by internalization has not taken place: there the law will cease to serve life constructively as an aid to judgment and will become a major problem of judgment, one in which more and more human energy will be consumed enforcing the law, bringing it to bear as a correction, after the fact, on recalcitrant, arbitrary behavior. Through the law, men declare to one another the basic standards of judgment in interpersonal dealings that they can be expected to follow. An offense against the law brings an accusation of an error in judgment; a trial establishes facts and principles and culminates in a judgment of the suspect judgment. And since the law itself, as it is internalized and used, and as it is brought formally to bear on abuse, is through and through a system of judgment, it too is subject to the test of consequences; hence throughout its history it has been dynamic, subject to revision, a living work undergoing continuous elaboration and refinement.

¶17

Politics is closely related to the law as a system of judgment. Through politics people make judgments of import to their polity. This holds true regardless of the form of polity: whatever the form, the making of certain judgments is the function and the differences of form—monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, tyranny, what have you—differentiate who has power and responsibility for making these judgments. The foremost problem of judgment in politics is to judge rightly what judgments are to be made through politics. Man is a problem for man; with his Lamarckian capacity to take on acquired characteristics, judgment becomes a problem for judgment, and this circularity is most inescapable in politics. The tragedy of politics is that those with the power and responsibility to make the judgments also have great influence over what judgments are to be made, and they, being fallible, corruptible, are always liable to substitute personal judgment for political judgment in the exercise of this trust. Certain judgments must always be made for the community: laws must be established; common enterprises chosen, organized, and executed; emergencies, martial or natural, coped with. Politics has the function of bringing sound judgment to bear upon these matters, and politics never ends because the matters keep changing and the judgment, however good, is never wholly pure, never sufficiently disinterested, never quite adequate to the task at hand, and the consequences always reveal the leadership to have been imperfect. Yet the demands of life never stop; however imperfect, someone must govern—the King is dead, long live the King!

¶18

Economics, too, clearly has its roots in the vital problem of judgment. Production and exchange are elemental tasks of the living being from the most primitive to the most sophisticated. The most absolute asceticism is, among other things, a set of economic judgments, and no one can avoid the imperative of making judgments about production and exchange. The basic schools of economic thought are judgments about how these judgments should be made, and the basic conflict between the schools, a conflict in judgment. Among culturally developed peoples, the economic sphere of action becomes extremely complicated and portentous, for the web of human interdependence is perhaps most complex and delicate in matters of production and exchange and the consequences of poor judgment in the face of untoward circumstances can be calamitous. Here the test of consequences is palpable and compelling: hunger, cold, disease, wealth, luxury, power. But the test of consequences yields no certainty, but rather brings a fundamental dilemma. Economic judgment must deal accurately, concretely with an infinitely complicated range of particulars and at the same time it must deal soundly with the over-all condition of the whole: the former can be accomplished at the sacrifice of the latter by relying on unfettered markets, which establish concrete values but renounce the exercise of foresight, the latter can be accomplished at the sacrifice of the former by substituting planning for the market, which permits of foresight but renounces the establishment of concrete value. The reconciliation of these two systems of judgment is still fundamentally circumstantial: under favorable circumstances men incline to judge according to the market, but in emergencies they rush to plan, regretting their lack of foresight. The great animating hope of the modern era has been the hope of escaping this dilemma, yet far from realized.

¶19

Law, politics, economics: in these areas the roots in the problem of judgment are clear and close to the surface. But they are no less real in other areas, in art and music, in religion and soaring speculation. To see this clearly, we might further pursue our general considerations. The dialectic of development is driven, not by truth, not by reason, but by consequences. Consequences are the ends, not merely the wished for ends, but the implacable ends, the lived, suffered consequences of the system of judgment. Reason, at a certain stage, emerges as one among diverse means in the approach to these ends. Reason becomes dialectical because the structure of life, the structure of judgment, is dialectical, a continuous balance of conflicting forces, an implacable tension between known and unknown. Thus reason is not alone uniquely dialectical—all of culture is. Inspiration, charisma, craft and competence: none can rest for long, stable, fixed, unchanging. Continually, they are all put to the test of living: suffered consequences crush the unsound and there is a natural selection that drives the Lamarckian inheritance as sternly as it drives the genetic towards an unfolding of the vital power to create a cosmos, a habitable environment. Thus, as we contemplate the great functional categories of culture, we dare not forget their living roots, the real standards controlling their development, the imperative of judgment sovereign over life.

¶20

Such considerations lead not to a simple pragmatism, not necessarily to a preference for the branches of culture patently rooted in the problem of judgment. Consequences are the standard, but that does not mean that the standard of thought should be its practical pay-off, its cash value, in William James’s popular phrase. The standard of life, not necessarily thought, is the quality of judgment as revealed in the consequences suffered; hence the cultural drive, that elaborating systems of judgment. It is entirely possible that useless, irrelevant, trivial creations will give rise to capacities for judgment that greatly extend the habitable cosmos. The point is not to pit abstraction against life, art against life, play against life, but to insist that abstraction, mysticism, aesthetic creation, simple play exist as such because they have real value to life. The cell itself, as we have seen, must be impractical in a crass sense; it must carry with it an extensive baggage of genetic information for which it has no immediate use; it must anticipate the yet unknown. Lived consequences are the implacable standard of judgment, yet they set up no facile hierarchy of value that can be applied complacently as a sure means of judgment. Judgment exists as a problem and imperative precisely because at the moment of judgment what the lived consequences will be is unsure, they are not yet there as lived consequences, but merely, at most, as imagined, hypothesized consequences. Judgment is always a drama, suspenseful, something suspended between future and past, underlain, determining but not determinate: there is no sure prescription and that is why there must be judgment. Consequences are not a test of truth, but a test of judgment, and judgment is always situational, concrete, existential, within history, and therefore it holds only for itself and it does not validate or confirm a general proposition, but gives rise potentially only to another datum among the myriad that may be taken into account in ensuing occasions for judgment, which, no matter what, will be as suspenseful as those that came before.

