The Great Ideas Today 1970

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The Great Ideas

mm£smsra EDITORS

IN CHIEF:

ROBERT M. HUTCHINS and MORTIMER

Featuring a Symposium:

J.

AOLER

THE IDEA OF REVOLUTION

CONTENTS Part

One

THE IDEA OF REVOLUTION:

'.

A SYMPOSIUM Arnold

J.

Toyn

Ivan lllich

Introduction

Revolutionary Change

The Need

for Cultural Revolution

Anarchism and Revolution

The Sorry Condition

of

Counterrevolutionary Doctrine

The Idea of Revolution in Great Books of the Western World

p au Goodman |

A SPECIAL FEATURE Part

William

F.

Buckley,

Jr.

Beethoven 1770-1827 by Robert Mann

Two

THE YEARS DEVELOPMENTS IN THE ARTS AND SCIENCES WILLIAM LETWIN

Social Science and Practical Problems

KENNETH REXROTH H. B. VEATCH & M. S. GRAM

Literature

R.H.ROBINS

Linguistics

Philosophy and Ethics

Part Three

THE CONTEMPORARY STATUS OF A GREAT IDEA CHAIM PERELMAN

The New Rhetoric: A Theory of Practical Reasoning

Part Four

ADDITIONS TO THE GREAT BOOKS LIBRARY ERASMUS

The Praise of Folly

LENIN SCHILLER

State and Revolution

INDEX

The Death

of Wallenstein, trans,

The Great Ideas Today 1961-1970

by Coleridge

$11

THE GREAT IDEAS TODAY

1970 Editors

in

Chief:

Executive Editor:

ROBERT M. HUTCHINS

and Evil nt

MORTIMER

J.

OTTO BIRD

ADLER

lion

Contributors:

THE IDEA OF REVOLUTION ARNOLD

J.

TOYNBEE,

historian, writer, traveler,

author of the monumental

A Study

of History.

IVAN ILLICH, ral

director of CIDOC, Centro Intercultude Documentacion, Cuernavaca, Mexico.

PAUL GOODMAN, social critic, educator, novelist, dramatist, and an editor of Liberation. WILLIAM

F.

BUCKLEY,

sonality, editor of the

JR., writer, television per-

weekly National Review.

Printed

in

U.S.A.

THE YEAR'S DEVELOPMENTS IN THE ARTS AND SCIENCES WILLIAM LETWIN, professor, London School of Economics, analyzes the role of the social sciences in decision making.

KENNETH REXROTH, poet, novelist, critic, reviews recent developments in literature, especially as a form of protest. HENRY B. VEATCH and MOLTKE sors of philosophy, review

S.

GRAM,

profes-

and analyze recent work in

the field of ethics. R. H.

ROBINS, professor of linguistics, the University examines recent work in and the past

of London,

history of the field of linguistics.

THE CONTEMPORARY STATUS OF A GREAT IDEA CHAIM PERELMAN, professor of philosophy sity of Brussels, writes

about the

new

,

Univer-

rhetoric

practical reasoning.

THE GREAT BOOKS LIBRARY The

Praise of Folly, the satire of the renaissance humanist, Erasmus.

and Revolution, the epoch-making work of Lenin. State

Schiller's Death of Wallenstein translated by Coleridge.

y

Published by:

ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, Distributed

to the

trade by:

PRAEGER PUBLISHERS,

INC.

Ill Fourth Avenue

New York,

N. Y. 10003

jacket design by

Chad

Jefferson Associates

INC.

and

Homer

Nicomachus

Aeschylus

Ptolemy

Sophocles

Marcus Aurelius

Herodotus

Galen

Euripides

Plotinus

Thucydides

Augustine

Hippocrates

Thomas Aquinas

Aristophanes

Dante

Plato

Chaucer

Aristotle

Machiavelli

Euclid

Copernicus

Archimedes

Rabelais

Apollonius

Montaigne

Lucretius

Gilbert

Virgil

Cervantes

Plutarch

Francis Bacon

Tacitus

Galileo

Epictetus

Shakespeare Kepler

Man

Reasoning

Mathematics

Relation

Matter

Religion

Mechanics

Revolution

Medicine

Rhetoric

Memory and

Imagination

Same and Other

Metaphysics

Science

Mind

Sense

Monarchy

Sign and Symbol

Nature

Sin

Necessity and Contingency

Sla\

Oligarchy

Soul

One and Many

Space

Opinion

State

Opposition

Temperance

Philosophy

Theology

Physics

Tii

Pleasure and Pain

Truth

Poetry Principle

Universal and Parti

Progress

Yii

Prophec

War and

Prudenc

Punishment Quality

Quantity

iltli

Will

m rid

The Great Ideas

Today 1970

William Benton, Publisher

Encyclopaedia Britannka, Chicago

•

London

•

Toronto

•

Geneva

•

Sydney

•

Tokyo

•

Inc.

Manila

The Great Ideas Toda3

©

1970 by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

Copyright under International Copyright Union. All rights reserved

under Pan American and Universal Copyright Conventions by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

No

part of this

work may be reproduced or

utilized in

any form

or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing

from the publisher.

Printed in the U.S.A. Library of Congress Catalog

Number: 61-65561

Standard Book Number: 0-85229-150-7 State

and Revolution by V.

by International Publishers Co.

I.

Lenin, copyright

Inc.,

is

©

1932, 1943,

reprinted by permission

of International Publishers Co. Inc.

Distributed to the trade by Praeger Publishers, Inc.,

New

York, Washington

070

editors

in

chief

Robert M. Hutchins

Mortimer

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Adler

OttO Bird

Arnold

contributors

J.

Toynbee

J.

Ivan

Paul William

F.

lllich

Goodman

Buckley,

Robert

Jr.

Mann

William Letwin

Kenneth Rexroth R. H.

H. B. Veatch

and M.

Robins

S.

Gram

Ch. Perelman

William Gorman, Contributing Editor; John Deely, Assistant Editor; William R. Dell, Managing Editor; Will Gallagher, Art Director;

Cynthia Peterson, Art Supervisor; Geoffrey Ward, Picture Editor;

Joan Meyers, Picture J.

Thomas

Beatty, Production

Manager; Anita

Elizabeth Chastain,

Peggy

Editor;

Collins,

Copy

Copy

Donald Rentsch, Designer;

Wolff, Production Coordinator;

Editor;

Mary Reardon, Copy

Editor;

Editor; Carol Stine, Clerical Assistant.

Contents

PART ONE The Idea

of Revolution:

A Symposium 2

Introduction

Arnold

Toynbee

J.

Ivan Mich

Paul

F.

The Idea

A

The Need

Goodman

William

Revolutionary

Change

4

28

for Cultural Revolution

Anarchism and Revolution

Buckley,

Jr.

of Revolution in

The Sorry Condition

44

of

Counterrevolutionary Doctrine

66

Great Books of the Western World

79

SPECIAL FEATURE Robert

Mann

Beethoven

1

770-1 827

85

PART TWO The

Year's Developments in the Arts and Sciences

Social Science and Practical Problems

William Letwin

Kenneth Rexroth R. H.

Robins

H. B. Veatch

138

Literature

178

Linguistics

and M.

Gram

S.

92

Philosophy and Ethics

228

PART THREE The Contemporary Ch. Perelman

Status of a Great Idea

The New Rhetoric: A Theory

of

Practical Reasoning

272

PART FOUR Additions to the Great Books Library Erasmus Lenin Schiller

The Praise

of Folly

State and Revolution

The Death

386

of Wallenstein,

translated by

INDEX1961-1970

314

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

454

531

A NOTE ON REFERENCE STYLE

In the following pages, passages in Great Books of the Western

World

are referred to by the initials

'GBWW,'

page number, and page section. Thus, refers to is

page 210 in

Volume

'b' 'a'

Adam

Smith's

followed by volume,

'GBWW,

The Wealth

Vol. 39, p. 210b'

of Nations,

39 in Great Books of the Western World.

The

which

small letter

indicates the page section. In books printed in single column,

and

'b'

refer to the

upper and lower halves of the page. In books

printed in double column, halves of the left column,

'a'

'c'

and

and

'b'

'd'

refer to the

to the

upper and lower

upper and lower halves

of the right column. For example, 'Vol. 53, p. 210b' refers to the

lower half of page 210, since chology,

is

Volume

printed in single column.

53, James's Principles of Psy-

On

the other hand, 'Vol.

7,

Volume

7,

p. 210b' refers to the lower left quarter of the page, since

Plato's Dialogues,

Gateway

to the

is

printed in double column.

Great Books

is

referred to by the initials 'GGB,'

followed by volume and page number. Thus, 'GGB, Vol. 57' refers to

pages 39 through 57 of

Great Books, which

The Great

Ideas

is

James's essay,

Today

is

Volume

10 of

"The Will

Gateway

pp. 39to the

to Believe."

referred to by the initials 'GIT,'

lowed by the year and page number. Thus 'GIT 1968, to

10,

fol-

p. 510' refers

page 510 of the 1968 edition of The Great Ideas Today.

PART ONE

The Idea of Revolution

A Symposium

Introduction

no doubt thai it has had We seem now to be liva time in which the idea of revolution is again experiencing an upswing in popularity. It is therefore appropriate th.n we consider what we think about revolution and what we should think about it. The West has a long tradition of thinking about the idea of revolution, which is well represented in Great Books of the Weston World. One need

Revolution

is

a

perennial idea. Yet there

is

one time than another.

greatei currency at

i

onl) cite the authors

who

discuss revolution: Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch,

Machiavelli, Hobbes, Shakespeare, Locke, Montesquieu, the authors of

The Federalist, Hegel, Marx, and Engels. In organizing our symposium, was asked our contributors to continue this conversation. Our contributors represent different approaches to the idea of revolu-

None

tion.

State

of

them

To

is

as

such an advocate of immediate violent political

we reprint in Part Four Lenin's and Revolution, which w as w ritten immediately before the violent

revolution.

represent that position, r

overthrow of the Russian

r

state in 1917.

two of our authors find do the other two. Both Illich and Goodman, at least by implication, view sympathetically some of the revolutionary aspirations present in the world today, though both contend that these aspirations need redirecting. Toynbee and Buckley take a more skeptical attitude toward revolution.

Although not advocates

the idea of revolution

The

of violent revolution,

more

greatest difference

attractive than

among our

four authors

lies

in the focus of

Toynbee, as a historian, takes an admittedly long view of the subject and considers how revolutions have arisen their interest in revolution. Dr.

in the history of civilization. Dr. Illich speaks as a representative of the

Third World, an expression that he dislikes and would not deny that the part of the world that it is

criticizes, is

though he

used to designate

often held to be the closest to revolution, even of a violent sort. Per-

haps the most remarkable feature of the current concern about revolution is the emergence of anarchism as an ideal that is considered attractive

and

feasible,

and

this

is

the subject on which Paul

Goodman

writes.

the few anarchist ideals shared by Lenin; in fact, he, after Engels, describes as

practicability,

if

it is

The

one of the essence of what

ideal of a society that can function without the use of coercion

"the withering away of the state."

is

The

im-

not impossibility, of governing without the sanction,

not the actual use, of force

is

if

one of the main contentions of William

Buckley's analysis of what he calls counterrevolutionary doctrine.

The

part of our symposium consists of an attempt to delineate main contours of the discussion of revolution as it is found Great Books of the Western World. least

last

the

at

in

B^SCiiB*5fiBSBiiii M »

in' ih .^

i

TnM yij »»-~tv>-^/"'

T f

m

'

"T t J

Ev 'T3A C"lP

*• • i

;

y

,j

i

ii

i

.in

p nan, i

i .,

..

„

*

'

.

*

.

,-»im

'! !!,

-M^^L-

Arnold Arnold

Toynbee

J.

the world for his

J.

Toynbee

known throughout

is

monumental work, A Study

cf History (12 volumes, 1934-61). In the

eighty-one years since he was born

London

in

he has been

(April 14, 1889),

indefatigable not only as a writer and traveler, but also

worked

for his

as a

world wars, served

conferences

in

man

of affairs.

He

government during both at the Paris

peace

1919 and 1946, and was

director of studies for the Royal Institute of International Affairs

from 1925 to 1955.

His books run to over twenty-five

and deal mainly with affairs, religion,

and

titles

history, international travel. After

tory school at Winchester,

prepara-

he followed the

traditional classical curriculum at Balliol

College, Oxford, where he remained as a tutor

from

1

91 2 to

1

91

5. In

1

91

9,

he began

his long association with the University

of

London, from which he

He continues

to write,

retired in 1955.

and

last

year saw

the appearance of his autobiographical

Experiences.

Change

Revolutionary

Every evil.

revolution

is

and it is not even always the lesser no choice between alternative evils. pitch at which a revolution has become

a misfortune,

In some situations there

Social tension has risen to a

is

unavoidable.

The

reason

why

a revolution

is

a misfortune

that "the times are out of joint." Its outbreak

is

is

that

it

is

a

symptom

a sign that the traditional

structure of society has ceased to answer to the conditions, needs, and

demands of at least a portion of the members of the society that is numerous enough, or strong enough, to have the power to change the structure of society by force, if its demands continue to be resisted by the reigning "establishment." These are the circumstances in which revolu-

The

to

change the

established institutions of the society by violence in order to

make them

tions occur.

answer,

more or

The makers

objective of the makers of revolutions

less,

to

is

contemporary conditions, needs, and demands.

They Few people who are

of a revolution are usually a minority of a minority.

are dissident representatives of the "establishment."

not members of the ruling to take the initiative in

The

class have the power and the self-connck jnce attempting to overthrow the established order.

leaders are, however, unlikely to succeed unless the\

the passive support of the mass of the people. This truth

is

have

at

least

illustrated b)

and the second on the whole, singularly conservative and stable during the three thousand yean and more for which this ancient Egyptian civilization lasted. The "Old Kingdom"— a stage of Egyptian history that reached its acme in the time of the pyramid-builders— was brought to an end b) a revolt! the contrast between two revolutions— the

successful

first

abortive— in the history of Pharaonic Egypt,

a

society

that was,

was successful and violent. We have retrospective glimpses i the restabilization ol it in some of the literature that was written aftei Egyptian society in the "Middle Kingdom." This firs! Egyptian revolution was violent, because the burden placed on the backs ol the mass ol the people had eventually become intolerable. We do not know who the revolutionary leaders were, but we do know that, whoeva the) were, the tion that

Pyramids near Cairo, Egypt

y

^^a "Pharaonic Egypt, a society that was, on the whole, singularly conservative and stable"

The Idea of Revolution

people followed them. This revolution that liquidated the "Old King-

both social and mental. The might) were put down from their and the humble and meek were exalted, and this social revolution was evidently accompanied b) a loss ol faith in the efficacy and the value of the previous regime, under which a pharaoh and his courtiers had sought to win immortality lor themselves by requiring the mass of the people to carr) out giganti< public works. Originally the workers may have been docile and may even have believed that the labor that was being exacted horn them was due from them and was worthwhile. But in the end the) lost both their faith and their patience, and, when they

dom" was seat,

"Old

revolted, the

The second tive

Kingdom"

collapsed.

Egyptian history— this time an aborwas made, nearly a thousand years after the collapse of the one— revolution in ancient

"Old Kingdom/' by one of the rulers of the "New Kingdom," Akhenaten. As a pharaoh, Akhenaten had absolute power, and he used it to attempt to make a revolution in almost every department of Egyptian life: in art, in literature, and in religion above all. But though Akhenaten was an allpowerful individual, he remained an isolated one. He had only a handful of followers, and therefore, after his death, the "establishment" which he had temporarily deposed was able to make a counterrevolution which the people accepted passively. is a resort to violence, and therefore, like war, seldom or never attains the objectives that its makers have had in view. Sometimes its aftereffect is actually to reinstate and aggravate the ancien regime against which it has revolted and which its

Revolution, like war,

it is

costly,

and

it

makers believe that they have swept away. In France, for instance, recognizable elements of the ancien regime have reasserted themselves again and again since the Revolution of 1789. In Russia, the present Communist regime has reproduced the tyranny of the czardom, though the new Communist "establishment" in Russia claims to have made a complete break with the past. This tendency of a revolution to topple into reaction is discussed further at a later point in this essay.

Revolution is

inevitable,

Change

is

is

a violent

form of change, and, in

human

affairs,

change

but the process of change need not be revolutionary.

inevitable in the

first

place because

all

human

action produces

and in the second place because human manners and customs are handed on from one generation to another mainly b\ tradition, which is mutable, and only to a minor extent by immutable instincts "built into" the psychosomatic structure of the species and trans-

a certain

amount

of change,

mitted by physical procreation.

It is

impossible for a younger generation—

and cultural herihanded on by a process of education in word. Even when the younger generation is

or series of generations— to take over, intact, the social tage that an older generation has

the broadest

meaning

of the

conformist-minded and not rebellious-minded, ing over and handing on, in

its

it

does not succeed in tak-

turn, the ancestral tradition in exactly

Arnold

J.

Toynbee

the form in which this has been presented. This inevitability of change

human

by the notorious impossibility of preservgrammar, and pronunciation of some phase of a language that has been consecrated as being "classical." Later generations may try their hardest to retain the classical form of their language, but invariably they fail sooner or later. In spite of all efforts, the living speech diverges farther and farther from the arbitrary classical standard until eventually the classical form of the language becomes "dead." A would-be Latin-speaking people, for instance, had sooner or later to recognize the truth that it was now speaking no longer Latin but Italian or Spanish or French. in

affairs is illustrated

ing, unchanged, the syntax,

Thus change

is

inevitable in

human

evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

affairs,

The

but the process can be

structure of society can be

answer to the changing conditions, needs, and demands of the and that can therefore peacefully, because they are being made before the new conditions have diverged so far from the old structure that the social misfit has set up an emotional tension. This evolutionary process of adjustment

changed

to

members be made

is

the

of society by adjustments that are timely

way

in

which changes in human

about according

mutamur

to the

medieval Latin

deemed to be brought "Tempora mutantur, et nos

affairs are

tag:

("Times change, and we change with them"). In this change is assumed to be a matter of course. However, when we survey the span of recorded history, we see that this assumption is too optimistic. Within the period from which records survive, we have evidence that there have been many revolutions. The revolution that liquidated the "Old Kingdom" of Egypt in the second half of the third millennium B.C. had a contemporary counterpart in the lower basin of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the present-da) Iraq. Since then, revolutions have become more frequent. No later civilization has been so stable as the ancient Egyptian civilization was. in illis"

line of verse the evolutionary process of

However, the period of recorded history, in the literal sense of tin from which we have some surviving written records, is infinitesimall) short compared to the age of the human race. The earliest systems ot writing were invented barely five thousand years ago, whereas the pieliterate period of human history ma\ have been a million yean Ion-. Fortunately we do have some information about this major pai ot human history. We are informed about it, not In surviving contemporary writ ings, but by surviving contemporary tools, and tools an- coeval with Man himself. Indeed, it is possible that out ancestors were already making tools t

human, and that the invention making was one (though only one) of the innovations that enabled them to achieve this portentous advance. before they became

ol

in

the art

tool

«>l

then wa)

ol

life

Tools are our only surviving evidence foi the histor) ol human affairs during by far the greater part ol human history, and the) are good evidence as far as they go. It would, however, he a mistake to assume, on

The Idea

of Revolution

this account,

ditions of

mands

life

that

were ever the sole agents of change in the conand therefore the sole sources of the new needs and de-

that tools

l>\ new conditions. If we consider the history hundred years, we shall recognize that the foundphilosophies, and ideologies have had at least as

were generated

of the latest twenty-five

new

ers oi

religions,

potent an effect on the course of

human

affairs as the

inventors of

new

excluding the inventors of tools for use as weapons); and, as luck into the past as our written records reach, we have evidence

tools (not tai

that religion was as important a factor in

This

is

also true today of the

portions of the

human

race.

way

human

of life of the

We may

infer that

it

life as

still

technology was.

relatively primitive

has been true, likewise,

became human, although, during most of the intervening time, Man's spiritual life and the changes in his spiritual outlook have left no memorials. Even the cave paintings dating from the comparatively recent Upper Paleolithic Age enable us only to make un\ei ifiable guesses at the character of the religious and magical beliefs to

ever since our ancestors

first

which these paintings may, or may not, bear witness. By our time the advance in technology has shot far ahead of the advance in religion and morals, but our surviving records show that this is a recent phenomenon in human affairs. In the sixth century B.C., Man's spirit shot ahead of his technology. We may guess (though this guess is hazardous) that in the times before the beginning of recorded history, when rates of change in all dimensions of life were slow, Man's technol-

and his spiritual and social life kept pace with each other, more or and that therefore the changes in Man's tools, during the period from which nothing but his tools survives, give a fair measure of the rate ogy

less,

of change in all sides of

human

human

life.