¶21

In this context we find the value to judgment of art and play, rest, recreation, and soaring speculation. Judgment is far more complex and subtle than is reason alone, and the demands on judgment are far more definitive than those on rigorous thinking. We know not the sum of our powers, neither our cultural powers nor biological powers. Judgment must not only apply itself to the world, but even more to itself, probing, exploring, testing itself, disclosing itself to itself. Thus Immanuel Kant's great study of aesthetics is a Critique of Judgment; it strangely combines a study of the biologic and the artistic. But what sounder combination could there be? It is all an investigation of our intuition, empathy, discrimination, taste, our sense of fitness and form. With these men make judgments by leaps, by existential acts. The most plodding lawyer cannot write a routine brief without calling to the muse to bring words forth in that creative instant whereby he pulls from memory, he knows not how, that which suits the needs of his occasion. The imperative of judgment requires that men live life with the sum of their powers; they have a sense for things, a feel of things—the craftsman knows with hands as well as head and the man of worldly experience at a glance can judge with fine discrimination what he can and cannot expect of another. Such judgments are liable to error and the test of consequences controls them as much as any other judgment. Nevertheless, without them, human life would be slow and plodding, simply nonviable. Tastes change, styles change, senses of form and fitness change, but men cannot live without a sense of form and fitness, without taste, without style; they need to develop these, as much, if not more than law, politics, or production and exchange. They need a sense of form and fitness, style, taste, grace and coordination, an informed eye and ear, a kinetic sense of language, movement, gesture, expression; they need all this, not as ornament, not as luxury, but as an essential part of judgment, living judgment. Schiller rightly commended to a practical age the higher practicality of The Aesthetic Education of Man.

¶22

Music and art, literature and drama, sport and play, mystical intuition and religious reverence: these are the essential lubricants, without which judgment is slow and inflexible, at once stolid and uncertain. These too are the source of inspiration, aspiration, exhilaration, hope. We are wont to think of judgment as excessively Apollonian, but it is not so. Men judging forever feel the chafe of their limits; tensions build; they need rest and release; in the sum of life, repose is required; nothing to excess, neither play nor work, neither Apollo nor Dionysus; the limits overburden, they must be shed; let imagination fly, the heart well, the spirit soar; cathartically cast off the limits, frenziedly break the limits; yes, yes!—and then, ...sluggish, ...slow, spinning sleep, after which, ...on the morrow, limp but renewed, the steady life begins again. All this, too, is part of the totality of judgment, part of the problem of judgment. And here too, nothing is certain before the fact and the test is always in the consequences. The Dionysian is dangerous; whether it will result in renewal and the extension of possibilities or in brute dissipation is never certain. Yet, despite danger, the dance is as integral a part of man's Lamarckian being as is the law.

¶23

Men create systems of judgment, highly elaborate ones, Apollonian ones, Dionysian ones, ones for every aspect of their lives, and these systems are continually tested by the consequences to which they give rise. These consequences, however, never validate, confirm, or fix a particular system finally and forever. The test of consequences does nevertheless give rise to a steady, ever-changing process of cultural selection, a turning of judgment upon the systems of judgment. This process is ever-open, controlled as all else by the imperative of judgment. However dogmatic, however authoritarian, it is ever tentative, ever uncertain. It is an editing, an elaboration, a refinement, an astonishing discovery, a mystical epiphany, a selective forgetfulness, a serendipitous accident, even a fortuitous error; the unexpected occurs and transformations follow; the whole process is enclosed in history; it is history, the historic life of man—no leap beyond judgment to certainty, to eternity, out of history, occurs in this unending quest of the cosmos. Over and over again, men transform and blend their available heritage to make a work that is absolutely their own, that is, their judgment. Their education, labor, and study aim only at forming that. Montaigne said it well, and it is a judgment too much ignored in considerations of education, labor, and study. The formation of judgment, that shall be our theme, our goal, our subject. Let us seek to make a work of it absolutely our own, that is, our judgment.

¶24

Judgment has been too much at the periphery in efforts to understand education historically and to deliberate on educational policy in the present. The cultural heritage has become so vast, so complicated, so productive, and the problems of passing it on through universal education have been so demanding, that the human roots of it all have become obscure. The cultural heritage seems to have been wrenched free, to have become a spreading, baseless presence, a gigantic Spanish moss, hanging, growing rootless from human forms. Throughout these studies, we shall try to keep in touch with the vital problems in human life; we shall try to understand education, in its fullness and in its depth, as a never ending effort to form and acquire judgment.

¶25

Man and Judgment will be a piecemeal, long-term effort to understand the place of judgment in educational striving, historical and contemporary. This effort at understanding will proceed through essays that can be grouped in four divisions. These divisions are not separate categories; rather they are like the different emulsions in color film, each sensitive primarily to light of a certain wave-length on the color spectrum, which, suitably overlaid, give a fair image, not only of form, but of color as well. The formation of judgment in the saga of mankind is a wondrously complex theme; it merits sustained study, but does not lend itself to continuous narrative. The problems of judgment, the environments of judgment, the creators of judgment, the study of judgment: all are too many-sided to be told in a Studies of Educational Experience and Aspirations single story. Our aim will be to build up, slowly, essay by essay, with room for continuous revision, a comprehension of the many-sidedness, the diversity, the profundity, the integrity, the discipline, the imagination, the inspiration, the luck, the effort, through which human judgment has been, and is being, formed in the West. And the negative qualities, the narrowness, shallowness, opportunism, fraud, laxity, stolidity, inertia, blindness, and sloth, must also be part of the inquiry, for they too are human qualities, part of the judgment by which men live.