If

we now survey

the total span of

our evidence for the period before written records begin, we shall find that the medieval tag was not so far from the truth after all. In human history viewed as a whole, evolution has been the rule, and revolution has been the exception. In fact, it is safe history, taking tools as

to say that

during the major part of because during

sibility of revolutions,

the conditions of

life,

human

was no posperiod the pace of change in and therefore also in needs and in demands, history, there

this

was so slow that the necessary corresponding changes in institutions were bound to be brought about by the evolutionary process of gradual adjustment.

The It

possibility of revolution

no accident that the medieval Latin tag was written at a time in West European history at which the conditions of were changing slowly, by comparison with the rate of change in the

is

the recent period of 10

life

Arnold

J.

Toynbee

times that immediately preceded and immediately followed the Western

Middle Ages. Of course, even

in the darkest patch of the so-called

compared to the same region.

Ages, the pace was precipitate

Lower

Age

Dark

the pace in the time of the

the medieval pace was Middle Ages, to assume that evolution, not revolution, is the normal way in which changes are made. In the present-day Western world this assumption would be unconvincing; it would be too much at variance with present-day facts; for in our day we are living in the state of "permanent revolution" that is written, both as a fact and as an ideal, into the present Mexican constitution. The measuring rod for gauging the pace of change in human affairs is the average length of a human being's life from the dawn of consciousPaleolithic

enough

just slow

ness

till

to

in

make

it

Still,

plausible, in the

dotage or death. In the Lower Paleolithic Age, the expectation

was considerably shorter than it is today among the minority of the world's population that already enjoys the benefits of modern medicine. But even this slightly protracted expectation of life is minimal compared to the age of the human race and also compared to that major portion of this time during which mankind has lived under Lower Paleoof life

conditions of

lithic

life.

an archaeological museum in which there is a display of successive types of Lower Paleolithic tools coming from all parts of the habitable surface of the globe, we find a remarkable worldwide uniformity in the representatives of each type of tool. This uniformity of If

we

visit

Lower

Paleolithic tools is reminiscent of the uniformity of present-da\ but the reason for the uniformity is, of course, not the same. We know why there is a worldwide uniformity in the types of presentday tools. Today, we have so efficient a network of worldwide means of communication that a tool that has been invented in one place will altools,

most instantly be carried to all other parts of the world and will be copied and adopted there. The speed of the worldwide adoption of each successive type is so great that it exceeds the speed of innovation. Each type in

its

turn comes into worldwide use before

type— and

this

munications, In the

were his

is

though the speed

it

is

superseded In

new

a

of innovation, like the speed of

com-

accelerating.

Lower Paleolithic Age, Man's only means of communication feet, and his means of transport were limited to the maximum

load that he could carry as he walked.

and were widely

Human

scattered, because, in that age,

ing his livelihood were so inefficient that individual was required in order to enable ing. In these circumstances,

any type of

a a

tool

communities were small Mans means oi gather-

large area of territory

pa

community

liv-

to

earn

itv

must have taken hundreds

and thousands of years to be disseminated from its place ol origin. rhere must have been few opportunities Foi passing it on from one community to another, and, even when a communit) did acquire a tool >! a new

The Idea

of Revolution

[\\)v from its distant nearest neighbor, we may guess that it will have been slow to copy and adopt the new type, since small isolated communities are apt to be conservative-minded. The reason why, nevertheless,

cadi

Lower

come

type of tool did eventually

Paleolithic

into world-

wide use was that the pace of technological progress was almost incon-

and therefore there was it was superseded l)\ a new type. This is surely evidence that, throughout the Lower Paleolithic Age, people were unconscious of technological change or an) other kind of change within the span of a single lifetime, and ceivabl) slow, judged by present-da) standards,

time tor each type of tool to spread

we may guess

that, insofar as

adapted his institutions fact in

all

over the world before

changes did occur, Lower Paleolithic

to these

changes unconsciously,

easily,

Man

and

in

an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, way.

When, in the archaeological museum, we pass from the Lower to the Upper Paleolithic room, we have the impression of witnessing a revolution. The improvement in technology, as between the Upper and the Lower Paleolithic ages, looks abrupt when compared with the virtual stagnation of technology throughout the Lower Paleolithic Age. Yet this impression of a revolutionary change can be seen to be illusory when we measure the rate of the invention of Upper Paleolithic tools by our measuring rod of a

human

lifetime. Relatively swift

advance came to be at last at this stage, in any generation in the probably long ventors of

Upper

first

was

though the technological still so slow that no one

series of

generations of the

in-

Paleolithic tools will have been aware that the tech-

nological conditions of

The

it

life

were changing within his

lifetime.

people to become aware of a revolutionary technological

change must have been the users of Lower Paleolithic tools who encountered users of Upper Paleolithic tools. The mutual isolation of communities had

now

resulted in one group of communities forging ahead

in technology while the rest of

mankind remained

stationary.

Techno-

on those who achieve it, and the inwould therefore have impinged on the Lower Paleolithic majority of the human race. This experience must have confronted its Lower Paleolithic victims with a choice between making a revolution and going under. They had now to copy and to learn to use the more efficient tools of their Upper Paleolithic tool-using conlogical progress confers mobility

ventors of

Upper

Paleolithic tools

temporaries if they were not to be exterminated; if they succeeded in adopting the new technology, they would develop new needs and would

make new demands; and these sudden new conditions, needs, and mands would require a rapid adjustment of traditional institutions.

The Yerba Buena section

of

San Francisco: an

original city

house against a new

building

"in our

day we are

living in the state of

'permanent revolution'

"

de-

office

juu

JUIJ

Villagers of

'Here

Ecuador

we have put

a finger on one of the causes of revolutions. This cause is the technological and spiritual change as between different sections of the human race." difference

\v**P*

.

.

.

in the rates of

The Idea of Revolution

Causes I

it-ic

cause

of revolution

we have put

on one of the causes

Bngei

a

the difference, since the beginning oi the

is

and

the rates of technological

in

spiritual

revolutions. This

oi

Upper

change

as

Paleolithic Age,

between different

race. When a more backward community is immore advanced community, the situation in the more backward community becomes potentially revolutionary. There arc mam examples of this phenomenon in quite recent history. Within the modern Western society, for instance, the French political

sections of the

human

pinged upon In

a

Revolution of 1789 was not inspired solely by dissatisfaction with the failure of the ancien regime to adapt itself to contemporary conditions

knowledge and emulation, among and in the United States. The development of constitutional government in Britain in the seventeenth century had been studied by the eighteenth-century

of French

was also inspired by

life. It

a

the leaders of the Revolution, of previous events in Britain

French philosophes, and, even the seventeenth-century

if it is

British

who had

officers

The

their

The

nonetheless influential in France.

from British rule had been

true that they partly misinterpreted

facts,

assisted

presentation

of

encounter each other are not

liberation of the United States

by a French army, and one of the

more acute when

is

sister

the two parties that communities within the same society

but are different societies whose characters differ more widely. the revolutionary effect of the impact of a

of

was

served in this campaign was Lafayette.

revolutionary situation

example

these

A

classic

more potent modern West

on weaker alien societies is the impact of the on Russia, Egypt, Turkey, Japan, and China. In each of these confrontations with the West, the society that has suffered the impact has found civilization

itself

forced to revolutionize

Whether

its

traditional institutions sooner or later.

or not these traditional institutions

be adequate for the non-Western society

if

would have continued to had been able to con-

it

tinue to live in isolation, they proved totally inadequate for enabling the

threatened society to

required

if

it

conquest and conditions of

was if

life,

mands, that were

and

ideas,

The

to

was

it

make hold

the adjustments in

its

own

cope successfully with the changes in its domestic and the consequent changes in its needs and its de-

set in

motion by the

all

from outside, the

institutions needs to be.

the

Western technology,

history of the non-Western civilizations since they

to this challenge

16

infiltration of

ideals.

Westernizing revolution that the

its

institutions that were

to

the West's impact shows that the

of

its

against Western economic or military

The

first

experienced

more prompt and more thorough the threatened society makes in response less

violent the revolutionary recasting

saving virtue of promptness has been

more important because, during

the period in which the

West

Arnold

Toynbee

J.

has been making its impact on the rest ol the world, the Western w of life itself has been changing all the time at an ever-accelerating pace. Peter the Great, lor instance, was to the

prompt

contemporary Western way

in

adapting Russian institutions

oi life in the late sixteen

and

earl)

seventeen hundreds. In 1825, however, Czar Nicholas I crushed the Dekabrists' attempt to bring up to date Russia's adjustment to the continuing

changes in the Western civilization. The penalty for the Dekabrists' failure in 1825 was the belated, and therefore far more extreme and violent,

Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Similarly, the halfheartedness and

dilatoriness of the Westernizing reforms that were started in

Turkey

in

the late seventeen and early eighteen hundreds had to be paid for by the

radicalism of the revolution that was carried out by Mustafa Atatiirk in the 1920s. First

By

the time that

World War, nothing

less

Turkey had been defeated

Kemal in the

saved the Turkish

drastic could have

people from being subjugated and perhaps even extinguished. Again, the rejection of the Western civilization by China and Japan

Western Question" for the assault on Eastern Asia had been repulsed, the West continued to develop at an accelerating pace. During the period for which China and Japan succeeded in virtually insulating themselves from the West, the West itself went through the British Industrial Revolution, the French Political Revolution, and a general Western scientific revolution, which had not merely intellectual but also religious effects. The transformation of the Western peoples' picture of the universe, through the discoveries made b) Western geoloin the seventeenth century did not solve "the

peoples of Eastern Asia.

gists

and

biologists,

Christianity,

Though

the West's

undermined the

first

belief in the West's ancestral religion,

and thereby potentially undermined the

belief in all the rest

of the world's traditional religions. Thus, when, in the nineteenth century, the West made its second assault on Eastern Asia, it was equipped this time with new and far more powerful weapons, and the most potent of these new weapons were not material armaments; the) wen- ideologi

democracy, and later communism. This new challenge from the West evoked very different responses in China and in Japan. The Japanese decided in 1868 that their onl) chance of coping successfully with the West la) in deliberately putting [apan through a Westernizing revolution. The intention ot the makers of the Meiji Revolution was to transform not the whole ot Japanese life but first

only so

much

as

would make

it

possible

toi

[apan

to

hold her

own

in a

world in which the West had become dominant. Then immediate objc< tive was to equip Japan with Western-style armaments thai would make he) realized thai Westernher a match for an) ol the Western powers. ol technology, science, style Western would a armaments style require thetill eventual defeat and it not was bui education, and government; the.n end ot the Second States United military occupation of Japan b) the 1

The Idea

of Revolution

World War

the Westernization

that

Japan was carried virtually to

of

completion. Japan's revolutionary response to Western pressure was more prompt than China's was. Japan made the Meiji Revolution 1868 without having been goaded into this h\ an) humiliating defeat

All the same, far ol

the hands ol a Western power. The sight ol Commodore Perry's guns had been enough; Japan had not waited to receive a broadside. On the Other hand, China's humiliation— thirty years before Japan's Meiji Revolution—in the Opium War had not aroused the Chinese to take any similar revolutionary action. In China the inevitable Westernizing revoat

lution

hung

for

fire

more than

further humiliation after another.

a It

century, while

was not

till

China suffered one

the 1940s that the Chi-

upon themselves to make a genuine Westernizing coming so late in the day as it came, this took the radical communism. In fact, China paid as high a price for having failed

nese people prevailed revolution, and,

form of to

make her

first

W esternizing revolution r

in the 1840s as Russia paid for

the miscarriage of her abortive second Westernizing revolution in 1825.

The

acceleration in the rate of change that has aggravated the effect

impact on the rest of the world is not a new phenomenon in though it is a recent one in terms of the age of the human race. It is the most intense phase arrived at so far, in a process of acceleration that started, so far as we know, when, perhaps thirty thousand years ago, the Upper Paleolithic way of life broke in upon the perhaps oneof the West's

human

history,

million-year-old torpor of the

Lower

Paleolithic Age. Ever since then, the

process of change in the conditions of

human

life

has been gathering

speed.

The

innovators

who have

driven the rest of

tionary changes in order to keep pace with

mankind

to

make

revolu-

them have not always been

the same section of mankind. The torch— an inflammatory torch— has been handed from one society to another. Most of our evidence for Upper Paleolithic Man's way of life comes from tools of his that have been discovered in Europe. Most of the evidence for the next spurt of acceleration at the dawn of the Neolithic Age, perhaps eight thousand years ago, comes from the outer rim of the "Fertile Crescent" in southwest Asia. This next spurt brought with it not only the art of grinding stone tools, which has given the Neolithic Age its label, but the equally important arts of agriculture and animal husbandry, spinning and weaving, potterymaking and navigation. The third spurt was the dawn of civilization about five thousand years ago. This was signaled by an innovation that was social rather than

technological.

The

jungle swamps of the lower Tigris-Euphrates basin

and the lower Nile basin were now drained and irrigated, and these great feats of civil engineering must have been achieved by the organization of the labor of large numbers of human beings who had been persuaded or

Arnold

coerced into working for long-term objectives.

wielded

this

The unknown

J.

Toynbee

leaders

"man-power" must have had both great administrative

who

abilitv

and great personal magnetism. The fruit of their leadership was that, the former jungle swamps had been transformed into unprece-

when

fields, societies were created that, for the first time in were able to produce a surplus beyond the minimum human and shelter. During these last five thousand years food requirements of the greater part of this surplus has been spent on the destructive game of war. The margin of the surplus that has been spent on fostering the arts of peace has been the source of all improvements in the conditions of human life that have been achieved since then.

dentedly

fertile

history,

The most

recent of the successive spurts

is

that started in Britain about two centuries ago

while,

first

to the rest of the

modern Western

the rest of the world. This

all

still

is

the Industrial Revolution

and

that has spread

society,

and then

mean-

to almost

the spurt in which we, in our time, are

being swept along at a pace and with a

momentum

that are ever

increasing. It is

evident that, with every increase in the pace of change in the

conditions of

life,

it

becomes increasingly

difficult

to

make

therefore peaceful adjustments of traditional institutions.

not surprising that,

when we

survey the

last thirty

timely and

It is

therefore

thousand, eight thou-

and two hundred years of mankind's history, we find revolutions becoming ever more frequent and more violent. Technolo_ systematized and reinforced by science, has now obliterated the natural environment in which the human race came into existence and has oversand, five thousand,

it with an artificial man-made environment. This man-mack- new world of ours is both material and mental. We have conjured up for ourselves a new technological apparatus and a new outlook on the universe, and, in performing this double conjuring trick, we have set ourselves the

laid

problem of creating new life

social

and

make

religious institutions that will

possible in these entirely novel circumstances.

It has been suggested already that, perhaps not more than about thii t\ thousand years ago, on the eve of the advent of the Upper Paleolithic Age, our Lower Paleolithic ancestors were still unconscious of am change

in the conditions of life within a single lifetime, or indeed within

a

span

on end. In our time, a human being, between the dawn of his consciousness and his dotage or death, ma) find himself challenged to make as many and as momentous changes in his personal wa) ol Ideas his ancestors made gradually in the coins.- ol man) aeons Learning to use an ever-changing output of new material apparatus is the- hast ol contemporary man's difficulties. He- mav also dud that his ancestral religion has given way under his feet, and that he has to make- his arduous and painful journey through life in a state- ol spiritual nakedness. It is no wonder that these extreme demands, on contemporary societj .mil on its of

many

lifetimes

u

U.S. soldier and watchdog guard nose cones Germany, 1958

"A second

of our glaring misfits is that

year-old habit of going to war"

for

we have

Matador guided missiles

in

West

not yet discarded the five-thousand-

Arnold

members,

for revolutionary readjustments of the traditional

matters that touch

human

aise that rankles into

The Nor

life to

J.

Toynbee

regime in

the quick should have produced a mal-

an unrest which

finally boils over into violence.

situation today

is it

surprising that in our time the misfit between traditional

insti-

and actual conditions, needs, and demands should have become almost intolerable. Try as we may to recast our institutions and our beliefs to keep pace with the accelerating changes in our way of life, we are failing, at present, to win this desperate race. A full catalog of present misfits would be endless. We must illustrate them by picking out a few of the most flagrant of them. There is, for instance, a glaring misfit between our inherited institutions and the present facts on the political plane. Today the surface of tutions

our planet states; yet

is still

we

partitioned politically

unified the whole habitable

planet and in which afield

than

this, to

we

147 sovereign independent

some

and traversable part

are reaching out to the

of the surface of this

moon

and, far further

of the other planets that travel, as our

round our

travels, in elliptical orbits

A

among

are living in an age in which the progress of technology has

second of our glaring misfits

is

own

planet

sun.

that

we have not

yet discarded the

five-thousand-year-old habit of going to war, though the accelerating ad-

vance of technology has

Technology may prove planet in order to

make

now equipped

to it

us with annihilating weapons. have knit together the whole surface of this a potential arena for atomic or bacteriological

warfare; and, so long as local sovereignty survives, wars,

our command, continue

waged with the

since most deadly weapons at going to war is the principal prerogative of sovereignty. The third of the particularly glaring misfits has been touched upon already. Our new scientific knowledge has discredited our traditional religions and the traditional codes of morals that are so closely bound up with traditional religion, and we have not yet found even a stopgap to plug this devastating and demoralizing spiritual vacuum. These misfits explain why the rising generation is toda) in a recalcitrant and rebellious mood— particularly the university students, whose educa tion makes them aware that the times are out of joint and whose assemblage on university campuses gives them opportunities tor debate that is

apt to find vent in action.

The

to be possible,

rising generation sees thai the dispai

it\

l»
i

ballot 111

Social Science

and

Practical

Problems Preference Table

Number Temperature

of

persons

preferri ng

below 60° 60

Cumulative total

it

10

10 18

8 12 12

61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

30 42 57 75 105 138 188 228 248 268 280 290 297 302 310

15 18

30 33 50 40 20 20

71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 above 79°

12 10 7 5 8

311

1

312 313

1 1

313

Although the candidates had only a sparse sample to work from, it deeply and guessed as well as they could. Eventually, at the last possible moment, just as the ballot was going off to the printer, each made his pledge. One, who came to be called "Mr. Hot," promised to keep the pool at 73°; his opponent, thereafter known as "Mr. Cold," 2.

they pondered

pledged 68°.

Cold won

a landslide victory. All the

for him, of course. All those

members who preferred 68° voted

who wanted

temperatures lower than 68°

voted for him as w ell, even while castigating him for being not cold enough. And in the center, those who preferred 69° and 70° also voted r

for

him

as the "lesser of

two

evils,"

to Cold's 68° than to Hot's 73°.

the votes of every

reasoning that 70°

is

marginally closer

For similar reasons, Mr. Hot received

member who wanted

71° or over. Mr. Cold received

248 votes to Mr. Hot's 65, a result whose correctness

is

confirmed by the

preference table later ascertained at great expense by objective research workers.

The

election was rightly regarded as a

triumph

of democracy, for the

members got what they wanted: their total dissatisfaction was less at 68° than it would have been at 73°. But some members, of all persuasions, regarded the victory as a just reward for Mr. Cold, a reward for his political skill, politics being their term for the art of guessing what mem-

Most members regarded Mr. Hot's defeat as just retribution "extremism" in proposing 73°, and they said that his resounding defeat disqualified him from ever running for the regulatorship again— though cynics were heard to mutter that if the candidates had happened

bers want. for his

112

William Letwin

both to pledge temperatures two degrees lower, Cold would have seemed Hot not at all extreme.

not very skillful and

The

provoked a great deal of speculation among the memwhat might have happened had things gone a bit differently. Suppose both candidates had guessed the same? What if both had promised 68°? Obviously the members would have been very perplexed on receiving the ballot. Some might have tossed a coin. Some would have been swayed by "irrelevant" considerations: the look of Mr. Hot's ears or a fancied slight suffered some time ago from Mr. Cold, or one's great charm or the other's well-known rectitude, certified by his well-known poverty. Some members would have been unable to reach a decision, and others would not have bothered to send in their ballots. Yet none of these defections from responsible membership would have mattered, for whichever candidate won, the club would still have achieved the ideal democratic solution of 68°, ideal because it would cause the least dissatisfaction all around. Even if some of the members had voted "irrationally," or failed to vote, the democratic ideal would have been achieved. It was only 3.

election

bers as to

necessary that both candidates should have guessed correctly the state of the members' preferences.