¶26

Preeminently, the formation of judgment is a human drama, one going on continuously, one that started in obscurity, and moved, slowly, haltingly, with men as the agent, into relative clarity. Certain raw capacities for judgment are given to men—we know not exactly what they are, or rather what their limits are. Turning these potentialities into actualities, however, is the creative work of men, particular men living and acting in particular times and places. All culture is historical; none is given, once and for all, to persist without care, without nurturing effort, at once patient and inspired. The creators of our available forms of judgment are numerous and diverse, their numbers are legion, yet limited. We cannot hope to follow the accomplishments of each and all, but, through our first division of essays, we can sample the accomplishments of representative creators of judgment, and their concerns and creations can be studied, savored, followed from the inside in an attempt at empathetic recreation. With a second division we will try to come closer to the ordinary man and his problems of judgment. Here we must use much imagination, for the historic sources are thin. Yet we are discovering that much can be learned by inference from the study of environments and artifacts; men leave a record, not of their individual lives, but of their way of life, by the traces they leave on the land, the scenes they record in pictures, by the things they loose, or bury, or squirrel away, or pass on to their heirs. From all these and from more conventional documents we can piece together a picture of the human environment in which men and women, whose names are lost, lived, loved, worked, and died, and with caution we can enter into their efforts to form their judgments. Through a third division we shall study the great problems of judgment, the problems that upset the living of ordinary lives and made the lives of a few extraordinary by giving them the opportunity to shift the limits of the Lamarckian inheritance. The great problems of judgment are not abstract. They are the problems, there in the environments, physical and human, that complicate the exercise of judgment by all; they are the problems, the solutions of which make certain men creators, makers of the cultural heritage.

¶27

These three divisions, suitably overlaid, will give a picture of the problem of judgment in the pedagogical past and present. In the fourth division, our reflections will be more critical in character. Judgment has not been a major, explicit theme in recent reflection and study. Yet, the recent work of others can by no means be ignored in our inquiry, for it throws much light on the problems of judgment, and on the problems of studying that subject. Hence, through a fourth division of essays we will consider recent works and reconsider standard works in an effort to extract from them what value and caution they may yield in the pursuit of our theme. Creators, environments, problems, considerations and reconsiderations: these are our basic divisions.

¶28

What we envision with each division will be clearer if we take a period and describe some of the matters that will eventually be dealt with in essays of each type. For illustration, let us take a time close to the chronological beginning of our story of judgment, that of the ancient Greeks. An account of Western efforts to form judgment actually has several beginnings, and it must follow many threads, taking a variety of perspectives on those threads. But the Greeks were an important beginning, and for rational judgment, perhaps the most important among the beginnings. There are, looking at it from one perspective, a number of great figures whose work needs to be studied and understood: Homer, Hesiod, Pindar; oracles and mysteries; Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides; the medical circle called Hippocrates; Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon; Solon, Pericles, Demosthenes; a host of pre-Socratics, sophists, and the great Socrates; Plato and Aristotle; the ensuing schools—stoics, epicureans, cynics. All, in one way or another, contributed to our understanding of judgment; their achievements have entered into the formation of judgment throughout the ensuing history. What they wrought, they wrought through the exercise of judgment: insofar as we can, taking some individually and some in small groupings, we should enter into their work, comprehending their concern, seeing what it meant to the Lamarckian inheritance, showing how it has both facilitated and debilitated the living of life. In these essays on the cultural creators, exposition will not be the prime concern, but rather elucidation, a making plain what they have contributed, positive and negative, to the cultural capacity to form judgment. Such an elucidation cannot be definitive, for we are, in this, as in everything, saddled with the imperative of judgment—the elucidation can only be critical, an estimate, an attempt to evaluate the significance of the creator's work for our theme.

¶29

Powers of judgment, as disciplined and given form through cultural creations, are in part an inheritance passed on to us through the inspired work of a few great men. But judgment always has its roots in a time and place, in the existential realities of lives lived, not only by the great, but the ordinary as well. Cultural work is always interpersonal, cooperative work, the work of a whole people, no matter how strongly it may be identified with a particular person of genius. What the great create becomes distorted if its connections to the human condition at the time of its creation are lost. These distortions are by no means without significance. Culture is alive, dynamic, fruitful, the very stuff of history precisely because it is so susceptible of misunderstanding and unexpected transformation. But if we are to bring to life the formation of judgment, in the past and in the present, we need to attend, not only to the great creative leaps, but to the soil, the sea, and air, to the mundane, human environments in which the creative work occurred. We cannot understand what is creative in creative work if we look only at the work itself. The unexpected can be seen as such only against the backdrop of the expected, the unfamiliar against the familiar, not what is to us familiar, but to the contemporaries of the creator. The formation of judgment is not abstractly cultural; it is rather concretely cultural—it goes on day-in, day-out, as people lead their mundane lives. If we are to appreciate the inheritance of the past, we need to enter into the everyday life of the past, not necessarily the particular life of Homer or Socrates, but the everyday life they may have led in common with the myriad others among whom they lived and worked. Hence, we need to reflect on environments, human environments. The geography of Greece, the climates of Greece, the slow changing material conditions of life, the food and drink, the clothes, the forms of sociability, the art and architecture, the ways of communication, popular hopes and fears, daily routines on the land, on sea, in cities. Here judgment is performing its manifold human work, and it is important, insofar as possible, to enter into its rhythms to estimate how it was formed, consciously and unconsciously. Such an effort for a time as far past as that of the ancients is at best speculative, but, recognizing it as speculative, it can throw much light on the development of our heritage, and however speculative, it need not be in the least arbitrary, for much data has survived through time, and the task for our historical eye is to make of these discrete bits a coherent picture by filling in what is not there but must have been.