One

peculiarly reflective

member even extended

this finding (or over-

extended it, for such is the characteristic vice of the reflective) to politic s. He maintained that in a nation whose candidates are good at guessing how citizens feel, it does not much matter whether all the citizens vote.

And

he offered

as evidence the fact that presidential candidates in the

must be rather good at guessing, since in most elections each candidate came remarkably close to getting 50 percent of the votes, so that it did not as much indicate poor citizenship as intelligent laziness it man) Americans did not trouble to vote. To which his critics asked how he U.S.

whether the vote would be split nearly so evenly if all the He was silenced, though left feeling that there might be more to say on that score later. In supposing what might have happened, some asked this question: What if both the candidates had made the same guess, and the guess had been wrong? Suppose both had promised f).r)°. One candidate, again,

could

tell

citizens did vote.

would have been elected for some random reasons or other, but the memThis supposition bers would not have been well served by that election made them fear that in future elections they might not be offered "a real choice" by the two candidates.

A committee

was established

to investigate

electoral systems with a view to insuring thai "a real choice"

would

U

offered in each annual election of the regulator. 4.

Let us examine the likely evolution thereaftei

1

politics

m

the

Triton Club. At the next election Mr. Cold would have little- incentive to alter his platform, having won handil\ last time, whereas Mi. Hot

would have every incentive

to

move

c

lose]

to

Colds position

so

.is

to

Social Science

and

Practical

Problems

garner a larger share of the votes; and it as a result they stood this time for 68° and 69°, the election would still go to Cold, though by the reduced majority of 188 to 125. Suppose

now

that during the third election, ex-

on the cold side (those who preferred 65° or under) started applying pressure on Mr. Cold, threatening that they would refuse to vote for him unless he changed his policy in their direction; and suppose he guessed (correctly, as it happened) that if they carried out their threat, he would lose the election; he might conclude that he had better alter his policy from 68° to 67°. Mr. Hot might then, in view of his last two failures, happily alter his policy from 69° to 68°; and now at last Mr. Hot would be elected, by 175 to 138. It should be noticed, however, that though the candidates (or parties) in office had now changed, the social policy being pursued remained the same throughout and was, in fact, tremists

the ideal policy. 5. Lest it be thought, however, that the ideal social choice would emerge from each election campaign, consider what happened in the year following. The extremists on the cold side spent the time before the election grousing and organizing, their complaint being that neither of the major parties offered any "real choice" and their endeavor being to launch a third party, which would give their views a chance of prevailing. They were successful in introducing a third candidate into the next election, a candidate who committed himself to 63°, while Mr. Cold altered his pledge this time from 67° down to 66°— in the hope of holding some of the less extreme extremists— while Mr. Hot took the occasion to revert

to a slightly

warmer pledge

Cold, 81; Super-cold, 57.

of 69°.

And

The

election results were; Hot, 175;

so the pool

was warmed up

to 69°.

The

upshot, in short, of the effort of extremists to express their views through a candidate "of their

temperature

own" was

now chosen

entirely destructive:

suit the extremists less well

not only did the

than

if

they had

never started their movement, but it suited the whole community less well, since at 69° the total dissatisfaction in the community was higher than it

had been 6.

at 68°.

Thereafter, recognizing

of the

how

their political system

Triton Club generally declined

worked, members

to foster third parties, ideological

dogmatic candidates. They knew that the tastes of individual to time and that new members shifted the a whole, but they relied on competition among candidates for office to result in a tendency toward the ideal social parties, or

members changed from time tastes of the membership as policy.

114

To extract literal "lessons" from a parable is seldom welcome. Precise models of this sort have been systematically analyzed by Guy Black, Anthony Downs, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, and William Riker, and by many others now working on the theory of elections. It is enough to say that the theory does illuminate some tendencies in the real world— such as the long domination of American politics by two and only

William Letwin

That

an aid to understanding and, for that But knowledge of the theory cannot guarantee practical success in politics. It can tell the politician, if he listens, what he needs to do to win. It cannot tell him how to do it

two

parties.

may

reason,

the theory

is,

also be

an aid

is

to practice.

effectively.

Techniques

policies of an organization

for formulating

Systems analysis

Much

of decision theory starts

men

through which

structure. All of

or

them— state

committee— all are

from the premise that the organizations of their ends have a common formal

many

achieve

or party, military unit or business firm, club

systems.

This premise

weighty practical implications that

much

during the past twenty years, in establishing and teasing out its implications. In

common

A

regarded as having such

been spent, mainly

a precise definition of system

speech, system refers to an ordered whole, a whole whose

parts are differentiated

unconnected

is

effort has

bits.

and

articulated, not a

The language

mere

collection of similar,

of experts does not depart

system, in the words of R. L. Ackoff,

is

"any

entity,

from

this sense.

conceptual or

and he instances "philocommunications systems, control syssophical systems, systems, tems, educational systems, and weapon systems." But the specific subclass

physical,

which

consists of interdependent parts,"

number

that concerns the social sciences, including the theory of decision,

havioral systems, those whose components, some or

are

all,

human

be-

is

beings,

moving, changing, acting, or— in the dialect of the sciences— behaving. Under the influence of the German biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy,

who first advanced the idea in human organizations as "open

1932,

it

is

now common

systems." This

is

terminologizing, of giving an obscure thing a novel it

will pierce the mystery.

means

A

good deal

a system that enters into

is

also to classify

not a mere matter of

name

in the

hope

that

implied by "open system."

transactions with

its

environment,

Ii

as

which is in principle isolated from everything between open systems and their environment have the same generic character, whatever the particulai species oi system. They draw energy and materials from the environment, the) transform those inputs, and they emit outputs. Moreover, in the normal case there is a reflexive relationship between outputs and inputs, so th.it the outputs

distinct

from

a closed system

outside. Transactions

in

some degree "cause" the ingestion All this

is

ol

subsequ< nt inputs.

readily illustrated by considering an)

Individual animal,

an open system. Its inputs are air, light, food, water, sound, dust, and so on; these are transformed within the system, resulting in lies outputs; waste products arc- ejected, signals given (in the loim ot

which

is itself

i

or gestures), and above

all,

the animal

moves from one

locale to anotlu

1

115

Social Science

And

it is

and

Practical

Problems

by those motions or purposive actions, which necessarily make

up part of the animals

total output, that

acquires the next dose of

it

inputs. Similarly, to turn to an organization, a (actor) can be recognized

an open system,

as

its

inputs being power and raw material, which

transforms into outputs, products which

it

it

emits into the environment,

thereby earning the income with which it acquires further inputs of power and raw material. These examples are so obvious that they obscure the force of the analytic point: to say that

open systems is analyze any sort

to assert that

it

human

all

possible,

and the

an unfamiliar way

we

large, although, as

its

organizations are

even

useful,

of organization in terms of

functions, outputs, clearly,

is

essential,

to

inputs, transformation

on

reflexive effect of outputs

inputs. It

is,

to analyze a political party or the state at

been applied

shall see, systems analysis has recently

to the analysis of political organizations.

Another

characteristic of an

open system

is

that being a system

human

organization

is

not a meteor, hardly seen

a certain durability: a

before dead. Like any animal it

survive but

it

retains

self-regulation, or, to

toward

its

survives for a time,

it

shape,

it

conserves

others, yet all the while

it

it

takes in

has

and not only does

itself. It

has capacities for

adopt the language of the systems

a "steady state." It works,

it

theorist,

it

tends

some things and sends out

remains fundamentally unchanged, or

it

changes

way that makes each of its stages a recognizable relative of the stage before and the stage after. The steady state is maintained by mechanisms known generically as "negative-feedback devices." These are mechanisms, in a

in the loosest sense of that word, is

whereby some

of the output of a system

used to alter inputs and outputs in such a way as to restore the steady

any departure from it. A thermostat within a house-heating commonest example; warm-blooded animals employ devices analogous to a thermostat to maintain their internal temperatures in a steady state— sweating and shivering are means for altering internal temperature in response to a meter that indicates departure from the norm. But again it is when one moves from animals to organizations that systems analysis is perplexing and may possibly, in the future, become revealing. Do human organizations tend toward a steady state, are they selfregulating, do they exhibit feedback mechanisms? Certainly they retain their identity over long periods, which is equivalent to saying that they state after

system

are

is

the

somehow

controlled or self-controlling.

We

are in the habit of ex-

plaining persistence of organizations in terms of rides, traditions, customs,

and the purposes

of persons

who

regulate them. These mechanisms and

do not appear

actions are not, however, closely related to feedback; they to

correspond to von Bertalanffy's statement of the case:

system variables

is

altered, the system manifests

direction." Clearly, the tries to

116

maintain

it,

head of

because

".

change

.

.

if

one of the

in the opposite

a business firm, a sailing club, or

it is

an army

not very attractive to be head of some-

thing that has ceased to exist; but

it

may be doubted whether

his efforts

William Letwin

to

keep

going always increase when

it

leaders, at least, thrive better

on

idea of negative feedback

the best

come

to persist

is

it

seems to be in trouble— some on setbacks. So whether the

success than

way

how

to explain

organizations

at present, rather questionable.

is,

must not be overemphasized, howexpense of underrating the capacity of organizations to adapt.

Self-regulation toward a steady state ever, at the

In the face of small and erratic changes, open systems restore the

norm;

to alter their

When

norms.

a law, they are

many

effort to restore the condition prescribed

citizens habitually

may

be replaced by another. Adaptation

may

may

efforts to

a few citizens of a state sporadically break

punished in the

by the law; when

make

and prolonged changes, they tend

in the face of large

break a law,

it is

very likely to

take various forms: the system

of its

environment, either by moving out present one into another or by artificially altering its present one;

or

may

alter itself; or

it

changing

alter its

the relations between

alter

its

it

and

itself

"interface" with the environment.

its

A man

environment, by suddenly beset by

from traffic may go mad, take to earplugs or doublepromote an anti traffic law, move away to the country, or develop

excessive noise glazing,

a psychic insensitivity to noise— all are forms of adaptation. Similarly,

when

a business firm ceases to earn profits,

change

to

modifying

itself its

or

its

it

may

take adaptive steps

environment, as by redesigning

Many

advertising.

its

product or

other instances could be propounded of

"adaptive behavior."

But how much good has

How much

things?

it

done

to

put these new labels on familial

light has systems analysis— extremely useful as

it

has

been in the development of communications theory and in improving certain branches of engineering— cast on the subject matter of the social sciences? Certainly it has stirred up a good deal of inquiry and writing, of which two prominent instances are David Eas ton's A Systems Anal

and Karl Deutsch's The Nerves of Government Such works, Deutsch believes, have recast the problem ol terms of the analysis of political systems and "the essential con

of Political Life (1965)

(1963,

1966).

politics in

communication—epitomized in the feedback ." Hut Norbert Wiener's term 'cybernetics' not always very productive, as the following passage from

nection between control and process,

and highlighted

the recasting

is

in

Deutsch suggests: aspect of goal-changing feedback might involve fundamental changes in goals. An organization, having pursued one kind of

A

last

goal, might

come

to

pursue

u

very different kind of goal In this

manner, the Swedish political system changed from the pursuit of military power in the seventeenth century to the pursuit of neutrality

To

and

social welfare in the twentieth.

describe this change in Swedish poliq as an aspect

feedback" does not give

a

bettei explanation

ol

ol

"goal-cl

what happened; inched.

Social Science

it

and

Practical

Problems

does not give any explanation. But such a criticism should be very

A

carefully qualified. call it a case of

why it explains his The proper defense of

savage will ask

"rapid oxidization."

hearth-fire to

that elaborate

name is thai it subsumes one particular concrete phenomenon under a body of theory which can explain many other phenomena, apparently dissimilar, and which can correctly predict that if this fire is deprived of oxygen, it will stop burning. In like manner, Deutsch might answer that his purpose in attaching a new label to the change in Swedish policy is to show how that concrete instance fits within the admittedly powerful theory of feedbacks. But if it is asked whether that theory enables anybody to make successful predictions about how Swedish policy will alter in any future circumstances, the answer seems clearly to be negative. It would be futile to speculate about whether systems analysis will bring about theoretical improvements in the social sciences, but it seems clear that it has not done so yet. It is clear, on the other hand, that systems analysis does offer a useful guide to the making of practical decisions. The guide, an approximation to the ultimate of prudence, is this: "If you change any aspect of a system, some other aspects will change as well." As this rule is a direct inference from the definition of a "system," it might seem at first glance to add little. Nevertheless, it is a useful and even powerful injunction, too often overlooked. Economic aid to underdeveloped countries encountered unexpected

difficulties,

because those

who

introduced tractors or new crops

would inevitably bring about other changes in the economic and social system, not all of them desirable. Conversely, the rule suggests that the best way to change one aspect of a system may be to operate on another aspect of it. High blood pressure used to be

forgot that any such change

relieved by applying leeches; of salt.

An

it

is

now

relieved by reducing the intake

analogous instance of the indirect approach

in support of "integrated research into organized

is

cited by Ackoff

man-machine systems."

Complaints were made in a large office building that elevator service was too slow; engineers suggested adding more elevators, installing speedier

manager and the third as inadequate; a psychologist suggested that although service was a bit slow, what really annoyed users was waiting inactive in a crowded lobby; and the problem was thereupon solved by putting mirrors on the walls of the lobby, which presumably created an illusion of space and provided elevator riders with ones, or assigning the existing ones to serve specific floors; the

rejected two solutions as too expensive

a spectacle.

Prudence, then, in the systems-analysis version, reminds practical that problems need not be attacked head-on is

likely to generate a systemically related

embodied

in the rule that

changes," prudent 118

a

more

men

men

and that solving any problem problem. For such reminders,

"every change in a system produces other

should be grateful. Such reminders help build up

sophisticated view of the relations between

means and ends and

of

William Letwin

But they do not provide automatic do not tell one how to invent Trojan horses or howthe unintended consequences of action.

the tasks of practical deliberation.

decision rules; they to anticipate all

Operations research

Operations research

nothing

is

ing into the operations, which

much more definite than a way of lookmeans the practical working, of business,

government, defense, or any other organization, whatever objectives.

The

preferred

method

specialized

its

of operations research

is

to devise a

mathematical model of the activity being studied— a model that is abstract, formal, and symbolic— from which can be elicited an optimal it is rapidly becoming a recognizable profession, most practitioners have been trained either as engineers (40 percent),

decision rule. Although

mathematicians, tions research

statisticians, or scientists (45 percent).

easier

is

to represent

Altogether opera-

by illustration than by any exact

definition.

There research 1.

to

is,

is

first

of

all,

a set of characteristic

problems which operations

practiced at analyzing. These are:

Queuing problems. Any part of an organization has tasks, and the tasks turn up at certain rates.

the service

is

wasted; whereas delay.

if

Common

under

is

the capacity of

of tasks, but part of the service capacity will be

the

queue

is

long, a

good deal

of time

sense suggests that the obvious solution

exactly the rate of input with the capacity, but there

If

very large, relative to the input of tasks, then there need be

no delay or queuing

is,

a certain capacity

perform

it

this rule, in a

tendency for the queue to

break

down

wasted by

is

to

equate

can be shown that

any random fluctuation in the rate of input,

for the service to

is

if

would result. grow infinitely long— that it

altogether. Operations research aims

therefore to find decision rules that optimize the relationship between

capacity

and flow

of tasks.

Inventory problems. All organizations that produce anything that can be stored keep stocks of their outputs. They do so because they cannot

2.

control the rate at which the users of the outputs— who are aliens to the organization, parts of to

would it

its

environment, and therefore beyond

lose the profit

it

its

powc-i

an organization held no inventory, it could have earned by selling. If, on the contrary,

control— turn up to buy them. held a large inventory,

it

If

would incur proportionately

large costs of

an optimal inventor) storage and maintenance. Evidently, then, there for any organization, which depends on its particular circumstances; and to define the rational rules for determining the optimal inventor) Ii one is

is worth noticing the fundamental symmetry of queuing and inventory problems: in the tonne], the rate at which inputs arrive is uncertain; in the latter, the rate at which outputs depart is uncertain; in both cases, what is within the power ol the In in

of the tasks of operations research. It

is

to

determine

its

optimal capacity to accepl inputs

01

to

provide outputs,

119

Social Science

and

Practical

Problems

Sequencing problems. All operations or projects can be analyzed into steps, each of which necessarily precedes or follows other steps and takes place simultaneously with still others. This whole 3.

a

sequence of separate

configuration can be represented as a chain or network of tasks. For instance, the operation of a typical project at a filling station with

one

attendant can be represented in this scheme:

(90)

(60)

(40)

+•0 fill

»

check water,

gas

oil

o

> fill

(45)

(75)

o

»

check

water,

o

tires

1

inflate tires

oil

In this diagram the

circles,

known

as "nodes," represent the static state

and before each separate task, the arrows stand for the performance of each task, and the numbers in parentheses record the time, here given in seconds, for each task. If the same operation were carried out by two attendants working together, the diagram might show

of the project after

this:

fill

(40)

(60)

(90)

check water,

gas

oil

fill

water, oil

(45)

(75) »

check

In the

first case,

the operation

o

»

o

inflate tires

tires

the total time elapsed between beginning

would be 310 seconds;

in the second, the total

and end of time would

be 190 seconds, the length of time needed to complete the longer of the

two

sets of tasks (90

figurative

and

+

+

60

40),

or— to put

it

in the terms, at the

network. That longest path

is

same time

move along the longest path in known as the "critical path," being

analytic, of the art— to

the the

one which determines the total time elapsed during the operation. While one attendant is still following the critical path, the other has already finished the tasks on his path, which took only 120 seconds, leaving him with slack time or "float" of 70 seconds. A shrewd manager, noticing this waste of time, might revise the work plan so as to shift some tasks from the critical path to the other, and shifting is almost always possible because tasks are indefinitely divisible. In this case the revised plan might be:

(90) fill

gas

(30)

check

(20) fill

water

water (75)

check 120

tires

(45)

(30)

inflate tires

check oil

(20) fill

oil

William Letwin

a result, the critical path will

have been shortened to 170 seconds to 30 seconds-so that although the (75 + 45 + 30 + 20) total amount of labor used in the project remains the same, the time elapsed and also the time wasted have been radically reduced. The advantage of the third work plan over the second is unambiguous;

As

and the

float

time has been saved and at no extra

cost.

The advantage

of the third

which requires two men, as compared with the first, which requires only one, is open to question. Does the increased speed with which a car plan,

can be processed yield benefits

employanswer can be given only in the light of a cost-benefit study, which finds the optimal relationship between the number of inputs of labor and the speed of output. But even in the shorter run, taking the number of workers as fixed for the time being, a ing a second attendant?

A

sufficient to justify the extra cost of

fully rational

sub-optimal or second-best solution can be arrived at by rearranging and reallocating the indefinitely divisible steps in any "project" so as to mini-

mize the "float" and when possible to reduce

it

to zero.

These observations may seem too obvious to merit much notice, and the correct solution of practical sequencing problems too easy to deserve the attention of powerful experts. But as the routing problem discussed at the outset

showed, the number of sequences that can be made up of

few

ten independent tasks

as,

say,

is

as

nearly 4,000,000; and projects of

many independent tasks as well as many that dependent on one another. Thus, the Apollo moon-landing project is said to have involved 100,000 operations, carried out by 20,000 firms and 150,000 scientists and engineers. If the sequence of steps in that project had not been carefully planned, the project would have encountered enormous delays and unbearable costs. It was in fact planned by a method of sequence analysis identical in form to the one in the fillingstation illustration but, necessarily, adapted to solution by computer. This method, known as PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique), was developed by a team of mathematicians and engineers involved in the planning in 1957 of the Polaris missile system, and it is now used widely throughout industry, as well as government. A fundamental similar form of analysis is known as CPM (Critical Path Method). 4. Allocation problems. It is typical of organizations that the) can and do make a variety of products at the same time and out of much the same great complexity involve are intricately

A farmer grows a variety of crops; a suit manufacturer combin workers and machines and cloth to produce prodm ts ot different Itykl

inputs. his

and quality;

a hospital uses

how much

its

inputs to tend or

I

lire

disorder* ot \ai ions

produd] an exceedingly intricate- problem it tlu- aim in to maximize the value of the output tor an) given set ot inputs or, ion \ versely, to minimize the cost of producing an) given lei ot outputs sense of the intricacy of such problems (an be gathered from an illustrasorts.

Deciding

each sort of output

is

of each sort of input to allocate- to

Social Science

tion

two

and

Practical

that concerns a

Problems

bakery company which owns two factories and

stores.

The two

inputs, bread

baked

at factory

A

and

at factory B,

converted into two different outputs, bread delivered at store

and the problem

can be

Y and

at

minimize the total cost of shipping. Costs of shipping 1,000 loaves of bread from each factory to each store are given in the table below, as are the total supply and demand of bread in each. store Z;

is

to

Shipping Costs (per 1,000 loaves) to

Y

Z

$5

$6

$3

$8

Capacities

supply

from A: from B:

8,000 loaves 4,000 loaves

° f Y:

5,000 loaves 7,000 loaves

demand

of Z:

Common

sense suggests that the best

that the largest possible quantity

is

way

to allocate the

shipments

is

so

which decision has been

sent along the cheapest route,

from factory B to store Y. It turns out that once this made, the rest of the problem is solved automatically. For sending all the 4,000 loaves produced at B to Y means that in order to satisfy Y's remaining demand of 1,000 loaves, those must be sent from factory A, which leaves A's 7,000 remaining loaves to be sent to Z. is

Allocation

(in

loaves)

to

Y

Z

totals

1,000

7,000

8,000

4,000

122

totals

5,000

4,000

7,000

William Letwin

The

total cost

each other.

now

can

The

thousand loaves times of S59 (42

+

+

5

be calculated by multiplying the two tables times

12)

7,

is

or $42;

A

A

from

cost of shipping

Y

to

is

to Z, for instance,

and B

S5;

to

Y

is

SI 2.

S6 per

is

The

total

the lowest possible; any other allocation, such as

the one shown below, would produce a example below, $71.

Allocation

(in

total cost higher

than S59; in the

loaves)

to

Z

totals

4,000

4,000

8,000

1,000

3,000

4,000

5,000

7,000

Y

totals

be seen at once that a very large number of allocations (in this case 4,000) could be compared, all of which would be consistent with the constraints of the problem: that the total supply (or inputs) equal the It will

total

demand

(or outputs)

and that the quotas

and

of both factories

of

both stores be exactly met. This class is known as "feasible" allocations, to distinguish them from all the allocations that would not be consistent with the constraints— such as, for instance, any allocation which provided for shipping 5,000 units from B to Y, impossible because B's output is is onh one And luekih

postulated as 4,000. But of the 4,000 feasible solutions there

which in

is

instance,

this

common But as

optimal in that

results in the

minimal

commonsense

rule does not hold good. Shipping

as possible along the cheapest route

the cheapest route to full capacity of the

be recognized by unaided

the optimal decision can

because, as soon as the problem becomes

may

total cost.

sense.

in general the

much

it

most expensive route

is

not

slightly

a

sale general

more complex,

may compel one

to use

as well. In such cases the

rule

to use

good deal

a

optima] decision

be one that uses neither the cheapest nor the dearest but

I

oni

(

(Urates

on the middle range. For instance, in the example below, the optimal allocation sends none of the bread along the heapesf route (from A toX) and as much as possible along the dearest route, yet arrives al a total cost of $82, some 12 percent less than the cosl ol the allocation ni.nlc- in (

accordance with

common

sense rather than

strict

mathematics.

123

Social Science

and

Practical

Problems

Shipping Costs (per

1

,000 units)

to

B

%

X

Y

Z

$3

$7

$4

$4

$9

$6

$6

$10

$9

Constraints

from A: from B: from C:

1,000 units)

(in

toX: toY: toZ:

3 6 5

Optimal allocation

(in

6 3 5

1,000 units)

to

Y

X

Z

totals

3

I

2

4

B

3

2

totals

Allocation problems faced in industry can be vastly more complex this. A large gasoline company buys crude oil in many different

than

it

by

refineries, cracks

it

markets, ships

and

ships

it

many different routes to a large number of different into many different combinations of end products,

from each

of

its

refineries, in variable quantities,

to

each

of its retail outlets. For such a system there will be many millions of feasible allocations, among which the optimal one is as cunningly concealed as the longest straw in a haystack, and as valuable as it is difficult to find. It is in dealing with the allocation problem at this level of com-

plexity that operations research, aided by

characteristic tool, the

com-

and its characteristic analytic methods, is at its most Besides dealing with certain characteristic problems— of which queuing,

puter, 124

its

helpful.

William Letwin

and allocation are leading sorts— operations

inventory, sequencing,

search uses a set of methods which, though not peculiar to to

it

a particular flavor.

rigor

and

These range from mathematical methods methods that come

theoretical comprehensiveness to

tinkering and hunch.

itself,

The

re-

impart of great

close

to

character of these extremes can be indicated

by comparing two ways of measuring the area within a given equilateral triangle, the first being to calculate it, using the exact formula pro-

pounded by Euclidean geometry (Area

\ Ta = -^—

2

—

the side), the second being to approximate

,

where

a

is

the length of

by counting up the number At the most rigorous and comprehensive end of the spectrum of methods used in operations research lie general systems analysis, or cybernetics— which analyzes any operation in terms of a comprehensive theory of inputs, transformation, outputs, and feedback— and information theory analysis, which examines of one-inch squares that will just

fit

it

inside

it.

the working of an organization by regarding a sort of telephone system, discovering

it as an information network, which channels are overcrowded

and which are underused and proposing measures

to correct these im-

perfections.

An

is occupied by methods comprehensive in their ambit: instead

intermediate position in the spectrum

which, though rigorous, are

less

an operation as part of a system, they treat it as a relatively detached unit. Most important among this group is linear programming, a method for identifying the feasible solutions and the optimal one in allocation problems such as that illustrated above and in many similar problems. A more complex method, known as dynamic programming, is used for solving problems where the best decision to be made at each step in a process depends upon the decision made as to the previous step. And, finally, at the extreme of experimental, ad hoc methods, occur simulation and gaming. These are methods that examine the outcomes of of analyzing

alternative policies by calculating or estimating the effect of each one,

optimal policy. The) are, in methods of repeated trial and effort. For instance, the simulation approach would consist of calculating the cost of each of the 4,000 different solutions so as to find the best one. This is obviousl) a thoughtless procedure, feasible only because electronic computers can do the repetitive arithmetic routine quickly and cheaply; in fact, an) operations research specialist who respects his craft uses such an inelegant method only if all other methods fail. But the complexities encountered in the real, practical world are often so great that the onl) practicable method is one of solving without solving— that is. finding the best solution withthus, at last, long-windedly discovering the

fact,

why it is the best. In the hardest practical cases, then, operations research docs not come anywhere near arriving at automata or even general decision inks, it

out understanding

Social Science

and

Practical

Problems

back instead on the old procedure of empirical medicine, which is wrong cures until one finds a cure that does not kill the patient. Its procedure has this one advantage, that its trials are arti-

falls

to try out all the

ficial,

so that the deaths are hypothetical rather than real;

the disadvantage that hypothetical ence.**

trials,

and with

it

leading to "synthetic experi-

always necessarily omit, conceal, or mistake some elements of the

which may in fact be critical. The airplane that flies beautifully in a wind tunnel crashes in reality, because there were no sea gulls in the wind tunnel, but there are at the real airport.

real situation

Game

theory a recurrent accident of the

Conflict

is

ordered

civil

societv,

to

human

situation.

Within

a well-

be sure, individuals rarely engage in violent

though they regularly take part in polite versions, such as disa family and litigation between parties to a contract, or in ritualized versions— games of skill and parliamentary debates. In a peaceful society, also, private organizations engage only in mitigated forms of conflict— an election "fight" between parties or a proxy fight for control of a corporation. On the other hand, relations between governments often verge on war, and the proper business of military organizations is nothing else. The possibility of conflict, in all forms ranging from chivalrous to savage, is too universal to be overlooked by any broad forms of

it,

agreements within

theory of practical decision. Nevertheless, until our time there existed no general theory of strategy, no general theory of how best to behave in a situation of conflict. Machiavelli propounded certain rules of warfare, discussed above, but those were at best bits of general advice drawn from limited experience and dubious guides to conduct. Retired soldiers, taking up the pen after

laying others ipes

down arms, have over how to win wars, but

and never enunciated

existence for the

bv John von games. This

first

tell

those manuals often collected outdated rec-

a perfectly general

time during World

Neumann on

name

the centuries written masses of books to

a

new body

War of

theory. II in

That came

into

the massive treatise

mathematics— the theory

of

continues to cover the broad theory of conflict, which

has been developed rapidly thanks to the double stimuli of cold war and

nuclear weapons.

Game

theory, as

it

now

stands,

is

a

formal inquiry into the rules of

rational decision in situations where the

of each contestant's

opponent reacts. A "game," for the purposes of game theory, is a contest between at least two adversaries, who make alternating choices, resulting ultimately in an outcome that carries "payoffs," the amounts which the adversaries win or lose. A game may be open, like chess, where each player knows the moves his opponent is making, or it may be covert, like war, where the enemies do their best to conceal action depends

126

outcome

upon how

his

William Letwin

moves from each other. The aim of game theory which the contestant can optimize his outcome.

is

to discover rules

by

Consider, for instance, a very simple open

game between two persons. one move by each player, and each player has three courses of action, or "strategies," from which to choose.

The whole game

As the game

is

move

consists of only

open, each player knows

how

the other has

moved

as

soon

made, though he cannot predict with certainty how his opponent will move. Furthermore, the payoffs for each of the possible outcomes are determined in advance, perfectly certain, and known to both players; they are displayed in the "payoff matrix" below. The horizontal rows of the matrix are labeled A, B, and C, each letter standing for one of the three strategies open to the first player; while the vertical columns, X, Y, and Z, designate the three strategies open to the second as the

is

number in a cell is negative, it means that bound to pay that much money to the second player; amount that the second player must pay to the first. So,

player. If the

the

is

if

player

first

positive, the

for instance,

if

player chooses strategy A, and the second player responds with strategy X, then the outcome of the game is that the second player wins S4 from the first; whereas if the first player chooses strategy A, but the the

first

second chooses Y, then the

first

player wins S10 from the second.

second player

Y

-4

-12

10

-1

-2

-3

What, under these circumstances,

is

11

the rational decision for the

player? Inspecting the outcomes, he sees that strategy the greatest payoff, since

would win

if

C might

the second player responded with

give

first

him

strafc

But the objection to choosing (. is that it the second player responded with Y, the first would lost |3. In the- same way, strategy A would be rewarding if the second playa responded with Y, but punitive if he responded with /. And strategy B does not. considered the

in

first

itself,

look very attractive, since the most

break even, and lose SI.

$11.

How

the

if

it

offers the

firsl

playa

i^

to

the second playa responds with X. then the lust will

game

will turn out lor the lust playei

.

therefore,

i

lf.ii 1\

depends on how the second playei responds moves, and the first player consequently must choose his own strategy n the- basis ol his estimate as to how the second playa will read to each possible- str to ,m\ ol his

127

Social Science

and

Problems

Practical

In forming his estimate, the that the

opponent

is

first

player might assume, or

may know,

thoughtful and careful and that he will unfailingly

him the

select the response that gives

assume, in short, that the opponent

is

greatest possible payoff; he

may

On that assumpchose A instead, his

entirely rational.

tion, the best policy for the first player

is

B. If he

opponent would counter with Z, whereupon the first player would lose $12; or if he chose C, his opponent would counter with Y for a loss of $3;

B the first player insures that his loss is cut down The compound rational outcome of the game, B followed by X, defines what is known as a "saddlepoint" or "minimax" solution, so called whereas by choosing to $1.

because

it is

either player,

neither the best possible nor the worst possible solution for

but— in

that carefully qualified sense— the best possible solu-

tion for both, given the circumstances of the

game and

perfectly rational

responses by both players to those circumstances. It

happens in

findings of

game theory

is

that

saddlepoint— that the outcome first

game— and one

this particular

it is

of the lesser theoretical

happens in every game that contains a not affected by which player makes the

move. Suppose that the second player were entitled

to

move

first,

then to avoid the worst possible outcomes he must decline to follow

could result in ZC, costing him $11— or strategy Y— would cost him $10— thus settling on X, which guarantees that he will win something whatever the first player does. After the second player has chosen X, the first player would rationally choose B, so as to minimize his loss. So the outcome is the same whichever player moves first, as indeed it would be if each player in the game had to move in total ignorance of the other's choice, provided each assumed that the other would act rationally. But if one of the players does not act rationally, then the best strategy for the other depends upon his knowing how his opponent has decided. Suppose that the first player were stupid, or careless, or greedy, and chose strategy C, because of the lure of possibly winning $11. The optimal strategy for the second player would then be Y, which in fact imposes a loss of $3 on the first player. Or suppose that the first player had a moral objection or aesthetic aversion to strategy B, then the second player would strategy

Z— which

because

YA

rationally avoid X. In short,

ality—that

is,

if

if

either player departs

from complete ration-

he attaches significance to any strategy other than the

significance expressed in the payoffs— the other player stands to benefit; will pay the opponent to wait until the other has made his move or, he cannot wait, to buy information about the opponent's plans. So far, the analysis has dealt with the species of game called "zero-sum" because the payoff for one player on each outcome is the negative of the payoff for the other player; if the first player wins $1, the second must lose exactly $1, and the sum of the win and loss in each payoff is zero. But most conflict situations in the real world are not zero-sum, because someit

if

128

times both parties

lose,

and sometimes both gain or break even. The

William Letwin

model

games that are not zero-sum arises from dilemma." Two members of a gang are captured just after they have robbed somebody, before they have agreed on an alibi or a course of action, and they are jailed in separate cells. The prosecutor visits each one separately, urges him to classic

for illustrating

the ancient puzzle

known

confess, promises that

if

as "the prisoner's

he confesses he will be given a lighter sentence normal sentence of ten years, and

of five years in jail rather than the

mentions that the other prisoner has already confessed. Each prisoner though he knows that the prosecutor's promises are entirely authentic. Each prisoner knows, therefore, that if neither confesses, both will go free; if both confess, both will get the light sentence; and if only one confesses, he will get the light sentence, while the other gets the heavy sentence. All this can be represented in a payoff matrix, where the first number in each square is the greets the last bit of information with great skepticism,

sentence of the

first

prisoner,

and the second number the sentence

of the

second prisoner.

second prisoner

o

What first

is

confesses

doesn't

confesses

5.5

5,10

doesn't

10.5

0,0

the rational rule for deciding? Clearly the best outcome for the

prisoner

would

also refused; yet

if

result

the

if

first

he refused to confess, provided the second second confesses, then the

refuses, but the

on the other hand, the firs! oneconfesses, he can guarantee himself a sentence of no more than five years though equally no less. That is the dilemma, and the onh wa\ out is b\ first

gets the worst possible

outcome.

If,

guessing what the other prisoner will do.

Ii

each prisoner tiusts the Other,

they will jointly arrive at the best solution;

if

they will jointly arrive at an inferior solution:

both mistrust cadi other, if

one mistrusts the other

while being trusted, the trusting one will incur the worst possible out come, while the untrusting one will incur the lessei sentence-. It cm be seen that in these circumstances the rational decision

ioi

each one-

is

to

on the supposition that the Otha tiusts him. Indeed, experiments made by Anatol Rapoport shon tint most people who took part did trust each other. Hut il one- has good reason trust the other, or at least to act

to believe,

on past experience,

that

the

untrustworthy, then the rational decision

otha is

to

is

be-

e-ithei

untuisti;

untrusting

one

oi

untrust-

such that the

too. If the game were changed into an prisoners could consult and agree, both would have reason to cooperate;

worthy

e>|)en

129

Social Science

and

Practical

Problems

the rational rule for each player would be to trust the other— if the other were rational enough to be trustworthy. Since, as everybody knows, however, some people are perverse, and everyone has a slight streak of perversity in him, it can hardly be rational bluntly to assume the contrary. In the light of this model, international relations in a cold war can be understood as arising not necessarily from natural belligerence but from the estimate by each nation that the other cannot be trusted.

Most political and international conflicts contain not only potential rewards for cooperation but also room for negotiation, which is the process of fostering cooperation by the use of threats and promises. Consider, for instance, a game with the following payoff matrix, whose sums Green Country has the

are not zero-sum. If

first

move,

its

better strategy

Green country

Y

Z

1.2

2,1

0,0

0,0

o o B

£ GO

is

Y,

which gives

exposes

itself to

it

the best payoff,

2.

But

in choosing Y,

Green Country

the possibility that Blue Country will choose B, where-

The choice of B might be mere by choosing B instead of A, Blue denies itself the payoff of 1, but this might be rational if Blue regards an equal payoff as better than an outcome in which Green gains more than Blue— an attitude reasonable enough if the game involves the balance of power. upon neither country perversity

130

on Blue's

gains anything.

part, for,

Suppose now that before Green makes its first move Blue threatens that if Green does choose Y, Blue will most certainly choose B. If Green trusts the threat, finds it "credible," then Green may decide to choose strategy Z, which would give it a small payoff if Blue chose A. If, on the other hand, Green regards the threat as empty, it will choose Y; or if it believes that Blue will choose B in any event, then Green may as well choose Y. In short, Blue's threat is credible only insofar as it is coupled with a credible promise: "If you choose Y, we will choose B; but if you come to your senses and choose Z, we promise to choose A." These examples, which barely scratch the surface of game theory, suggest the power of its analysis and its weakness. Given a payoff matrix and an accurate estimate of the opponent's behavior, a contestant using game theory can discover his optimal, rational strategy. But in order to arrive at a correct practical decision he must have a correct payoff matrix and an accurate estimate of the opponent's responses. Now, in international disputes the payoffs are uncertain; especially it is uncertain what

William Letwin

value the opponent attaches to each of the possible outcomes.

ernment to

of Israel

may

be more or

less clear

on how much value

The it

gov-

attaches

keeping the Sinai, but it can only guess at how much value Egypt atit. Countries in dispute deliberately conceal or mis-

taches to recovering

represent their valuations of outcomes in order to enhance their power to threaten and promise. And equally, no country can make accurate esti-

mates of the opponent's future responses, since the opponent deliberately obfuscates his intentions. To sum up, then, though game theory does

more exact analysis of the general structure of conflict, it does not eliminate the need to guess about the unknowable facts of practical situations. The neatness of the rational decision rule is contaminated by the coarseness of the concrete circumstances to which it must be applied lead to a

in practice.

Experts vs. executives

How An

to identify objectives

executive's

first

job

is

to define the objectives of his organization:

it

management science, policy-making, or public administration that does not make this point at the outset. It is a good point, worth making and, like other good points, well worth

is

a rare

book on operations

research,

qualifying.

Of course action.

it is

Any

true that the

end

is

the logical beginning of deliberate

and considered, begins when some goal, aim, objective, purpose, or end which achieve. Once he has formulated the end, he can choose

deliberate action, purposeful

the actor recognizes

he desires

to

rationally the optimal path toward

it.