¶30

Intertwined with the creators and the environments, there were the great problems of judgment. These are partly manifest in the work of the creators, partly in the environments, and partly in the great events of the time, and partly in the myriad of minor events that have mostly been lost, although traces of them remain. In the problems of judgment, everything comes together, yet with the problems of judgment, the historical understanding is most sorely taxed. The problems were problems because they were not well understood, and not being well understood, they were not well recorded: hence the most difficult historical task is to understand the real problems of the past. Yet, however difficult, the problems are most fruitful. They make or break a people. They animate creative work, and test it by the implacable test of consequences. They make history move. The most serious task for historical knowledge and understanding is to bring the problems to light. It is not easy, for the big problems, the serious problems, are nevertheless real problems, human problems, problems that manifest themselves concretely and uniquely in each person’s life, but problems that yet transcend each person’s life and, through interpersonal connections, aggregate together into a general predicament, one in which no one is situated to give a general solution. With the great problems, the interrelationships are terribly complicated, giving rise to situations in which one factor compounds another; paradox and irony dog events. For the ancient Greeks the great problems had to do with making the polis function in a world of rapid change, change in the modes of production and exchange, in communication, in art and literature, in scale of organization and action, in law and politics. These problems and the human dislocations, the civic disabilities and incapacities attendant, made some Greeks much aware of the problem of judgment, the problem of education, and they began to ask questions that have had great influence on later efforts to form judgment in the West. Our task will be, insofar as we can, to bring these problems to life.

¶31

If the formation of judgment should be a central theme in efforts to understand the pedagogical past and present, perhaps too in those at fashioning a pedagogical future, then it is important, not only to study the creators, environments, and problems of judgment, but also to evaluate, to consider and reconsider, the contributions of other scholars to the comprehension of this theme. With respect to the ancient Greeks a number of works, some long standard, others relatively new, some undoubtedly yet to appear, merit such review, serious review, sustained review. Once such work is Werner Jaeger's Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, which has had an important, but problematic influence on the study of ancient education. The work appears seminal in scope and authority, yet, strangely, in its influence on later scholars, it has been remarkably sterile. We need, methodologically, to free ourselves from its sway, and this will be our object in one essay of reconsideration. But it is not only long-established works that merit serious attention. Man and Judgment will be a long-term undertaking, one developing parallel to other long-term undertakings. The progress of these should be monitored, evaluated, and made to bear fruit for the theme of judgment. One such effort, one well along towards completion, is W.K.C. Guthrie's authoritative History of Greek Philosophy. Guthrie is sensitive to the importance of judgment, and to the Greek concern for its formation through education, and the insight his work offers merits a careful essay of consideration. In addition to considering the work of single scholars, we should consider what might be called schools of inquiry to which the works of many scholars contribute. One school of inquiry, a very important one for the theme of judgment as it pertains to the ancient Greeks, comprises diverse efforts to exploit to the full the insights of Millman Parry into the oral character of early Greek culture. Serious scholars have found that our understanding of ancient Greek culture, over a considerable time and in many matters, has to be fundamentally rethought, and this rethinking too merits an essay of continuous consideration. Such essays criticizing standard works, evaluating current works, and surveying important schools of scholarship will be a significant part of the cumulative study of Man and Judgment.

¶32

All these matters—essays on ancient Greek creators of judgment, their environments of judgment, the classic problems of judgment, as well as on significant scholarship bearing on our understanding of judgment among the ancient Greeks—are illustrative of the type of essays that, one by one, I hope to write under the heading of Man and Judgment. The scope of the whole project, however, will by no means be confined to the ancient Greeks. Rather, I want to take the sweep of Western history and the gamut of contemporary concerns to which the formation of judgment is pertinent as potential subject matter. All of it, of course, will never be covered. Life is too limited. The impossibility of covering everything within the scope of what I set out to understand daunts me not the least, not because I am blithe to the difficulties, but because I have struggled with them for some time and think I have begun to see a sober way through them.

¶33

All efforts at understanding are selective, none are complete and exhaustive. Selection is necessary, but it is important that the criteria of selection not be reified, not be hypostatized into a self-subsisting time and place and subject. Selectivity in understanding is a judgment manifest in action—for the most narrow specialist, everything that ever has been, is, or will be, is potentially relevant subject matter. Let us admit that and do the best that we can, go as far as we can, without pretending that academic divisions are attributes of reality. I choose to work within the confines of one basic, somewhat indefinable, arbitrary boundary, namely that of Western history, and at many times and places, that boundary must be seen as highly permeable. But within that boundary, more or less permeable, everything should be seen as potentially pertinent, and the act of selection should be seen, not as a negative exclusion, but as a positive inclusion. To choose to write now on this and then on that, and perhaps never to get around to writing on a myriad of other things, should not be seen as an exclusion of those myriad things, but rather as a manifestation of human limits and personal interest. It is often said that the scholar needs to narrow his subject to manageable proportions—perhaps, but I really doubt that the scholar has the power, if his subject has any actuality, to so easily alter that which is. Rather, I would say that the scholar should concentrate his attention so as to make it productive, and that is what I have tried to do in developing a program of inquiry for Man and Judgment.