Indeed, the analogy of a journey

constantly recurs in the formal analysis of decision processes, because a

planned journey presupposes both a destination and a path to it. The truth of this proposition is underscored by the frequently misunderstood proposition that the end justifies the means. Of course it does. The purpose of getting to Timbuktu is the only consideration that could justify the trouble of going there, unless it were merely an accidental stopover on the way to some other place, which ultimate destination would then justify the trip. Good ends justify the use ot means—make them good means as distinct from efficient means— because no means, when considered in isolation from all ends, is either good or bad in Itself. Evil ends of course justify no means. When an evil man says that the end justifies the means, he should be understood to be saying that the end he pursues is so desirable in his eyes that it overrides everything else, authorizing him to do things that any decent man regards as intolerable When a good man denies that the end justifies the means, be should be understood as saying that no single end pursued b) an\ man can icalh be so valuable as to authorize him to do things contrar) to all the Otha

Social Science

and

Problems

Practical

ends that he ought

to

men do

be pursuing and that good

pursue. Assum-

however, thai a man in pursuing an\ given end keeps in mind all the other ends that he should, he can and ought to believe that what justifies ing,

means

the

justified

the

end

is

it

it

the end toward which

spares

someone

lie

max be

has directed them. Lying

great pain, but

is

not justified

if

it

serves

of torturing him.

men and

Yet although

organizations cannot act rationally without hav-

ing selected their ends, instructing of his organization, sets

him

a

man

to identify his ends, or those

at a task that, while logically possible,

practically impossible. In the midst of action

men

is

are preoccupied with

An members to have as its ends those ends that it is actively pursuing at that moment. Nowhere is this more cleai 1\ exhibited than in military operations. The commander in chief of an armv the local and short-run objectives that justify their present action.

organization seems to

is

its

always tugging his subordinates toward the end of the whole rather than

end

the

that he has temporarilv assigned to the part. Wellington sent

the household cavalry into action at Waterloo to bolster a particular in-

fantry unit, but the cavalry became so engrossed in their charge that they continued forward despite orders to retire; their charge was brilliantly successful, the cavalry were gloriously destroyed, and the whole army was put in peril. The commander in chief, similarly, is liable to regard

the short-run end of his forces as partaking of the ultimate; he

is prone win the war, whereas, in truth, it is to establish that condition for the sake of which alone a war is worth fighting. Lincoln was an admirable president, because he constantly repeated that the point of the Civil War was "restoration of a righteous peace," and because he often insisted that this end guide the conduct of the war. Nevertheless, even he was seeing matters from the limited viewpoint of particular action, because to reestablish the Union and eradicate slavery

to believe that the objective

is

to

could be regarded as desirable objectives only in view of

still

higher

and longer run objectives. To identify the ultimate ends of an organization would require the executive to embark on an infinite regress. Recognizing this difficulty, some experts in decision theory have argued for a more sophisticated approach. Instead of asking the executive to de-

then clarify

he should be asked to identify problems. Certainly an anybody else, can tell when something is wrong. Let him his policy by starting from felt needs rather than thought-out

goals. Since

it is

fine objectives,

executive, like

or

all

impossible in practice to identify the ultimate objectives

the current objectives of an organization, he should settle for a

policy of piecemeal improvement, hoping that the continuous process of correcting defects as they arise will steer the organization closer to

ultimate objectives. This sensible strategy has place, a

132

it

does not explain

how an

its

executive can

own tell

flaws.

In the

that a condition

"problem." Suppose that a company's inventory fluctuates; that

fact,

but

is it

a

problem?

Is it

a

good thing or bad or absolutely

its

first

is

is

a

indiffer-

William Letwin

The

ent?

question cannot be answered seriously without referring to

though the objective may in practice be implicit or rechow could anyone decide what cure to adopt without referring to some objective? Most problems have many possible solutions, and only a pathological optimist would suppose that any of those solutions is good enough. Which is thought best must depend rationally on the objectives of the organization. Finally, to be propelled through life from problem to the ever ready next problem is ignobly passive, leaving one subject to the initiative of chance or malice—

some

objective,

ognized only intuitively. Secondly,

a slave to

crisis.

Another

attractive view dismisses objectives in favor of style. It points

are guided in many activities by the intention to do things manner, and that such activities are corrupted by the intrusion of substantive objectives. Amateurs do not play tennis in order to win but in order to play, and the game is spoiled by an opponent who cares for nothing but victory at any price. Similarly, in this view, the proper attitude in managing an organization is to aim at maintaining and perfecting its quality as an organization— the warmth of human relations within it, the excellence of the services it renders to customers, and the care it exercises about its environment. Its earnings and profits, in this view, are means to those goals rather than ends, though this view prefers not to express its outlook in those terms. In its objection to commercial crudity, in lauding the voyage rather than the destination, this attitude is congenial to many. Yet it embodies an error of reasoning. It means to condemn certain kinds of objectives; in order to do so it deprecates "the

out that

men

in a certain

objective" as a logical category. that

somebody who

of acting that way. Style itself It

seems, after

ically correct

all,

yet

it is

is

identify the objectives. is

perfectly appropriate to saj

manner

follows the objecth e

an objective. must be admitted

that the textbooks

in holding that

tifying objectives

And

prefers to act in a certain

the

first

What

strictly

to

be theoret-

step in rational decision

to

is

they do not add is interminable and imposes severe strains on

that the project of iden-

the honesty as well as the intellect of the seeker.

Above

all,

the projtt

t

cannot be carried out by any scientific or objective method. Two men equally knowledgeable about an organization may well disagree about its objectives, and no third man could, on account of an) science it his disposal, tell which of the two was more accurate. In short, the Opening

presumably objective process of decision-making with modern methods is itself a step that requires analysis of a Uurgel) intuitive sort At the very threshold of rational certainty in practical matters Stands the step in the

uninvited guest of discretionary judgment.

How

to use experts

Sooner or decisions,

an executive, who is an) person charged with making may turn to an expert for advice. Hie first rule i^ that the N later,


\ now that the American Negroes are rejecting the dominant society in ever larger numbers—not just the young and the dispossessed, but the Negro elite—professors; celebrities of the theater, music, and sports; even siuccsstul businessmen, doctors, and lawyers. Underneath all this turmoil of the metropoles f the "have societies," the whole world south of the Tropic of Cancel lias entered a state t society,

Large

classes

chronic, apparently incurable,

crisis,

accelerating in violence ami chanu

terized by unrestrainable overpopulation; exhaustion ol soil;

breakdown

139

Literature

monocultures like sugar, coffee, or rubber; proliferation of immense slum cities, shantytovvns full of starving people, and streets crowded at night by sleeping families without domicile. Underlying both the breakup of the dominant civilization in the metropoles and the breakdown of the former colonial societies of imperialism lies the fantastically accelerating breakdown of the environment itself. One of the American Great Lakes has become an open sewer; the rest are

of

swim in near the bigger cities. Deforestation, and soil exhaustion have taken more land out of cultivation since the Second World War than in hundreds of years before. The Sahara

seriously polluted, unfit to

erosion,

among

the finest

grazing land on earth, with terrifying rapidity. All the major

cities are

Desert

spreading into former

is

smogbound with dense clouds tus

is

fertile

savannahs, once

of carcinogens.

The

fabled honey of Hymet-

no more; the bees have left the slopes of Hymettus above Athens, a San Francisco, cleansed, one would expect, by the daily winds

city, like

from the

sea.

do not fill their swimming pools with seawater until they Channel or a day off the American coasts. The sea has been polluted, and the coastal waters of the United States are

Luxury

liners

are out of the English itself

highly contaminated with easily measurable, increasing quantities of insecticides

and detergents, the bulk

take a generation to wash out

The

if

of

which are still in the soil and would were to be stopped tomorrow.

their use

exploitation of offshore oil deposits

is

destroying the

areas of the continental shelf in California, Alaska,

life

over vast

and the Caspian. The

oxygen content of air is declining, and the carbon dioxide content rising, even over the center of the Indian Ocean or the South Pacific, and pollutants are easily found in the air and on the snow of Antarctica.

The human

race

is

entering a truly eschatological situation.

of scientific congresses, especially of the life sciences

The

and the

reports

sciences of

man, and most especially the combination of them— ecology— read like the Book of Revelation. At the time of the Second World War, the theology of crisis, the more melodramatic forms of existentialism (the philosophy of "le monde concentrationnaire"), and literary movements that called themselves Apocalypse, or Croix du feu, suddenly became popular all over the world. There is the closest connection between the poetry of Dylan Thomas, novels like Ernst Jiinger's Auf den Marmorklippen [On the Marble Cliffs], the plays and philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, and the objective situation— Hamburg, Dresden, Dachau, Buchenwald, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Today the terrible eruption of the Second War and its attendant genocides seems almost cosmetic— boils and pustules with which a body was trying to expel its poisons. For most people in the world, apocalypse is all

140

about

us,

part of the daily substance of our

lives.

We

cope with

it,

and most of us go on living, like the people in wartime London. The people of Vietnam have learned to cope but do not go on living. The war in Vietnam dominates the decade like a great cloud of moral

Kenneth Rexroth

the United States and spreading from there smog that reaches out from Los Angeles to corPhoenix and Santa Barbara and washes against the peaks

poison gas lying over

all of

across the world, like the

rode the air in of the Sierras.

The

Young Men in Great Thaw and Hundred Flowers in

previous decade was the era of the Angry

Britain, the Beats in America,

and the

Russia and China. In the plastic arts American abstract expressionists were at the height of their fame, and the American style was imitated by painters

all

over the world.

The

last

twelve-tone musicians, disciples of

Arnold Schoenberg, dominated the conservatories. Electronic music, concrete music (made of "real" sounds), and tape music were in the first period of the consolidation of a new idiom. Literar\ activity in the minor languages— Flemish, Dutch, Polish, Czech, and the languages of the Balkans— was extremely intense. The writers of Group 47, most of them still young, were on the verge of becoming the highly successful West German literary establishment. Only France lagged behind. In the French novel there was little to show except commercial fiction, little to choose between Francoise Sagan, Nathalie Sarraute, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, the commercialization of Colette, and the antinovel. The only creative advance in poetry was to be found, not in books, but in the cafes chantants. However, there was plenty of activity in the theater, the theater of cruelty, the theater of the absurd, the antitheater; but

wrights of the

first

alas,

on inspection, the leading French

postwar decade turned out to be almost

all

Samuel Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov, Arrabal, Ghelderode. The ists,

productions of

le

monde

play-

foreignersexistential-

concentrationnaire , were already exhausted.

of the mass culture. The genworld was of a culture of crisis, but not of catastrophe. The catastrophe was in the past, the memory of war and geiHM idc. This is the meaning of the shift in the recent decade— from crisis to apocalypse. It is nothing peculiar to Western civilization, the so-called free world. Apocalypse, like the ecological crisis, and probably, in the final analysis, because of it, is everywhere. The peculiar Fauna of lake

Existentialism

had become another formula

eral picture all over the

Baikal— freshwater seals, dolphins, and coelenterates— is being exterminated by pollution. The estimable reforestation program of Red China lags far behind deforestation and soil destruction. Communis! Cuba is more tightly locked in the antihuman sugar monoculture than it was

under capitalism. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China was an attempt of warring politicians to manipulate- the wholesale alienation ol youth, differing only in the intensity of its totalitarian techniques from the- ap peal of the Kennedys, Eugene McCarthy, and Will) Brandt to the hippie

and Gdmmler a

paper one.

round

vote.

The

The Chinese

tried to ride the tiger, not. in this case.

Russians have tried

of censorship,

purges, and

to

keep him

persecutions.

c

aged with a w hole new the West so lai. a

In

141

Literature

counterculture, an alternative society, has been permitted to grow up

except social ostracism—which

with

little restraint

The

only persecution has been provoked

l>\

a

is

just

what

wants.

it

generation quarrel over

pharmacy. People— it's no longer correct to say under thirty— under fortyfive prefer social and private intoxicants that do not give them lung cancer or cirrhosis of the liver, or cause their children.

The

What

new

to beat their wives or starve

Once some government economist

passionate intensity. tax these

them

older generation defends cancer and cirrhosis with discovers

how

to

diversions, this conflict at least will die away.

will not die

away

is

the rejection of the entire system of values and

incentives of the mechanical-industrial-financial culture— of what Marxists call

primitive accumulation, what the press calls the Judeo-Christian ethic

or, if

they have read

Tawney

or the Austrian sociologists, they attribute

work ethic of the rise of capitalism. Since the Secmajor historical epoch has come to an end— that of the

to Protestantism as the

ond World War

a

capitalism described by the classical economists.

war economy, the bankruptcy sale starvation in the

The

affluent society, the

of imperialism, overpopulation

and whole-

former colonial world, the generation gap, the

total

and the internal and external proletariats— all these are symptoms of the now worldwide civilization, Marshall McLuhan's to adjust to a technological revolution as profound as the

alienation of the creative minority— Toynbee's schism in the soul

growth of

his

of the failure

global village,

Neolithic one.

Ten thousand

years ago

some men refused

to accept pottery, agricul-

ture, towns, weaving, domestication of animals. In fact, until the sixteenth

and seventeenth centuries an extremely

large minority continued to

do

so,

but they were never dominant. Today the hunters and gatherers are in the seats of power. The potters and weavers and farmers and herdsmen are

employees or are outcasts. But today "pottery" means modern power of the hunters is the power of the cobalt bomb. Routinized materialist explanations of Sophocles or Le Morte Darthur may have been irrelevant or absurd, but the present cultural situation cannot be understood without reference to the technological, economic, and social background. The poet Bob Dylan is not only the product of their

physics; the

the alienation of youth; he is the product of electronics. He is also the product of the affluent society of the metropoles. European and American youth can afford to buy his records and go to his concerts, both more expensive than were those of Caruso in his day.

So the same youth can afford the moral integrity of alienation. However the

young outrage

their parents, the establishment,

and the authori-

They can choose the way of life of those who have upon them— American Negroes and Chicanos, for in-

ties, they can't starve.

alienation thrust stance, or

West Indians and Pakistanis

in Britain, Eta

Tokyo, Algerians in France. They tary but Dionysiac subculture without the

and Koreans in an involun-

can enjoy all the benefits of

142

penalties, at least without the

Kenneth Rexroth

penalties of unrelenting impoverishment of

The

only danger they run

is

life.

getting arrested for riotous conduct or for

pharmaceutical exceptionalism, or getting poisoned by not the establishment, stage the show parent, precisely in the Chicago

show

The

trials.

trial

a

bad

contrast

is

They,

trip.

readih ap-

where the involuntarily

alien-

ated defendant with a black skin, and considerably more courtly manners, received quite different treatment than the skilled advocates of "revolution for the hell of it." Doubtless both kinds of rebels will have to face Yagodas, Yezhovs, and Vyshinskis in the not-too-distant future, but at the moment the shoe is on the other foot; whatever their sentences, they are

trying their accusers

and judges. "We are

culture

is

morally defenseless, and that

if

folk-rock records, found-art objects, be-ins,

ment

will collapse? It will not.

fend

gun

itself is

the

niggers now," they say;

all

are conscientious objectors to everything."

Does

mean

this

we can naked

"We

that the old

just pile

up enough

theater, the establish-

Morally defenseless power can always de-

immorally, and power comes out of a gun; in

this case, the

Doomsday Machine.

People poetry

Once we have understood the roots of the vast cultural change confrontwe can understand the flowers, the actual works t art and literature that are its expression. So to take the most conspicuous example, there are technological, social, and moral reasons why poetr) ing the world society,

is

leaving the printed page for song or for other oral presentation of whi< h

poetry readings are only one kind.

man

It all

began

in Fiance

occupation when the singers of the caves of

communicate things

that could not be printed,

St.

during the Ger-

Germain were

and the

tions of the Resistance— Segher's Poesie '41, '42, '43,

able to

Fugitive publica-

'44,

and the

etc.

pamphlet poems of the editions de ratnuif—were circulated, memorized, and recited clandestinely. The leading French poets still, today, are singers, not book poets, and the leading literary poets arc still those who came up in the underground press. Pierre Seghers himself writes toi both print and voice. By and large, the French poets who have come up since the war, and who are now, with the passing of the last heroes ol the herou a drear) French modernist poetry, the contemporary establishment, are lot. Two thousand years of French culture- would seem to be wasted it


"

Literature

the authoritarian medieval society.

The} were sung gambled

bierstubes by wandering scholars while the)

in at

wine

cellars

and

backgammon and

The music locks with the rhythms of dance. same thing that poet-singers in the student hangouts in the same old Paris Latin Quarter sa\ today. Later, the medieval poet Villon is the \er\ archetype, the poet laureate of five hundred years of counterculture. So clearly does he speak tor a way of lite that his name has become a common adjective in European languages. So too the troubadours whose songs of erotic mysticism are echoed today in the lyrics of Leonard Cohen or Anne Sylvestre. All lyric poetry voices such sentiments— "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die"; "Hurry up and jump into bed, we're not going to last forever"; "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." The difference between the straight world and the counterculture is that the latter takes seriously the ethics of lyric poetry, in fact makes a life philosophy, a world view of it. Older, more conventional people have often remarked that the current revolution has almost no critics, even hardly any prose writers, much less gamboled with

The

a

their doxies.

lyrics sa\ the

John Locke,

a

Bentham

though the processes of

or John Stuart Mill, a

social

change are

far

Marx

or a Lenin,

al-

more advanced than the

an indication, not is. Changes in the environment may be met by changes in clothing or changes in the bloodstream and metabolism. Ideologies are only adaptations of costume. analogous ones in the days of those ideologists. This

of

how

superficial,

but of

how fundamental

is

the change

Democratization

The

diffusion of creativity, of art

what, to the old

When

Lenin

elite

said,

didn't say the cook efficient.

and

literature,

is

accompanied with

guardians of culture, seems a decided drop in quality. "Under socialism any cook can run the state," he

would be cordon bleu or

So the standards of the

arts are

the bureaucracy

would be

being lowered to a point where

almost anybody with a creative urge can meet them. Anybody can do junk sculpture. All you need is some junk, and with time and patience the mulberry leaf

is

turned into

satin.

Yet new standards are evolving, as

is

apparent in the careers of Bob the French singers Georges Brassens and Jacques Brel, until finally the scene is dominated by poet-singers like Leonard Cohen and Anne Sylvestre, who are great by any standards. In the rush of events and crush of Dylan, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, or

popularity few people pause to reflect that

poet English Canada has ever produced, yet

148

Cohen is certainly the finest who would deny it? Sylvestre

embodies the millennium-long tradition of the singers of the wine cellars and cafes of France, from the goliards and troubadours and trouveres, through Charles Cros, Yvette Guilbert, Aristide Bruant, down to the

Georges Brassens (above), Jacques

Brel

(left)

Kenneth Rexroth

popular

Her

stars of

French

television.

She

is

a

most impressive poet indeed.

best lyrics are quite the equal of, for instance, Apollinaire's classic

"Pont Mirabeau," itself a cafe chantant song that has been recorded to some thirty different melodies. Poetry, which, as they say in show business, can be projected, is sung by all the leading cafe chantant singers in France— filuard, MacOrlan, Prevert, Carco, Seghers, Joe Bosquet, poets of the widest variety can be heard nightly in the cafes. Yvette Guilbert

generations ago sang Ronsard's famous sonnet,

"When you

are old

two and

and Leo Ferre sings Baudelaire, even some of the prose poems. Why doesn't anybody in America sing Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Bill Knott, Philip Whalen? The San Francisco poet David Meltzer has shown that it can be done. He sings himself very effectively, and, of course, there's Cohen. Why can't Joan Baez sing Lenore Kandel? Kandel is herself a singer. Why doesn't she sing herself? If she does, why isn't she on records? There are historical and social reasons for the immense following of poets like Yevtushenko, Voznesensky, and Bella Akhmadulina in Russia, and Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Snyder in America, and for the failure in both countries of these poets to merge with the modern folk-song movement. In Russia it's very simple. The cafe chantant has only come back in recent years and is dominated by "ethnic" songs and the old standards, like "Stenka Razin" and "Black Eyes." Patronage is largely confined to the sitting

by the

fire,"

managerial caste with its typical bureaucrats' sentimental taste. The general atmosphere is conformist and anachronistic. The youth centers, or rather, youth cafes and night clubs, are few and far between, strictlj policed,

Other

and even more

activities of the

strictly

limited in capacity by "fire regulations.

younger generation are institutionalized and domi-

nated by the Komsomol, the Young Communist reactionary than the party Literature,

League,

today more

itself.

on the other hand, has great

prestige.

Yevtushenko ami Voz-

nesensky were launched on their careers in the Thaw (Akhmadulina was Yevtushenko's wife). It was as though they wear pulled up out ot tin-

underground by the political police, called before the Kulture Kommissai and her great and good friend Nikita Khrushchev, and ordered, "Make like Allen Ginsberg, and at the completion of your individual, personal \>i a first Five-Year Plan, you are ordered to overtake and surpass him decade poets like this functioned as salct\ valves, and lui th< more as lafet) 1

i

valves through which so

much

high-pressure hoi steam was rushing thai

was dangerous to shut them off. Recently the) have been crippled b) a combination of co-optation and intimidation not unlike what happens with multimillion-dollar record and concert contracts in the free world A poet-singer like Wolf Biermann was mu< h losei to a ( l« man ve rion of the cafe chantant, which had produced the songs i Bertoll Brechl to the music of Kurt Weill, and which, as in France, goes bai k to the Middle it

c

Literature

Ages. After

the principal manuscript of the goliardic songs of the

all,

medieval wandering scholars was found in the German monastery ol Benediktbeuern and contains German, as well as Latin, songs of wine, women, social protest, and the community of love. As Biermann's fame

began

to spread across the world, the

regime inhibited

his travel to the

West, and finally his appearances in East Germany, and in 1969 seems to

have silenced him completely. In Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Hungary, there are

many

and poets who sing or recite their poetry with the same intense tribal relationship and the same total commitment to social responsibility, but who so far are isolated from international fame by language. Note, however, what the focal points of the youth revolt in the Peoples' Democracies are— the statues of Mayakovski in the cities of Russia; the Petofi statue during the Hungarian revolt; the statues of Mickiewicz in Warsaw and Krakow; and in Prague, the Viola Cafe, whose proprietors modeled themselves on the Cellar in San Francisco, where many young Czechs believed the brief New Era was conceived and incubated. Primarily poet-singers

the objection to such tribalized relationships as those of the Beatles, the

Rolling Stones, or even Joan Baez to their audiences is, as it were, logistic —three hundred thousand young people who have tuned in, turned on,

and dropped

out, congregated in

one place, would threaten the very ex-

meaning

istence of a totalitarian regime or, for that matter, threaten the of

power

itself.

No

one

fears "the

mob"

like those

it

once put in power.

People have seen the threat of fascism in the mass outpourings of youth. "All

it

needs," say they, "is a charismatic leader, a white knight on horse-

back," but the charisma only works

when

it is

a direct expression of the

McCarthy could hardly be called a demagogue. Even the Black Panthers have become influential strictly in proportion to their abandonment of their youthful demagogy. We should remember that counterculture. Senator

when

the Panthers were at their wildest they were, most of them, high-

school boys. It is difficult to see

how

charismatic poets like Ginsberg and Snyder

could any longer be corrupted. Bitter experience of the years

when

the

news weeklies, the picture magazines, and what Madison Avenue calls the media— a. singular noun— have tried to turn them into allowed clowns, has provided both of them, and everybody like them, with permanently built-in fail-safe mechanisms. Then, too, Madison Avenue already has in circulation several highly profitable simulacra. Their motto is, "If you can't co-opt him, you can always make a reasonable facsimile thereof out of soybeans."

During 1969 Snyder has moved

152

to a central position for the

obvious

and most articulate of his colleagues. For many years he was away, most of the time in a monastery in Japan, in India, or working in the States in the mountains for the Forest or Park Service. At his rare appearances his effect upon

reason that he

is

the best informed, most thoughtful,

Leonard Cohen (above), Evgeni Yevtushenko

(right)

audiences who packed halls to hear him was— what? Stupendous? Terrific? Tremendous? Groovy? Not even Ginsberg had such impact, such total projection and identification. The word is empathy, used in its correct, not jargon, sense of physiological reciprocity. During those yean the world was catching up with Snyder, for he certainly was the first, at least overt, poetic voice of the ecological revolution. Ginsberg's life philosophy is

largely a kind of instinctive, orgiastic Judaism; he

sion of the Hasidic zaddikim, the Cabalistic poets,

Hosea and the Isaiah

community

is

a

modern

expres-

and the wilder prophets

Snyder lias a perwhich the ecolo concept of all life as community, the mutual aid oi Kropotkin, and the Buddhist love and respect for all sentient creatures are merged into a coherent and readily negotiable pattern, completely relevant to the in like

of the

fectly clear, carefully

thought out

temporary situation.

I

wouldn't

life

(all

it

love.

l

philosophy

in

ideology, hut he certainly answers

the quest of the critics in the older generation

man, or theoretician of the counterculture. What makes Snyder so extremely popular

is

ii

an ideologist, spokes-

relevance.

The develop

153

Gary Snyder

ment of a new ethic, a new aesthetic, a new life style, among artists, writers, and musicians and the youth for whom they speak has coincided with the breakdown of the older order. It was to be expected that, in the face of an ecological crisis of terrifying proportions, those is

essentially ecological

would

whose philosophy

of life

find themselves in positions of leadership

on their part, but it is important to realize that they were there beforehand and had developed on their own terms, indewithout any

effort

pendently of the general

crisis.

mankind has been brought face to face hundred years of the "value neuter" scien-

Since Nagasaki and Hiroshima,

with the consequences of tific

method,

finally

ethics. Ecology, its

we

five

with value neuter philosophy, even value neuter

are

now

discovering,

is

precisely that science

which

in

operation produces evaluations, even a scale of values, a hierarchy of

goals.

For a century

archy, have been

now

the sciences of

under the leadership of

man, emptied of any such hierand psychoanalysis

a psychology

increasingly pathologically oriented. 154

It

has often been pointed out by historians of the philosophy of medi-

Kenneth Rexroth

cine that both giene.

Greek and American civilizations were dominated by hyof Aristotle and the philosophy of William James

The philosophy

and John Dewey are rooted in medical concepts. The essential difference is that Greek medicine was focused on health, guided by the concept of man at his optimum, while American medicine is oriented toward morbidity, so that eventually almost all psychologists and psychoanalysts emerge from their value neuter descriptions of human behavior with the shocking conclusion, "Everybody is sick"; "We are all more or less crazy." It is

man

only in very recent years that the concept of

returned to the

life sciences.

When Abraham Maslow

subject he threw a bombshell into psychology

at his first

and

optimum has

brought up the

sociology.

We

all

learned in our high-school general science class what a paramecium at

optimum

was. It was a

paramecium over

a microecology permitted

it

in that corner of the tank

its

where

to function at fullest capacity, to realize itself

me alone, man. I just do nice things with my friends." What the spokesmen of the counterculture are all saying is that man can be a reasonable and self-determinative paramecium. He can, with his fellows, create the local environment in a society which will realize the greatest possible human potential. It is that or nothing— either optimum man or extinction. This is why Marx and Freud are lost on the other side of the generation gap, and why their followers are not listened to. All the major works of Marx after 1848 are concerned with social pathology—as Freud is concerned exclusively with sickness. After their youth, Marx and Engels refuse even to discuss the socialist society of the future, and in all the works of orthodox psychoanalysis there is no convincing portrayal t a mentally healthy human being. This is why the old masters of the counterculture are precisely the Utopian socialists and anarchists attacked by Engels, or they are William Morris, John Ruskin, Suzuki, or Alan Watts, or anti-Freudians like Marcuse, Reich, and Norman Brown, llu \ as

completely as possible as a paramecium. "Let

want

to

try to

answer the question, "What

is it

like to

be well? " .Meanwhile,

all

around, the world sickens toward death.

Fiction

It is difficult to talk

about the

very definite reasons. Fiction poetry. It has largely lost,

due

fiction of the is

due

decade

in these

terms

toi

three

incomparably more commercialized than to

its

decline in quality, which in turn

is

critical readers. Content]

an audience mostly for the immature, bui most of the immature prefer television. Since fiction must compete with the film and u-h-\ ision, it must try to equal the empty intensity of their stimulations. As In as the pubto its commercialization,

rary fiction

lishers are

anyway.

l

is

concerned, most novels are written

The

result has

been an

c\ ci

to be sold

t«>

the movi

accelerating sensationalism.

Phe

las!

Literature

Isaac Bashevis Singer five years

have seen the growth of

established publishing houses

sterile, infantile

now

issue

pornography, until old,

masturbation companions with

no more content than the mimeographed twenty-five-cent booklets once and known as "four sheeters." The evils of pornography are vastly overrated. Danish experience indicates it may well do more good than harm, but it certainly is not the art of fiction. The objection has nothing to do with puritanism; it's just that such immediate lures and satisfactions are the opposite of the long-term realizations of any art. Imagine War and Peace or even Wuthering Heights or The Brothers Karamazov improved and augmented, each with fifty sold in high schools

pages or so of choice pornography. 156

have made the most

It is

interesting that those authors

use of such materials,

who

from William Burroughs'

Kenneth Rexroth

Naked Lunch

to Philip Roth's Portnoy's

Complaint, have been intensely

puritan in their attitudes toward sex. Perhaps this the past ten years by

and

is what the novel of breakdown into extreme Certainly the two best novels of 1969

large represents— the

overreaction of the puritan ethic.

were by Vladimir Nabokov and Isaac Bashevis Singer, both of whom look on contemporary civilization from the outside. Both too are men with a wide range of general ideas; the great trouble with American novelists is their shocking poverty of general ideas. As Andre Malraux said long ago, "American writers do not have general ideas. In America general ideas are left to the professors." So true— today the words literary cocktail party

have replaced

ladies'

sewing

term for empty-headed, malevolent

circle as a

chatter.

In recent years the novel has been at

its

best

when

it

has given very spe-

dramatic embodiment to the most negative aspects of the general crisis of the society. I can think of few American novels that can be compared with the work of dozens of American poets as embodying a positive,

cific

or even a revolutionary, philosophy, except for the books of a few black

none

novelists,

of

whom

have yet reached the mastery of the medium

achieved by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, or James Baldwin. There

simply

is

no contemporary novel

of black life that can even remotely

com-

pare with the best statements of fact— The Autobiography of Malcolm or Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice.

An immense amount fiction of a sort that

of

highbrow

fiction

and almost

all

appears in the big women's magazines

the is

X

lowbrow

concerned

with the unmanageable conflicts and meaningless catastrophes that beset the American family. A large proportion of these writers are Jewish. Herbert Gold, Bernard

Malamud,

Philip Roth, Saul Bellow,

Norman Mailer—

they are only few out of many. Probably the best analyst of the pathetically

WASP suburbanite family is George P. Elliott, whose sharply clinical stories make me feel bad for days. Its hard to write about contemporary American fiction because it's so hard to read. Where can you turn? Science fiction? Detectives? Westerns? Alas, these have all become sterilized package commodities untouched 1>\ human hands, and again, alas, they too have been invaded by a cocktail-part) psychiatry ami the quickie stimuli of pornography. We have had no Simenons. We no untragic tragedies of the

longer produce any Dashiell

Hammetts, Raymond Chandlers, Ernest

Haycoxes.

Probably the best novelists of disorder, sorrow, and chaos are imported. For skill and depth of bite I can think of no Auk u an who an compai e with the early work of Gunter Grass 01 his contemporary luccessoi in the field, Jakov Lind. The novels of Witold Gombrowia have atn acted littlec

i

among intellectuals. Perhaps they're ovo he are cci tamh among the besl ol this kind.

attention in America, even

everybody's heads, but they great trouble with years

is

that

it

has

all

1

the best-known and most su< essful fiction

little


\

I

in\

it

n

York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967.

Songbooks of music and Lyrics by Bob Dylan, Joan Baes, Simon and Carfunkel, Leonard Cohen, Arlo Guthrie, the Beatles, and tnosi everybody else am be found in most music stores. These never contain the material in iheh latest records.

177

R.

Robert Henry Robins qualified to report

An

development Linguistics.

its

A Short

in

He has

among

research

General

Introductory Survey,

1967, he studied

in

of

1964 he described

entire field in his

Linguistics:

and,

especially well

on the development

linguistic studies. In

and analyzed the

is

Robins

H.

historical

History of

carried out original

the Yurok Indians of

northern California, and his results,

published by the University of California Press, constitute the

language. Educated is

at

first

of their

Oxford University, he

now Professor

University of London,

since 1948.

account

He

of Linguistics at the

where he has taught is

well

known

in

the

United States, having been Research

Fellow

at

Berkeley

the University of California at

in

1951, and Visiting Professor

at the University of

and

Washington

at the University of

Hawaii

in in

1963 1968.

Linguistics

Linguistics as a field of scholarship

Linguistics tific

is

often defined as the science of language, or as the scien-

study of language, interpreting the terms science and scientific

in their broadest sense, to fact

and the formulation

mean

the systematic

of theory. It

is

and objective statement

regarded by

many people

of

as a

modern subject among academic disciplines, and if one judges by reference to university departments, appointments, and degree subjects it is certainly true. The term linguistics and equivalent terms in

relatively this

other languages,

e.g.,

German

Sprachwissenschaft, came into general use

during the nineteenth century, but the formal recognition of the subject

began in the present century. Growth in research and teaching under this head was most marked in the United States between the two world wars and has continued there since then; in Britain and on the continent of Europe, and elsewhere, linguistics has been at the forefront in the expansion of university education that has so much characterized the past two decades. The science of language in the nineteenth century was largely dominated by historical considerations, in the main due to the intellectual excitement caused by the emerging picture of the Indo-European family of genetically related languages, covering most of Europe, parts ol the Middle East, and northern India. This aspect of linguistic studies is still familiar in the English-speaking world under the title com pin at

really

philology. It would, however, be a serious mistake to say thai linguistic studies only began in the nineteenth or twentieth century. From the earliest

we have of ancient cultures and from the evidence provided by the ethnographic study of diverse cultures in the modern world, it is clear that the existence and the working of human language has always

records that

and wonder. In a numbei ol centers o( civiliwonderment has independently developed through

excited man's admiration zation this primitive

1

"folk linguistics" into an organized and scientific stud)

ol

language,

1

in-

world over, is the heii to the- pi oduc ts ol .ill these sepa rate developments. One advantage that present-day linguistics has ova earlier periods is guistics today, the

Linguistics

that of seeing all

how and where

the subject should be divided in order that

may be adequately surveyed and anaby no means to say that linguistics today is at the end ot the

the relevant data of language

lyzed.

This

is

road and that the vast complexity ot language can now be regarded as laid bare. Indeed, some ot the most recent developments in linguistics have served rather to open up vistas of unexplored detail and further data, to which our theories are only beginning to adjust themselves. But we do now have a far better picture of the main headings under which language must be studied, whereas earlier linguists, however good their work was (and much of it was very good and made an indispensable contribution to our present-day achievements), frequently suffered through

Some contemporary through obstinacy or ignorance, and with far

leaving unheeded whole areas of relevant study. guists

may

still

do

this,

linless

excuse.

The

scientific

study of language

is

not the same as "language study" in

the sense of the acquisition of fluent

languages; and the use of linguist to

command of one or more foreign mean a student of language must

be distinguished from the more popular use of the word as a synonym of

one who is a skilled performer in a number of languages. Such and the teaching that produces it, is not to be underrated. Much of the stimulus to scientific linguistics came from the results of language contacts and the need to teach and learn other languages than one's own; and some of the most important practical consequences of linguistic studies lie in the improvements they have made possible in the teaching of languages (a field known as "applied linguistics"). But the linguist, as he is being considered in this article, is concerned with human language as a subject worthy of study in its own right. His scope includes equally languages of worldwide civilization and literature, such as English, French, and Spanish; languages known only from written records, such as Ancient Greek and Hittite; and unwritten languages, often spoken by fewer than a hundred speakers and on the verge of extinction, such as is the case with many of the native Indian languages of North America. Two facts about language stand out. At any period a speech community operates with its language in all necessary forms of communication without the need to know about or to think about the past history of the language. Indeed, in an unwritten language (and the majority of languages are still unwritten, although of course the best-known and widely used languages have long since been reduced to writing) there can be no direct knowledge of its past history. In other words, a language is at any one time and in any one speech area a self-contained system, in which native speakers are able to produce and understand, without any effort or even any great attention, an infinite number of sentences, most of which have never been uttered or heard before in the speakers' experience. But we know that languages are always changing over the course of polyglot,

an

180

ability,

Robins

R. H.

A

years.

comparison of Old English (Anglo-Saxon) with modern English,

modern French, Spanish,

or of Vulgar (colloquial) Latin with

which are

all

descended from

it,

makes

this clear. In

or Italian,

favored cases, as in

the history of English, several of the stages linking two widely separated

periods are preserved: for example, Old English, Chaucerian English.

Shakespearean English, 3 the English of the Authorized Version of the Bible, eighteenth-century English, 4

and modern English. Some

parts of a

language change more quickly than others; vocabulary can change very rapidly in periods of rapid cultural change, but pronunciation and gram-

mar change much more

slowly, so that within a lifetime speakers are not normally conscious of any changes in them. It is absurd to imagine anyone thinking that he was the last speaker of Late Latin or the first of

Early French!

An

adequate study of language must give due attention to each of these its self-contained working at any time (be it present or past) and its continuous change in time. Since Ferdinand de Saussure first made this necessary distinction clear to us, early in this century, these two

dimensions,

aspects of language study are often

known,

in his terminology, as syn-

chronic and diachronic, respectively. Alternatively, the terms descriptive

and historical them both.

linguistics

braces

linguistics are used,

and general

linguistics

em-

Linguistic levels

Independent of the distinction just made the study of language into a

they are often called. the general

human

number

matters

It

of

is

the division of language and

component

capacity for

the structure of a particular language; the point

any and every language, revealing just

and

it

is

is

human

that

immensely complicated (modern

how much more complicated

cannot be analyzed or

be focused on

aspects or levels, as

whether one is considering primal ih the acquisition and use of a language or

little

it

is

somewhat

satisfactorily studied en bloc. Attention

in detail

on

this,

is

than was once thought),

separate, though, ol course, interrelated, aspects

Linguists differ

languaj

linguistics

must levels.

oi

bul very generally the follow-

ing levels of linguistic statement and. in consequence,

ol

language are

recognized: phonetics, phonology, grammar, and lexicon. These levels are independent of the synchronic-diachroni< distinction, referred to above, in that any and all ol them must be considered in an) complete study of language both from the viewpoint oi a communication

system working at a given time and from thai

gone

Phonetics: Speech that

ol historical

changes under-

in time.

homo

sapiens

is

is

the primary material oi language. Since

coeval with

lennia of development behind peared, perhaps four

01

five

homo it

loquens,

human

it

is

likel)

iad mil-

Ian

before the earliest written records ap

thousand years ago. Literaq

is

b)

no means

Linguistics

normal human beings acquire their naease, and in literate communities they tive Language in learn to speak before learning to read and write; and for everyone far more time is spent hearing and speaking than reading and writing. It maybe taken for granted that language has evolved in the way it has and is maintained in its known forms primarily to meet the requirements of oral communication. Phonetics may be considered from three sides. Articulatory phonetics looks at the production of speech sounds by a speaker and their description by reference to the movements and positions of the vocal organs involved. Acoustic phonetics examines the nature and structure of the sound waves so produced and their transmission through the air or other material. Auditory phonetics concerns itself with the impact of these sound waves on the ear and their conversion through the aural mechanism and the auditory center of the brain into perceived sounds on the part of the hearer. Since the organs of speech, unlike the mechanism of universal, but all physiologically

childhood with

the ear, are relatively accessible studies are the

most

easily

articulatory phonetic

to observation,

undertaken and have been developed

Only

centuries in different centers of linguistic science.

for

many

in recent years

have we acquired enough sensitive apparatus adequately to investigate acoustic and auditory phonetics, but their findings have been of tremendous importance to language study. Phonology: Speech sounds, the field of phonetics, constitute the potential material of spoken language. But languages select different ranges and sounds and organize them differently. In a number of languages of India, aspirated spectively, with

and unaspirated p, t, and k (consonants released, and without a little puff of air) can distinguish two

ferent words; in English, aspiration or

its

lack

is

largely

re-

dif-

determined by

the environment in which the sound occurs: initially these consonants are aspirated, after

s

they are unaspirated (compare team and steam); in

French, aspirated consonants do not appear at differ greatly

in the syllable

Hawaiian and Fijian have no

and word syllables or

to speakers of these languages the English

Moreover, languages

words ending in a consonant;

word strengths and the German

would seem almost impossible, though they pass unnoticed among native speakers of English and German. Other languages, for example Italian and Finnish, lie between these limits of syllable complexity. The study of the contrastive and sequential relations between the sounds employed in particular languages is designated phonology. Alphabetic writing systems— Roman, Greek, Cyrillic— and syllabic writing systems—Javanese, Japanese (in part), and in some respects the DevanagarT script of Hindi-speaking India— depend on an intuitive partial phonological analysis of the language, though they vary in accuracy and exactness (Chinese character writing rests on a different basis: in brief, each charac-

sprichst

182

all.

structures that are permitted.

R.

ter represents either

hi.

Robins

an individual word or an individual constituent of

a word).

As the as

remedy the shortcomings

result of attempts to

accurate representations of what

is

of writing systems

actually pronounced,

from the

seventeenth century on, linguists have worked on transcriptions: narrow or phonetic transcriptions attempt to represent graphically the actual

phonetic features involved in speech; phonological transcriptions limit themselves to providing one distinct sign and one only for each distinctive

sound unit in a given language, collectively representing environmentally determined differences (English aspirated and unaspirated / in the example above) by a single written symbol. Grammar: Grammar has for long been recognized as the central part of language study. Traditionally it has been divided into morphology, the study of

word

structure,

and syntax, the study

of sentence structure,

a division not maintained by all linguists today, at least in

form, but one that can

still

its

traditional

be defended as theoretically sound and ana-

In a rather more comprehensive use, grammar has often been taken to include phonology (consider the expected contents of a

lytically useful.