¶34

This project has been long, slow, and torturous in germinating. For a long time, I have felt drawn to steeping myself in the Western tradition, to bringing it to bear on contemporary problems in order to test the problems by its teachings, and its teachings by the problems. The effort has been disorienting on occasion, for its potential scope makes it hard to keep one’s attention concentrated. The problem, however, does not really lie with the scope, but rather the scope in relation to the normal forms of research and publication. These create a great, unnecessary tension between the parts and the whole, for these seem to impose an ineluctable sequence to the parts, which must be determined long before the whole is clear to the researcher. There is a certain tyranny inherent in the form of the book; it requires a beginning, a middle, an end; it forces the writer to narrow his subject arbitrarily. For a long time I have labored under the tyranny of the book, planning this volume or that, turning away from each when the time for real work on it came, convinced that were I to commit myself to the plan I would inevitably loose sight of my real theme, my real concern. Man and Judgment has too rich, complex a theme to proceed with it according to a systematic plan, one in which research and writing marches through the subject according to its chronology; the more I tried, the more convinced I became that something like Henri Daniel Rops History of the Church of Christ simply would not work as a form for exploring the formation of judgment in the Western past and present.

¶35

It is not at all clear to me that the history of culture, the history of judgment, can be dealt with adequately simply on the basis of a chronological conception of time. A clear conception of chronology is essential; we need to make use of chronology, but not necessarily follow it. Chronology is measured change, and we are too dominated, for one thing, by sidereal chronology, the succession of years, and pay too little attention to the chronology of climate, ecology, and human demographics. But much more fundamental than this, however, culture, man’s quest for judgment, exists in history, not so much as a development through time, but much more as an eternal recurrence in time. The imperative of judgment is the same for all, and each is driven by it to make a work that is absolutely his own.

¶36

There is an evolving change in the context in which men live and judge, and culture, understood as a disembodied heritage can be said to be accumulative, but culture does not become embodied in a living judgment until and unless someone uniquely integrates parts of it into his judgment, making it his own, absolutely his own. If we are to understand the formation of judgment, we need to look recurrently at the recurrent achievement of this absolute uniqueness, at the way men pillage the culture here and there and make of it a work that is their own. Thus, in our study of history, we are not so much like the evolutionary biologist who wants to account for the development of different species, but rather we are more like the historical climatologist, who hopes eventually to understand the processes at work which account for variations in recurrent cycles in the weather. And as the climatologist will drill soundings through beds of sediment to find data on the variations within the cycle of recurrence, so too, perhaps, must we make historical soundings, understanding each occurrence as fully as we can, without too quickly putting the earlier into causal relation to the later.

¶37

Like the historical climatologist, we have the latitude, on having made a sounding and having found past examples of the recurrent cycle somewhat different from the present, to use all we know from whatever source to make the variations comprehensible, and in doing so perhaps learning better to understand the possibilities and problems of our present pattern. But unlike the man making samples of sediment, who is constrained by the nature of sediment in drilling his core to start from the top and go downward, we have a certain freedom to move our attention from one part of the sample to another. Thus, we are not really like the driller of the core, but rather like the students of the cores that someone else has drilled. The real historical climatologist in his laboratory has a variety of cores from different places, each carefully cut to reveal their successive layers, as well as cross-sections of trees, wooden and fossilized, pollen samples from certain eras, carefully drawn charting of how far glaciers reached at different times in different places, sporadic data on sea level variations, and so on. With all that data before him, he then concentrates attention, first here then there, trying to understand what ostensible variations in the cycle might imply, trying to find eras that might have been distinctively cold, others that were warm, times that were dry, others wet. He is not constrained only to study the development of climate as it unfolds year by year, but rather, never forgetting chronology, he can move his attention about in time, searching for patterns, and by seeking to understand these patterns and the forces at work within each, he hopes to understand better the forces at work in our present climate so that, even if we cannot change these, we can at least know where to expect favorable trends and where we might have to prepare to cope with untoward circumstances. The quest for understanding that we will be pursuing in Man and Judgment will be of this nature.

¶38

Seeing the nature of the quest in this way, I have come to search for a form of research and publication that would allow a concentrated attention to move rather freely in time. A cultural tradition is not a stream of collective consciousness that flows implacably in one direction; rather it is a great internal dialogue in which all its parts are in creative tension with each other regardless of their roots in time. Influence does not move only from past to future; sometimes it does not move at all; and sometimes it moves from future to past. Accomplishments of the recent past throw light on those far distant; more radically, things that happen later change the objective significance of things that came before. We cannot study the whole as a whole, but we can jump around within the whole, concentrating attention now on the recent past, now on the far distant, now on the immediate present, from here to there, from center to periphery, fully involved but never plodding, building up a network of cross-connections, a pattern of tension, a cumulative sample that may give a fair picture of the whole. Thus, the essay form came increasingly to seem the appropriate form of research and publication for Man and Judgment.

¶39

Yet problems remained. The professional scholar cannot today quite emulate Montaigne and write in solitude a leisured corpus of essays primarily for himself, waiting to publish until the work is reasonably ripe. The professional scholar must publish or perish, or more precisely put, arrive stillborn in the world. Outlets for essays and articles abound; their very abundance is the problem. Each outlet has its separate readership; each editor his or her distinct proclivities. Through normal essay publication, this essay might be placed here, and that there. Whereas book publication makes it hard to preserve a sense of the subject as a whole, normal essay publication makes it hard to preserve a sense of the work as a whole. Today, the essay writer finds himself first writing for this audience and then that, adopting this tone and then that; the collected achievement displays no unity, no central theme or purpose; the assemblage is to reading and reflection what a random selection of parts from different motors are to good engine design. Except for the very auspicious, who can establish an enduring relationship with a magazine that has precisely the right readership for their work, a writer today gravely jeopardizes the integrity of his work on sallying forth a free lance.

¶40

Cultural history shows eras, in which judgment was livened by pamphleteering, to have been among the most vital, complicated, to be sure, yet nevertheless among the most coherent. During the past hundred and fifty years, more or less, pamphleteering, although not dying out, definitely diminished in prevalence. Publishing emphasized the magazine, journal, and book. There were reasons, economic and technical, for that emphasis, but suffice it to observe that once again, rather suddenly, technical innovations have been introduced that greatly facilitate the production of pamphlets. Pamphlets offer a useful complement to the book and the article. The pamphlet writer can cut through all sorts of time consuming steps; he can take an idea from conception to publication in far less time than with other modes of publication, relying almost only on himself, and thus he can cultivate a direct relationship with readers. And the conditions of production are suddenly becoming so flexible that the relation of writer to readers becomes not only more direct, but potentially more significant: immediate revision and response, a true public dialogue, are again becoming easily feasible.

¶41

In writing Man and Judgment I want to probe, test, explore the renewed possibilities of serious pamphleteering, to make Man and judgment a series of pamphlets through which attention can be kept concentrated on the whole subject, through which the form can be flexible while the integrity of the whole work can be preserved. Make no mistake: such a mode of original publication does not exclude magazine, journal, and book, but rather frees the project as a whole from some of the constraints and distortions that arise when these are looked to as the original vehicles of publication. Man and Judgment will be written for a pamphlet audience—that does not mean that parts of it, most or all of it, will not find their way into magazines, journals, and books. They will and should, but that will be something in addition, an extra literary life. Its original life will be in the form of pamphlets, written on the presumption that there is a small but continuous audience interested in the formation of judgment in the Western past and present. With this audience, I hope to develop the theme in the richest manner possible, to explore it, uncover it, nurture it, to move from this aspect to that, from this time to that, to turn back on occasion and revise, to let the subject, and a sustained work devoted to it, grow over time and come alive.

¶42

At first, the whole will seem rather sketchy, a line here or there upon a blank canvas, a pamphlet on Socrates, a reconsideration of Jaeger’s Paideia, an essay on Rousseau, a broadside on the problems of judgment created by bureaucratic power in present-day life, a study of the historic significance of climatic change. At first, the audience, too, will be small and sketchy, but that is as it should be: a pamphleteer writes to begin with for himself and a few whom he knows, who know him; he commits himself to a market that is free, not structured; his work gains resonance, or does not, largely by itself; others find worth in its thought and expression, pass it on, and an audience builds, or they find it uninteresting and throw it out. Such conditions are a good goad to quality, and the pamphleteer has a surer sense of his reception, favorable or unfavorable; he can better understand who comprises his audience; he can adapt, test, and persevere; he can judge directly how best to build a dialogue. The start must be small and obscure, incomplete, a mere intimation of potential; the test of life is to see what happens.

¶43

Let us close. We have set a theme and outlined a program of work. The treatment of both has been at best incomplete, but that is as it should be: the study of judgment should be structured to allow room for the continuous exercise of judgment. A prospectus should not be a blueprint, not a design for a finished product. A prospectus should rather be an indenture, a commitment, an apprenticing oneself to mastering a matter, fate willing, so far as one can, and for a study of Man and Judgment, there is no more fitting indenture than that from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. It suggests that enough has been said, perhaps too much, that the time has come to turn from the glowing goal to the work of the way.

Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome. Every beginning is cheerful; the threshold is the place of expectation. The boy stands astonished, his impressions guide him; he learns sportfully, seriousness comes on him by surprise. Imitation is born with us; what should be imitated is not easy to discover. The excellent is rarely found, more rarely valued. The height charms us, the steps to it do not: with the summit in our eye, we love to walk along the plain.... Words are good, but they are not the best. The best is not to be explained by words. The spirit in which we act is the highest matter. Action can be understood and again represented by the spirit alone. No one knows what he is doing while he acts aright; but of what is wrong we are always conscious. Whoever works with symbols only is a pedant, a hypocrite, or a bungler. There are many such, and they like to be together. Their babbling detains the student: their obstinate mediocrity vexes even the best. The instruction which the true artist gives us opens the mind; for where words fail him, deeds speak. The true student learns from the known to unfold the unknown, and draws himself nearer the master.

Annotations to the text

Anno 1 Page 1 (**) 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. The American Heritage Dictionary 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 Man and Judgment: 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.

All this would be fairly straight-forward were it not that special meanings of the word judgment are more prominent than this very basic meaning. Thus judgment is a legal term, but one that is scant problem, for it is clearly a special case of the broader meaning—as judgment in general is the capacity to make decisions, a legal judgment is the rendering of a judicial decision. A second special meaning, namely that which judgment has within logic, is more troublesome. The difficulty it raises is not so much one of denotation, as of connotation, for it is easy to state the logical meaning of judgment in a way that clearly makes it a special case of the more general use: judgment in logic is the capacity to make decisions about relations within and between propositions. The problem, however, is one of connotation: in the history of culture far more has been said about this special meaning of judgment in logic than about the broader meaning of judgment in life, and most of the discussion among logicians suggests that judgment is a purely formal aspect of reasoning, rather than a flesh and blood element in all action. A third special meaning also raises difficulties because of its relative prominence: through ethics and theology the term has acquired a moralistic tone, owing to the whole matter of value-judgments. Again, these can easily be understood as special cases of the broader meaning, that is, as decisions about values and their application to acts. Nevertheless, those skeptical about the Last Judgment and concerned to be "non-judgmental" in their relations to others are likely to misperceive an effort to understand judgment in its larger sense as the basic problem in living.