Grammar tion

of French). Linguists differ in their interpretation of the rela-

between the

levels of

phonology and grammar.

Lexicon: While grammar considers words for what they have in com-

mon,

either in morphological

form or in syntactic function, in the

lexi-

con of a language one is examining each word as an individual entity, with its own specific pronunciation, grammatical status (e.g., noun), and meaning. The product of lexical study in synchronic (descriptive) linguistics is

the dictionary; in diachronic (historical) linguistics

it

leads to et\-

mologies of the words in a language.

Both grammar and lexicon are involved in semantics, the study of meanThe meaning of a sentence is the joint product of the structural meaning of its syntax (e.g., question, statement, command, emphasis, subject as against object in its nouns in relation to the verb) and the combined individual lexical meanings of its component words. The nature of the meaning relation and indeed the whole problem of meaning have been debated by philosophers, psychologists, and sour- linguists from ing.

very early days; several radically different points up, but a general, agreed standpoint on

theory and semantic

method seems

made

as iai

oi

view have been taken

the most adequate semantic

;nv;i\

as ever, despite the

great

understanding the nature ol the questions involved. In its widest sense, semantics lias been made- to covei the \ci\ extensive and complex relations holding between different types and styles progress that has been

in

and different personal relations, social roles, language hino reco and verse literature, colloquial speech, oratory, eu nized in societies. Linguists diner in the degree to whi< h the} im lude iim h topics within their main field of interest.

of utterance tions (prose

|

183

Linguistics

Early history of linguistic studies

Mention has already been made of the origin of linguistics in the natural wonderment aroused in man when he contemplates the power and mystery of speech. In several centers of early civilization,

this developed independently into linguistic science, the special concern of certain individuals recognized as its practitioners. In China the particular nature of the character writing system and the grammatical structure of classical

Chinese, wherein word form variation (inflexion) such as

languages like Latin and German, and to a

lesser

we know

it

in

extent in English, was

almost entirely absent, fostered a concentration on lexicography and phonology. Dictionaries of Chinese, setting out the characters roughly in the

way they

are listed today, date from the second century

a.d.,

the same period began a succession of studies in the structure

and from and pro-

nunciation of the syllables composing the words of the language.

In ancient India linguistics developed to a very high standard. Originally motivated by the need that was felt to preserve the pronunciation

and structure

employed in certain ritual utterances and and unaltered, it resulted in studies in linguistic theory and in the phonetics and grammar of Sanskrit that were in several respects far ahead of anything done in linguistics elsewhere for many centuries. The best-known figure in this work was Panini, whose date has been variously put between 700 and 300 B.C.; his description of Sanskrit word structure is regarded as a model of exhaustiveness and scientific rigor unexcelled before or since. This work and the series of treatises on Sanskrit phonetics have enabled us to know more about the structure and the pronunciation of that language than of other dead languages, even the European classical languages, Greek and Latin, about whose pronunciation we still lack certainty on a number of important details. The discovery and interpretation of this work by European scholars from the end of the Sanskrit

religious usages intact

of the eighteenth century proved a decisive stimulus in the progress of

European

linguistics.

Linguistics in Europe, like so in the speculations of early title

many

Greek

of philosophia (philosophy),

sights

into

the

potentialities

of

other intellectual activities, began

thinkers,

and Plato

under the then all-embracing is

grammatical

credited with the analysis.

He

first in-

devoted a

on and nature of language. Under the combined influences of philosophers and literary critics, Greek thinkers on language worked out

Socratic dialogue, the Cratylus? to the discussion of various questions

the origin

through successive stages the parts of speech (noun, verb, pronoun, categories (case, gender, number, tense, mood,

and the grammatical

that are familiar today;

184

grammar

were laid down.

their

work culminated

etc.)

in descriptions of the

Greek (100 b.c.-a.d. 200) in which the main language such as has been taught ever since the of

morphology and syntax lines of the

and

etc.)

of

R. H.

The Romans,

Robins

and copying of Greek and sciences, analyzed Latin grammar on the same descriptive basis and enshrined it in a series of Latin grammars written in the early centuries a.d., of which the most famous are the relatively short grammar of Donatus (fourth century) and the immensely long one by Priscian (c. a.d. 500), these two becoming the foundation of the study of the Latin language and of grammar in medieval Europe. models in the

From

true to their respectful adoption

arts

antiquity

we can

study in Europe leading

follow an uninterrupted tradition of language

up

to

contemporary

linguistics

through a

series

of successive phases. In the late medieval period Priscian's description of

Latin lastic

grammar was taken over and incorporated

into the system of scho-

philosophy, a joint product of Catholic faith and Aristotelian logic

shaped by such thinkers

number

as St.

Thomas Aquinas, 6 and

there resulted a

grammars") wherein language was displayed as part of an entire and unified Church-inspired world view. During the Middle Ages European linguists undertook the serious stud\ of Hebrew and Arabic, making use of the work already done by Arab grammarians. After the rapid expansion of Islam from the seventh century the requirements of administration and religion (the study of the Koran) led to an independent development of Arabic linguistics, in which the grammar of classical Arabic was codified in its present form by such early scholars as Sibawayh (end of eighth century). Arabic scholarship was an important influence on Hebrew linguistic work, and Western study of these two languages provided European linguistics with its first serious investigation of languages other than Latin and Greek. After the Renaissance European linguistics expanded in several dirt H tions, more particularly as more and more languages from the newl\ discovered extra-European world were recorded and studied. From the of treatises ("speculative

sixteenth century Chinese

became known

to the

hitherto outside the ken of Europeans, and with

West, a type of langua it

the scholarship already

expended on it by native linguists. With European lingua franca of educated discourse arose the stud) i mar and pronunciation of the European vernaculars, Further

the decline of Latin as the

ing the field of the linguist's attention. Scholastic

grammar

the gramdiversify-

hardl)

sur-

vived the scholastic age; in the post-Renaissance centuries theories

language and theories of grammar were debated along the

lines ol

philosophical controversy between the empiricists,

ioi

tion to such

men

looking

ol

the

inspira-

and Hume. 7 and the rationalists, important series ol grammars was produced in

as Locke, Berkeley,

looking to Descartes.

An

France under the direct influence of Cartesian philosophy

in

the seven

teenth and eighteenth centuries. It is only very recently that contemporary linguists have realized the importance and the relevance to our own work toda) ol the achievements of European linguistic scholarship between antiquity and the nineteenth century. Too many writers, until a lew yeai i ago, would dismiss the Eu

185

Linguistics

pean heritage

in halt a

dozen paragraphs

theoretically or historically.

much many

Now

it

is

as of little significance either

being increasingly

realized

how

and seventeenth-century predecessors have to teach us, both in relation to our own theoretical problems and debates and as part of the intellectual and cultural history of the European community. Inspired by this latter-day realization, active research is going on in the history of linguistics, though there remain great gaps both in our actual knowledge and in its interpretation. of our medieval

Nineteenth-century linguistics Typical of studies

this neglectful attitude

serious linguistics

began

be precise. This date

which

toward the

earlier history of linguistic

the formerly prevalent view, enshrined in several textbooks, that

is

Sir

is,

at the

William Jones,

strated for the

first

end

of the eighteenth century, in 1786 to

indeed, significant, because a British

it

was the year

in

high court judge in India, demon-

time the indisputable genetic connection of Sanskrit,

the classical language of India, with Latin, Greek,

and the Germanic

languages, as well as bringing to the notice of European scholars the work

done by the Sanskrit grammarians and phoneticians mentioned above (p. 184).

The

effects of this discovery of Sanskrit

by Europeans were twofold.

In descriptive work the phonetic achievement of the ancient Indians

wholly revitalized European articulator} phonetic investigations, which

had been

deficient in a

number

of respects hitherto,

and the Paninean

techniques of word-structure analysis virtually opened a

morphological theory, being directly relatable to the concept

(p. 203).

diate effects were

But

it

felt.

The

was in historical

new door in morpheme

later

linguistics that the

most imme-

discovery of the genetic affiliations of Sanskrit

with the major languages of Europe, coinciding with the historicist tendencies of late

eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century romanticism and

nationalism, inaugurated a century during which the historical dimension of language studies held the center of attention. This epoch was a special

achievement of German scholarship; chairs of Sanskrit combined

with historical linguistics were established in the universities, and work in this field in

German

Great Britain and America was largely in the hands of

expatriates

(Max Muller)

or of

men

trained in

Germany (W.

D.

Whitney). Learned societies devoted to historical linguistics made their appearance in Britain and on the continent during this century. The permanent achievements of nineteenth-century historical linguistics were

and method of this aspect of language remained valid ever since, and the establishment of the Indo-European family of languages and of other genetic language families based on the same principles. the explicit formulation of a theory

study,

186

which has

in

its

essentials

R. H.

Robins

on the theory during on a widening range of material from languages both living and dead, and it was set out toward the end of the century in the form that has been substantially accepted, with some additions and modifications, up to the present day. Briefly the main feaSuccessive generations of scholars concentrated

the nineteenth century, working

(modes of pronunciation) change gradubut regularly over the course of years in the transmission of a language from one generation to another, and that within different geographical areas the changes, or the absence of change, to which the sounds in a language are subject can be exactly stated, giving rise to the welltures of the theory are that sounds

ally

known concept

of

"sound laws." In

its

strongest form, popular in the late

nineteenth century though somewhat modified since then, sound changes

were said to take place by "blind necessity," and the laws were of the same sort as the laws of nature asserted by the physical sciences. This had the effect of concentrating attention on the apparent exceptions (word

forms apparently related to anterior forms but not adhering to the sound correspondences prevailing in other similar words); such aberrant forms as far as possible explained either by a refinement of the original law (as when certain changes undergone by consonants in the Germanic languages not fully explicable by "Grimm's Law" were brought into order by the subsequent "Verner's Law"), or by their being loanwords (words

were

brought into a language at a

later date rather

than inherited), or by the

operation of "analogy," whereby grammatically or semantically associated

words may be individually affected in pronunciation each other (thus in English at a certain period

between

s

and

o, as

w

to align

ceased to

them with

be pronounced

instanced in the word sword; this change did not

operate with swore, by analogy with the present tense form swear; the mistakes of children and foreigners in producing forms like "hitted" and

"runned" are examples of analogical creation, and the replacement of earlier holp by helped as the past tense of help is an instance of such a form becoming accepted as part of the language). On the basis of the asserted regularity of change, etymological connections can be made between word forms of successive periods in a language, and by the systematic comparison of words in different languages that appear to be related in meaning, it is possible to build up a picture of the historical connections between the languages of a single family and to go some way in "recon-

word forms of the language from which the members

structing" the

earlier

more or

less

unitary

"parent"

of the family have diverged, in the way

and Rumanian have diverged the title comparative and historical

that French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian,

from spoken Latin. This

is

the basis of

linguistics.

Concomitantly with the development of a theory of historic a] linguistic I went the development of the Indo-European family. This nun. which dates from 1814, was devised to cover the set of languages thai Included those originally mentioned by Jones, and several others. By the end oi the

Linguistics

century the family was seen to comprise various subfamilies, such as Indo-

The Romance group is something very like it is extant in Latin (though classical literary Latin is not the same thing as the spoken "Vulgar Latin" from which the Romance languages have developed), and this provides a check or control on the comparative method by which parallel groups, such as Germanic and Celtic, and the IndoEuropean family itself, are set up on the assumption of divergent development from a common source no longer extant. Some linguists set out language families in tree diagrams to display the historical relations between the member languages; the "parent" languages of the subgroups like Latin and (nonextant) "Proto-Germanic," "Proto-Celtic," etc., then appear between the single source and the extremities of the tree. Beside the name Indo-European, Indo-Germanic is sometimes used to designate the family, which includes most (not all) of the languages of Europe together with Persian (Iranian), Sanskrit, and the major modern languages of northern India (Hindi, Marathi, etc.). During the century other genetic language families were set up on a similar basis to account for systematic correspondences in word forms, e.g., FinnoUgrian (Finnish, Lapp, Hungarian, and some other languages of eastern Europe and parts of Russian Asia), Dravidian (many languages of central and south India), and Algonkian (American-Indian languages spoken or formerly spoken on the eastern seaboard and the central plains of the United States and Canada). This latter family shows how the methods worked out for Indo-European can be applied in areas where written records are almost nonexistent by relying wholly on transcribed spoken Aryan, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, and Romance. a special case in that the parent language or

forms.

Current research in comparative and historical linguistics has not subchanged the membership of the Indo-European family. Early in the present century Hittite was shown to belong to the family, though its exact relationship is still debated. Some rearrangements have been prostantially

posed

among

the interrelations of the

be noticed below ysis

have given

component

subfamilies,

and

as will

(p. 194) current synchronic theories of linguistic anal-

rise to fresh interpretations of the processes of linguistic

change. But the achievements of nineteenth-century historical linguistics,

though now integrated into more comprehensive general linguistic remain an impressive monument to German scholarship.

studies,

De Saussure The forms and

directions that linguistics has taken

and

is

taking during

the present century are, broadly speaking, the product of the inspiration

who by their work effected a permanent change and reorientation of the subject as they found it and left new of a few outstanding scholars,

188

R

H.

Robins

contemporaries and successors. was Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), a FrenchSwiss professor who published little, but whose lectures on general linguistics at the University of Geneva were extraordinarily influential both to those who attended them and in their subsequent posthumous published form as the Cours de linguistique generate, edited by some of his pupils. 8 In Europe especially, the next generation of linguists was dominated by de Saussure's teaching. Some have indeed spoken of him as the virtual founder of modern linguistics, but this is to underrate and misrepresent the earlier work that has been sketched out above. The point is that de Saussure was recognized for the decisive contribution he made in and just after his lifetime, while the importance now being increasingly

"growth points"

The

first

for their

of these

accorded to earlier stages and scholars covery of their thought and

its

is

more

in the nature of a redis-

relevance today.

Quite naturally, in the light of the place held in nineteenth-century by historical studies, de Saussure began his career as a com-

linguistics

making in his early life an important contribuIndo-European phonology. 9 But his major achievement was to reinstate synchronic— descriptive— linguistics alongside diachronic— historical— linguistics as an equally important component of general linguistics. A number of universally accepted concepts in linguistics were first made explicit by de Saussure, and many technical terms in the subject originated in his lectures (synchronic and diachronic, in their French forms synchronique and diachronique, are instances). It used to be said that de Saussure converted linguistics from being a primarily historical discipline to one that involved descriptive (synchronic) study. This could only be maintained when people's vision of linguistics went back no farther than the nineteenth century. In fact, in Greece and Rome, in the Middle Ages, and in ancient India, the orientation of linguists was predominantly synchronic, being concerned with the description and analysis of a particular variety of Greek, Latin, or Sanskrit, and with an associated theory of language. The strong historic i^i bias of the nineteenth century can be seen, in fact, to have been a diversion of main linguistic interests, to be accounted for by the particular [acton that were noticed at the beginning of the period. Of course, earlier linguists were not self-consciously or explicitly oriented toward description; parative-historical linguist,

tion to

the contrasts of the two dimensions of linguistic study, were not brought into our formal awareness prioi

so

obvious today,

to

de Saussure's

teaching.

De

Saussure's other principal legacy to present-da) linguistics was the

Contemporary interpretations oi the nun all linguists would necetstructuralist today; bul the main point oi the theorj

structural attitude to language.

structure vary between different schools, and not sarily

accept the

title

expounded by de Saussure is very generally acknowledged, namely, that the elements and categories by which a language operates and in terms

Linguistics

of

which

it is

analyzed have their function and their significance by virtue

of their interrelations with each other in the language

self-contained entities in isolation. case in

German and

As obvious examples

in Latin, despite their

and not simply

as

of this, the dative

common name and some

simi-

by reference to the German system of four contrasting cases and the fact that the German dative is one of the prepositional cases, as against the Latin six-case system in which the dative does not construct with any preposition; and words like good and warm derive their specific meanings from their presence in systems or fields of semantically associated but contrasting words such as excellent, fair, larity in

meaning, can only be

and

fully described

At the phonological level the must be pronounced so as to be readily distinguishable from d in deep, from n in need, etc.; but beyond this its exact phonetic realization, for example the degree of its aspiration (p. 182), varies from speaker to speaker and is less important bad,

etc.,

hot, tepid, cool, cold, etc.

English consonant sound represented by

t

in tea

provided only that its distinctiveness is maintained. Likewise in orthography the letter t may be written in various ways as long as it is always visibly distinct from /, f, etc. These considerations led to de Saussure's famous assertion "Dans la langue il n'y a que des differences." De Saussure's concern was with the whole range of linguistic levels: phonology, grammar, and lexicon; but, as it happened, it was in phonology that his ideas made their most immediate impact. Indeed, during the years between the two world wars one of the most noticeable facts in the development of linguistic science was the general dominance of phonetics and phonology. This is evinced in a number of separate ways. In Britain and to some extent also on the continent of Europe university chairs in phonetics were established in the 1920s; the first chair of linguistics in a British university was only set up in 1944. Professors of Comparative Philology there were, but their field was centered on the historical dimension of language study inherited from the nineteenth century. The International Phonetic Association was founded in 1886, but the first International Congress of Linguists was not held until 1928. More importantly, phonological theory was recognized as the pacemaker in theoretical developments at other levels, as will be seen in looking at work done in the 1930s and 1940s.

The phoneme theory

The

190

first specifically descriptive concept emerging in twentieth-century phonology was the phoneme, and phonological theory was worked out around questions on the status and definition of the phoneme and the problems and methods of the phonemic analysis of languages. Very broadly, phonemes are the distinctive sound units of a language as opposed to nondistinctively different sounds. In the English example given

R. H.

earlier the phonetically different aspirated

aspirated

t

[t]

t

[t

h ]

of steam belong to or constitute one

Robins

of team

and the un-

phoneme

/t/ contrast-

whereas in an Indian language in which aspirated /t h / and unaspirated /t/ may contrast and distinguish two words from each other they are two separate phonemes. (Slant lines are a convenient and accepted convention for indicating phonemes, with square brackets ing with /d/, /n/,

etc.,

marking speech sounds

as such.)

The

concept of distinctiveness as against nondistinctive difference is so important and basic through the whole of linguistics that it is worth

and illustrating from another field. Coins in a currency are having different values— cent, nickel, dime, quarter, etc.— and

lingering over distinct in

in using coins, as in using one's language, all the instances in any one denomination are treated as the same. But there are actual differences between individual coins— dimes with Roosevelt's head on one side and preRoosevelt dimes, British pennies with King George VI's head and those with Queen Elizabeth II's head, and so on. Such differences are observable, but they are nondistinctive in the uses to which coins are normally put. Numismatists study such differences, just as linguists study nondistinctive phonetic differences within phoneme units, because each is an interested student of the subject, coins and language respectively, and not just an

unreflective user.

The

it

in fact the Its

phoneme concept

very brief outline of the

relevant

was

to

just given will

de Saussure's insistence on contrast within

phoneme had been

show how But

a system.

in use before the publication of the Cours.

origin was in the problems faced by nineteenth-century phoneticians in

devising adequate transcriptions for languages. Spellings had for long as phonetically inaccurate; the disharmony between Enand English pronunciation had been a byword for centuries, and several attempts had been made at spelling reform, largely without success. But increased phonetic skill and accuracy showed that the graphic representation of every observable sound difference in a language, even it practicable, would lead to a quite unusable proliferation of separate sym-

been recognized glish spelling

bols.

Though he

never used the term

phoneme

in his work,

Htm

(1845-1912), one of the greatest of English phoneticians, arrived basic

phoneme concept by

every sound difference

is

\

Sweet al

the

distinguishing narrow transcription, wherein

(ideally) given separate written representation,

from broad transcription (a term still in general use), in which onh classes of sounds able to distinguish two linguistic forms (e.g., words) in a language from one another are represented by separate symbols. (In English h is a broad transcription [t ] and [t] are narrow transcription symbols; symbol.) Sweet called his broad transcription "broad ramie," because letter symbols largely derived from the roman alphabet were used; it Kl referred to in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, and Sweet, who was I

friend of Shaw's, was the

The phoneme

as a

model

term and

for the tatter's Professoi a

concept was

in

Higgins.