All this is not meant to suggest that the prominence that I seek to give judgment as a vital function of life is by any means idiosyncratic. One can find recurrent suggestions that judgment is central to living in the writings of significant thinkers. The importance of judgment to Montaigne has been suggested by the opening quotation, and he speaks continually throughout his essays of how men should seek sound judgment and to judge all things rightly. A useful study of the matter is by Raymond C. La Charite, The Concept of Judgment in Montaigne, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968. La Charite concluded: "Jugment is the central and most important psychological term and concept in the Essais. It can indicate an act, a faculty, a quality, and frequently the seat of all intellectual, moral, and psychological life.... The notion of "essai,” "essayer," that is to experience, depicts the role and primary activity of judgment, for the whole of life is the proper test of judgment. Judgment must orient man throughout the motion, change, and diversity of life. Ultimately, man’s knowledge and moral worth is reflected in his ability to judge himself. It is for this reason that Montaigne consistently stresses the importance of judgment and its proper formation...." (pp. 142-3)

Among more recent thinkers John Dewey found judgment, what he called "practical judgment," to be central. In a significant essay on "The Logic of Judgments of Practice," The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XII, Nos. 19 and 20, pp. 505-523, 533-543, Dewey pointed out that in logic discussions of judgment did not deal adequately with practical judgment. "I do not mean by practical judgment," he cautioned, "an alleged type of judgment having a different organ and source from other judgments. I mean simply a kind of judgment having a specific type of subject-matter. There are propositions relating to agenda—to things to be done, judgments of a situation as demanding action. There are, for example, propositions of the form: M.N. should do thus and so; it is better, wiser, more prudent, right, advisable, opportune, expedient, etc., to act thus and so. And this is the type of judgment I denote practical.”(p. 505) In this essay, Dewey’s strategy was cautious, and he simply made the claim that whatever the logicians say, practical judgment is a form of judgment that needs to be understood as much as any other. The Oxford pragmatist, F.C.S. Schiller soon followed with a paper, "Are all Judgments ’Practical'?”, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XII, No. 25, pp. 682-685, commending Dewey's reasoning, but rebuking his caution. "...If all judgments imply a valuation, are not all judgments practical? If all judgments are acts and aim at 'goods' and claim to be 'better' than others and the 'best' conceivable, need we hesitate to declare that they are 'practical'?"(p. 686).

Dewey may well have agreed with Schiller, for in a later work, The Quest for Certainty, when he discussed judgment, he kept the concept, but not the qualifier. He was directing his argument against "reason” in quotation marks, a traditional "reason" premised on "the doctrine that nature is inherently rational," that "reason" was a fixed, ordered system that conformed to nature, and that conformity had a "paralyzing effect on human action." Twentieth-century science, he thought, was constructively displacing this rigid "reason" in favor of intelligence. "...The marks of ’reason' in its traditional sense," he contended, were "necessity, universality, superiority to change, domination of the occurrence and the understanding of change." He continued:

Intelligence on the other hand is associated with judgment; that is, with selection and arrangement of means to effect consequences and with choice of what we take as our ends. A man is intelligent not in virtue of having reason which grasps first and indemonstrable truths about fixed principles, in order to reason deductively from them to the particulars which they govern, but by virtue of his capacity to estimate the possibilities of a situation and to act in accordance with his estimate. In the large sense of the term, intelligence is as practical as reason is theoretical. Wherever intelligence operates, things are judged in their capacity of signs of other things. If scientific knowledge enables us to estimate more accurately the worth of things as signs, we can afford to exchange a loss of theoretical certitude for a gain in practical judgment... .The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (1929), New York: Capricorn Books, 1960, pp. 211-3.

Dewey voiced his plea for intelligence and judgment in a rhetoric highly critical of traditional reason. It is not hard to find pleas with precisely the same effect, sometimes almost identical terminology, voiced by spokesmen of traditional reason. Thus Antoine Arnauld opened his great Port-Royal treatise on Logic, or the Art of Thinking:

Nothing is more to be esteemed than aptness in discerning the true from the false.... To distinguish truth from error is difficult not only in the sciences but also in the everyday affairs that men engage in and discuss. Men are everywhere confronted with alternative routes—some true and others false—and reason must choose between them. Who chooses well has a sound mind; who chooses ill, a defective one.... Our principal task is to train the judgment, rendering it as exact as we can. To this end the greatest part of our studies should be devoted. We are accustomed to use reason as an instrument for acquiring the sciences, but we ought to use the sciences as an instrument for perfecting the reason: Accuracy of mind is infinitely more important than any speculative knowledge acquired from the truest and most established sciences.... Defective minds give rise not only to the errors found in science but also to the majority of the civic offenses— unjust quarrels, unfounded lawsuits, rash counsels, and poorly planned endeavors. Nearly all these offenses stem from defects in judgment.... To achieve correct judgment, depending as it does on native intelligence, is very difficult, though desirable. Common sense is not really so common.... And yet, many false judgments spring not from stupidity but from hastiness of thought and lack of attention, which leads to reckless judgments about what is known but obscurely and confusedly....The Art of Thinking (1662), James Dickoff and Patricia James, trans., New York: The Library of Liberal Arts, 1964, pp. 7-9.

Further examples might be adduced, but it is perhaps more important to ask why, if concern for judgment in this sense is so recurrent, it never has really become established as a central concern, as an enduring central concern, in educational theory and practice. Such a question cannot be answered in this note, but we can observe certain things about where an answer might be found. Both Arnauld and Dewey suggested rightly that judgment was an essential quality of action, yet both, Arnauld especially, dealt with judgment primarily as an aspect of thinking, and as an aspect of thinking, judgment tends to get abstracted from its embodiment in real people living in real situations, and when that happens, it looses its reality as judgment. The basic ground for making Man and Judgment primarily an historical inquiry, rather than a theoretical treatise, is to avoid this tendency toward disembodiment. The fundamental effort should be, not to assert propositions about judgment, but to draw attention to the examples of judgment to be found in historic experience.

Anno 2 Page 2 (*) 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 Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, Berlin: Verlag von Julius Springer, 1909; Theoretical Biology, Mackinnin, trans., London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tuebner and Co., 1926; and Die Lebenslehre, Potsdam: Muller Piepenheuer Verlag, 1930. For Ortega, see my study, Man and His Circumstances: Ortega as Educator, 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, The Origin of Life, 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 The New Encyclopaedia Briatannica; Macropaedia, Vol. 10, pp. 893-911, esp. pp. 900-904; and George Wald, "The Origin of Life," Scientific American, Vol. 191, No. 2, August 1954, pp. 45-53.

Anno 3 Page 2 (**) The first five chapters of Biology and the Future of Man, 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. The Lives of a Cell; Notes of a Biology Watcher 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.

Anno 4 Page 2 (***) 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," The New York Review of Books, 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.

Anno 5 Page 3 (*) 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 "padagogische Anthropologie." An excellent summary of pedagogical anthropology is by Heinrich Roth, Padagogicsche Anthropologie, 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, Wege zur padagogischen Anthropologie: Versuch einer Zusammenarbeit der Wissenschaften vom Menschen, 2nd ed., Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1967. There is also a good essay on the subject in the Handbuch padagogischer Grundbegriffe, 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.

Anno 6 Page 3 (**) 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 Meditations on Hunting, Howard B. Wescott, trans., New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972. Ortega's writings are, of course, fundamental to my whole project of Man and Judgment, having entered profoundly into the formation of the outlook on which the project rests. The theme of judgment, however, was not one explicitly 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.

Anno 7 Page 4 (*) 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 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 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 The Lives of a Cell, op. cit., pp. 55-61.

Anno 8 Page 4 (**) 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 Time’s Arrow and Evolution 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 Irreversible Thermodynamics and the Origin of Life, 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, Being and Time, 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 The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 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, Everyday Life in the Modern World, Sacha Rabinovitch, trans., New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971, and Enrico Castelli, L'enquete quotidienne, 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 Studies in Human Time, 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 The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, 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.

Anno 9 Page 4 (***) 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 should 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 Man and Judgment, I want to reexamine the whole problem of historicism. Karl R. Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism , 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, Der Historismus und seine Probleme, Tubingen, 1922; Karl Mannheim, ’’Historicism," in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, Paul Kecskemeti, ed., London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952; and Friedrich Meinecke, Die Enstehung des Historismus, Carl Hinrichs, ed., Werke, 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 Zur Theorie und Philosophie der Geschichte, Eberhard Kessel, ed., Werke, Vol. 4, Stuttgart: K.F. Koehler Verlag, 1965, esp. pp. 358-363, he shows himself very well aware of Dilthey’s significance.

Anno 10 Page 4 (****) We need to understand far more fully than we do the role of error in development, be it biologic, historic, pedagogic. On the latter, The Possibilities of Error: An Approach to Education by Henry J. Perkinson, New York: David McKay Company, 1971, is of value.

Anno 11 Page 4 (*****) The transformation of the chaos into a cosmos is a fundamental conception on which my study of Man and Judgment 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.

Anno 12 Page 5 (*) 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 An Inquiry into the Human Prospect by Robert L. Heilbroner, New York: W.W. Norton, 1974, which leads on to many other sources.

Anno 13 Page 5 (**) 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 The Education of Henry Adams, 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.

Anno 14 Page 5 (***) The Ascent of Man 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.

Anno 15 Page 6 (*) 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 Preface to Plato, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963, pp. 3-193. Also important is Volume 2: Mythical Thought of Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 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.

Anno 16 Page 6 (**) I have reflected briefly on the contemporary problem of superstition in Man and His Circumstances: Ortega as Educator, 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, The Education of the West; A Formative Chapter in the History of Civilization, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1973, esp. pp. 516-562.

Anno 17 Page 6 (***) 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, Heraclitus, New York: Atheneum, 1964, p. 90. Eric A. Havelock in Preface to Plato, 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 Of the Advancement of Learning, 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 Discourse on Method, 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, eppur si muove, 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.

Anno 18 Page 6 (****) Willis W. Harman, An Incomplete Guide to the Future, Stanford: Stanford Alumni Association, 1976, is an interesting contemporary example of the relation of the imperative to act and the susceptibility to superstition.

Anno 19 Page 7 (*) 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 inside 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, The Concept of Mind, 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, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, 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 Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, and Stephen Toulmin made it explicit in Human Understanding, 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 Phenomenology of Perception, 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.

Anno 20 Page 7 (**) 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 Theaetetus, 187b-210d, and Sophist, 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 Lebensformen: Geisteswissenschaftliche Psycholoqie und Ethik der Personlichkeit by Eduard Spranger, 5th ed., Halle: Verlag von Max Niemeyer, 1925, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie by Max Scheier, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 7, Bern: Francke Verlag, 1959, and The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 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.

Anno 21 Page 8 (*) As an aid to penetrating into the deeply interpersonal aspects of the problem of judgment, I think Edward 0. Wilson's Sociobiology; The New Synthesis, 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.

Anno 22 Page 8 (**) 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 Emile, 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 Science, 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 Discontinuity in Greek Civilization, New York: W.W. Norton & 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., Climatic Change: Evidence, Causes, and Effects, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965 (primarily on a geologic, not historic, time scale), H.H. Lamb, The Changing Climate, London: Methuen & Co., 1968 (more on an historic time scale), and the issue of World Archeology, 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 Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800, 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 The Great Plains (1931), New York: Grosset & Dunlop, n.d., such as Redcliffe Salaman’s The History and Social Influence of the Potato (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, given, 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 Spirit of the Laws, 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.