\n\ general

use

l>\

the

Linguistics

1920s, but primarily as a

transcriptional device, legitimizing the units

assumed to be represented by the symbols of a broad transcription. This was its main purpose and justification for Daniel Jones, Professor of Phonetics at University College, London, 1921-49, whose works on the phonetics of British English have become standard textbooks wherever the language is studied. The further analysis of the phoneme, and of the notion of distinctiveness, was the principal achievement of the Prague school of linguists, applying Saussurean ideas to the existing transcriptionally derived

phoneme

unit.

The Prague school

The Prague

school was a group of European linguists, under the leader-

ship of Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoi (1890-1938),

who met

periodically in

Prague, although Trubetzkoi himself was Russian by birth and from 1922

was Professor of Slavic Philology in Vienna. Their main organ was Travaux du cercle linguistique de Prague (TCLP), which appeared at irregular intervals from 1929 to 1939; the 1939 issue comprised Trubetzkoi's Grundziige der Phonologie, 10 the summation of twenty years' study of phonological theory based on the concept of the phoneme as the phonologically distinctive unit of languages. Trubetzkoi was expelled from his chair shortly after the Hitlerian occupation of Austria and died soon afterward. The Second World War broke up the Prague school as a forum for international linguistics, and one of Trubetzkoi's most influento 1938

the series

tial associates,

European

now

Roman Jakobson

countries, finally

(b.

moved

1896), after staying briefly in other to the

United States in 1941 and

generally recognized as the doyen of American linguistics.

He

is

played

an important part in the development and transmission of Prague thought in America. The Prague circle re-formed after the war, but it no longer holds the center of the European linguistic stage. its

history,

School of

Its

achievements,

and its current work are well summarized in The Linguistic Prague (1966) by Josef Vachek, himself a member from its

early days.

In their work, which typical of the time was largely concerned with

phonology, Trubetzkoi and the other members of the Prague school subjected the phoneme to a thorough analysis. Their concern was not just with the

phoneme

broad transcriptions emphasized by de Saus-

as the theoretical justification for

but with the whole concept of distinctiveness, as sure, in relation to the phoneme. Their work is of lasting importance, not but because several of their developing linguistic theories and are

just as part of the recent history of linguistics,

ideas are

still

at the forefront of

actively influencing to reject, as

192

some

much

do, the

Transcriptionally the

current work, even

phoneme as a phoneme was

among

those

who have come

basic phonological unit. a single unit,

but as a

scientific

R. H.

concept

it

Robins

was further analyzable into a number of distinctive features

in

combination, which would be shared by more than one phoneme in a language, and two phonemes might differ by one or by more features. Thus English /t/ and /d/ share the feature of place of articulation (contact of the

and

of

lease,

tongue

mode

with the alveolar ridge just behind the upper teeth)

tip

of articulation (stoppage of the outgoing air followed by re-

or "plosion"), but they are distinct by reason of the presence of the

feature of "voicing" (vibration of the vocal cords during the articulation of /d/) as against the absence of such voicing during the articulation of /t/. The voiced-voiceless distinction also keeps apart /b/ and /p/, /g/ and /k/, /v/ and /f/, /z/ and /s/, and some other pairs in English. These phonemes differ distinctively by only one distinctive feature; English /b/ and /t/, on the other hand, differ by two, in respect of voicing and of place of articulation. Such are the distinctive features of a language, and there are fewer of them than there are phonemes, which they make up, since the same feature (or its absence) may form part of several different phonemes, as was seen just above. The distinctive feature was destined to have a profound effect in phonology and, by extension from phonology, in linguistic analysis at other levels.

Immediately,

it

made

clear that the basic constituents of phonolog-

ical systems were not atomic phoneme units but their component features, and that the transcriptional notion of mere distinctiveness was not enough, since phonemic distinctions were maintained in different ways. Like any

other fecund idea, the distinctive feature led to several further insights.

was now seen that separate phonemes were not all contrastive in all and that where certain contrasts were inoperative this was due to the "neutralization" of a particular feature and its absence. In English It

positions,

the six

phonemes

tip, dip,

/p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/ contrast initially (pet, bet, could, good), but after /s/ there is only a three-term contrast, of

place of articulation, as in spill,

sonant of these words (/p/, /t/, /k/),

but

Conventionally the second con-

still, skill.

assigned in transcription to the voiceless

as there

trast the distinctive

articulation

is

is

phoneme

here no possibility of a voiced-voiceless con-

unit really only comprises the features of place of

and manner

A comparable

of articulation (plosion).

neutrali-

zation of the elsewhere maintained distinction of voice- and voicelessnesfl is

found in German (but not

in English) in

word

Bund 'bundle' and The neutralization of

bunt 'colored' arc

voiceless plosives occur:

exactly alike, /bunt/.

in particular positions or

final position,

environments

is

where onlj

pronounced

a particular Feature contrail

now

a

basic

concept

ot

pho-

nology, and it arises from the Prague analysis of the- phoneme into its component features. De Saussure had taught that languages musl not just be analyzed l>\ but in terms reference to contrasts at the same plai c in loi ms (pet, bet. etc .)

arrangements and structures permitted in languages. In phonology the concept of syllable structure had lor kM

also of the different sequential

Linguistics

been recognized, and its different possibilities in different languages have been noted above (p. 182); but Prague phonology studied this aspect more systematically, under the title of Grenzsignale (boundary marks) with reference both to syllables and to words. In English it is well known that a notion and an ocean form a not quite perfect pun. The consonant and vowel phonemes are the same, /anoujn/, in each case, but the /n/ is differently pronounced: in a notion it is tenser and shorter, in an ocean it is weaker and more protracted; and similar differences make a tease and recognizably different. In such cases the differences relate to, and mark, the boundaries between the words. Languages vary in this respect; there is little scope for such differences in French. In some languages certain consonants are confined to initial or to final position in syllables at ease

and thus

h/ and and final position respectively: no word, therefore, can begin with /ij/ or end with /h/ (sounds, not letters, are being referred to; there is no /h/ sound at the end of hurrah). In some languages of southeast Asia plosive consonants are confined to initial

hi

(

n S)

serve to delimit the syllables by their presence. English

on ly occur

m

syllable initial

position in the syllable (and therefore, of course, in words as well); in such

languages the feature of plosion

New

light

is

a

mark

of syllable initiality.

was shed by the Prague study of the phoneme on nineteenth-

century historical linguistics. Sound change, the basis of historical guistics,

was seen

to

lin-

be not just changes in pronunciations but rather the

realignment of phonological systems and of the contrasts of distinctive features from one period to another. This aspect of Prague phonology was outlined by Jackobson ("Principes de phonologie historique," in Trubetzkoi, Principes

de phonologie) and has since been taken up in greater detail

by others, in particular by A. Martinet ("Structure, Function, and Sound

Change,"

Word

8,

1952).

Jakobson was responsible for one of the most significant grammatical studies coming from the interwar period of the Prague school. His Beitrag zur allgemeinen Kasuslehre (contribution to the general theory of case),

published in 1936 as part of

TCLP

6, is

an example of how phonological

theory led the way at this time; the semantic and grammatical analysis of the Russian case forms

is

carried out in terms of grammatically distinctive

oppositions found in different combinations in the various cases, on a similar basis to that of the phonologically distinctive features of phonemes,

and a number of technical terms in use then and phonology were exploited in the analysis of the

since then in

Prague

case system

of Rus-

sian nouns.

Linguistics

in

twentieth-century Europe and America

Before pursuing further developments and consequences arising from

Saussurean linguistics and Prague phonology, 194

sider the organization

and growth

it

will be desirable to con-

of linguistic studies in

European and

Ft.

American

H.

Robins

universities during the twentieth century.

As has been said, was the dominant aspect during the nineteenth century, but interest in the synchronic and structural study of language arose early in the twentieth and was most powerfully stimulated by de Saussure's teaching. In his Russian student days Jakobson tells us how he was most eager to read those new structural studies that his older teachers had declared to be unimportant. 11 During the 1920s a number of books on general linguistics were published, of which the best known is probably Otto Jespersen's Language (1922), a popular work still worth reading, though none was more provocative or significant than de Saussure's Cours. A more specialized work appeared in 1928 from Louis Hjelmslev (18991961), Principes de grammaire generate, itself inspired by de Saussure's thought and one of the few original works on linguistics in the 1920s not oriented primarily toward phonology. Hjelmslev was later to develop, along with his pupils and associates in Copenhagen, a highly idiosyncratic and abstract theory of language under the title of "glossematics," set out in Danish in 1943, which aroused considerable interest after the appearhistorical linguistics

ance of the English translation 12 but has

made few

converts outside

Denmark.

The

first International Congress of Linguists met in The Hague in meeting thereafter at five-year intervals. In the United States the Linguistic Society of America, with its organ Language, was founded in 1924. Historical studies under the traditional title of comparative philology remained well established in European and American universities, and in 1922 Jespersen could still declare that linguistics was distinguished by its "historical character." 13 While, as we have seen, phonetics and phonology held the center of interest in descriptive linguistics in Europe,

1928,

it was in America that descriptive linguistics as a whole achieved its first major foothold in academic establishments. The now universal recogni-

tion of linguistics as a subject of scholarship

United States

after the

came

into being outside the

Second World War.

The American achievement

in the interwar years,

dation for the vast growth in linguistics

all

which

laid the foun-

over the English-speaking

world and elsewhere from 1945 onward, may in greal part be set to the credit of a number of outstanding American scholars actively interested in all aspects, historical as well as descriptive, of language study, in particular Franz Boas (1858-1942), Edward Sapir (1884 1939), and Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949).

These men were well versed Bloomfield studied under the just before the First

in nineteenth-century

German

World War. But

a

August Leskien

American enAmerican Indians, ["hese languages and culture, had

special pari ol the

vironment was the anthropological stud) peoples, exhibiting a bewildering variet)

\

this reason,

209

Linguistics is so much easier between European languages than it is beEuropean language and one that is culturally Ear removed from Europe. Malinowski set out his approach to meaning in his "Ethnographic Theory of Language" (in Coral Gardens and Their Magic, vol. 2; 1935), in which the following two sentences perhaps sum up his theory: "Meaning is the effect of words on human minds and bodies and, through these, on

translation

tween

a

the environmental reality as created or conceived in a given culture." "It [translatability]

must always be based on

a

unification

of

cultural

context." Firth adopted Malinowski's context of situation to form the central

concept of his theory of language as well as of his theory of meaning. Indeed, the terms were not really separate in Firth's linguistic theory. In his case the fact that speech activity

some sense meaningful as part of the study of

led

him

and

all

other uses of language were in

to regard the study of

meaning. In

this respect Firth's

language at

all levels

thought was moving

in the exactly opposite direction to that of the "Bloomfieldians."

Meaning

term was very much extended in scope beyond its previous usages, and indeed beyond the usage of other linguists before and since, but Firth did not thereby lose all contact with the Malinowskian concepas a technical

tion; Firth's basic equation,

underlying his theory, was simply "Meaning

=

held that

function in context."

He

all

linguistic description

was the

statement of meaning at some level in relation to some context, and he

was in consequence committed to speaking technically of phonological meaning and grammatical meaning? 1 Few people have followed him as far as this, but his development of context of situation in semantics was insightful and is worthy of consideration. Firth's context of situation was a more abstract notion than Malinowski's, and it was not intended as a set of actual environmental features as such but rather as a descriptive frame w ithin which to state and categorize r

such features in the indefinitely varied actual situations of language use.

At the time he was reacting against the too facile identification of meaning with reference and was demanding that the other factors of major importance that are involved in our understanding and our responding to what is said or written in a language in which we are fluent should be made explicit in a semantic analysis and included in a theory of meaning. Such factors comprehended social connotations, degrees of familiarity between speakers and their personal relations, the course taken by any relevant prior conversation, the intended results of the utterance, and the various shared presuppositions about the uses of the words chosen. Firth, like Malinowski, regarded word meaning as an abstraction from the meanings of the sentences in which it could be used. You only know the meaning of a word fully when you know the meaning of the rest of the sentence as a whole. In this attitude Firth w as allying himself with one school of linguistic thought in ancient India (p. 184), which had maintained the semantic priority of the sentence 32 and went counter to the r

210

R. H.

Robins

which from Aristotle on had based semantic analysis on word as an independent meaning-bearing unit. 33 and Firth argued that we acquire the knowledge of Both Malinowski most word meanings through an abstraction process from manifold inWestern

tradition,

the prior existence of the

stances of their occurrence in sentences meaningfully uttered in situations.

This process of abstracting the meanings of words goes on all our lives, but it is at its most intensive in childhood. After a certain amount of such exposure, in some cases assisted by explicit instruction, we say that we know what such and such a word means, that is, we know how it is used in sentences such that our hearers and readers will on the whole understand what we have to say. There is nothing very difficult about learning word meanings; we all do it. What is much harder is making an explicit statement of them. This is the task of the lexicographer, and it is well known that any adequate dictionary entry must bring into play a good deal of contextual information as well as give a straight definition by synonyms; that is why good dictionaries give great numbers of citations of words in actual sentences. The part played by the dictionary is well summed up: "The way in which the dictionary writer arrives at his definitions merely systematizes the way in which we all learn the meanings of words, beginning at infancy, and continuing for the rest of our lives"

Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action, 1954). Those words which can be more or less satisfactorily described semantically by pointing or by a brief but complete definition are relatively few in any language, and they are mostly nouns: "What is a zebra?," "What are pygmies?," etc. Deictic definitions can only be given and understood after an adequate knowledge of the meanings of other words, and of grammatical structures, has been acquired; they must not be regarded as (S. I.

typical of all that

is

involved in semantic description.

Firth's context of situation

was an attempt

to set out

and systematize

the relevant information that the language user takes into account in ab-

word meanings, and which, largely intuitively, governs his choice words in speaking and writing. He has been accused of confusing meaning with use; it is held that by virtue of the inherent meaning that a word has we can understand its use in a given situation, but that the two thin are distinct. Firth and those thinking like him would reply that in linguistic experience meanings are abstractions from multitudes o\ observed uses and can only be described and analyzed by reference to the relevant stracting of

factors in the situations of use, for

which context

ol situation

was intended

as a formalization.

Firth's ideas called, did

on the contextual theory

of meaning, as

not attract the attention he had hoped

penetrating studies of areas of meaning

in

lor.

it

came

though

languages were made

to

be

several

in Firth-

ian terms (e.g., T. F. Mitchell, "The Language i Buying and Selling in Cyrenaica: A Situational Statement," in HespMst 1957). Parti) this was because the general climate of linguistu opinion in the 1940s and 191

Linguistics

was unfavorable to semantic studies in general, but more particularly it must be attributed to Firth's failure to set out his theory in detail and to apply it extensively. He was undoubtedly too optimistic about the ready availability of the context of situation concept in the absence of carefully

worked out

studies of various problems. For this Linguists

who have

rently returned to semantic questions have justifiably criticized his followers;

but

it

seems

clear, nonetheless, that in

form, Malinowski and Firth did point to a

number

however inchoate

notion of linguistic meaning.

Some

a

of areas of investi-

gation that must be covered by any adequate treatment of what in the

cur-

him and

is

involved

very recent studies in semantic

theory and statement, in discussing the information a speaker controls in

knowing the

lexical

meanings of

his language,

have come quite close

to

those very factors which Firth, however crudely, was endeavoring to bring

within systematic analysis. 34

Distinctive-feature

The Prague

phonology

concept of the distinctive feature has already been mentioned

in reference to the further linguistic analysis of the

phoneme

as a basic

unit in phonological theory (pp. 192-93). This part of Prague linguistics proved extremely important in its consequences. In part these were due, as

is

move

often the case in scientific developments, to personal factors. of Jakobson,

The

one of Trubetzkoi's most distinguished associates in America in 1941 has already been noticed (p. 192).

the Prague school, to

Some

years earlier (see his Selected Writings I: Phonological Studies, 23,

272-79) he had found reason to suggest an alternative interpretation of distinctive-feature theory. Trubetzkoi's features were based

tory phonetic categories— on the place

mouth

on

articula-

of articulation in the

examples such as voicing, nasality, aspiration, Jakobson suggested that in a number of respects

of the speaker— as

plosion,

etc.,

make

clear.

might be more fruitful to consider first the distinctive qualities of the sound waves as received and interpreted by the ear and brain of the hearer. It had been known for many years that speech sounds, like all other sounds, were transmitted as vibrations of various frequencies and degrees of loudness from their source to their reception by the ear. 35 Further studies had revealed that the various audible qualities differentiating one consonant or vowel from another depended on different combinations of vibrations at specific "bands" of frequency between 15 cycles per second at the lowest and 20,000 at the highest. Of course different frequencies and intensities (degrees of loudness) in the sound waves of speech are directly and solely caused by the configurations and movements of the vocal organs, and certain perceived qualities resulting from particular combinations of frequencies can be correlated with particular articulatory movements, but there is not a clear-cut one-to-one correspondence between the most it

212

and method

R. H.

readily

available

categories

of

articulatory

description

Robins

and the most

readily available categories of acoustic description.

Jakobson's interest in the acoustic and auditory side of phonetics coincided with significant technical advances in the physical analysis of speech sounds and in their visual representation. Notable publications in this include R. K. Potter, G. A. Kopp, and H. C. Green, Visible Speech

field

(1947)

and

Joos's textbook Acoustic Phonetics (1948;

Language

24, no. 2,

supplement).

A

phonology and advancing techknowledge was a new version of distinctive-feature theory in which phonemes as distinctive units were exhaustively analyzed into combinations of a smaller number of distinctive features, identified not on an articulatory basis but on an acoustic one, in terms of the relevant structures of the sound waves. The distinctive frequency "bands" that gave rise to the qualities of speech sounds are most noticeable in vowels, where two such "bands were isolated as the most important. These range between about 200 cps and 750 cps and between about 700 cps and 3,000 cps, and they are known as "formants." The most important two formants just referred to were designated "formant 1" and "formant 2" respectively. When frequencies in these two "bands," corresponding to those identified in the visible analysis of actual spoken vowel sounds, were mechanically produced and combined together, recognizable vowel qualities were heard. Other "bands" of frequencies are also involved, and in consonant sounds the distribution result of the collaboration of revised

nical

of energy over the frequency scale

is

more

diffused,

but every speech

sound has its characteristic and distinctive wave shape or configuration of combined frequencies. Some "continuant" sounds with rather vowellike qualities,

mant

such as English "1" sounds, exhibit a

fairly clear-cut for-

structure, similar to that displayed by vowels. Machines have been

devised to produce artificial speech sounds and even stretches of

speech on this technical basis, in what

is

artificial

called "speech synthesis."

Jakobson's acoustically defined distinctive features were based in the first

instance on the distinctive sound-wave configurations characterizing

them.

Some bore

Trubetzkoi, to a specific

e.g.,

and

as contrasted

titles

similar to those of the articulator}

features of

"nasal" (the release of air through the nose giving

rise

characteristic distribution of energ) over the frequent

with "oral," characterized b\

the-

absence

o(

nasal quality.

But most of the acoustic features carried names directl) related to thesound-wave shapes and only indirectly to the articulations producing them. Thus the features "grave" and "a< ute" referred to the- concentration of energy in the lower and in the upper frequencies respectively. Some twelve such features were identified, and it was claimed l>\ several linguists that the distinctive consonant and vowel sounds and other

phonemes of all languages coidd be exhaustively described in terms oi the presence or absence of a set of features selected from the list. The binarj

Linguistics

opposition of presence and absence was conveniently like

much

of the

terminology of information theory and certain computer operations, but this was not its principal justification. It was felt that "languages were like that"

and that such

a description

was best adapted

to display the

nature and working of languages, at least at the phonological

level.

One

was, of course, operating at the phonological level of distinctiveness, basic to the

phoneme concept and

When

it

ment,

to all descriptive phonology (pp. 190-91). was said that such and such a feature was absent in a given seg-

this

did not necessarily

mean

that absolutely

no vibrations

at those

frequencies were generated or perceived, but simply that they were not

(Many speakers

pertinent or part of the distinctive quality of the segment.

some

through the nose in speaking; they "talk through their noses," but while this is noticeable it does not affect the distinction between the nasal consonants, /n/, /m/, and /o/ [wg], and the corresponding nonnasal— oral— consonants, /t/, /d/, /p/, /b/, /k/, and /g/.) Jakobson, with collaborators, was the author of two standard textbooks on acoustic-feature phonology: with C. G. M. Fant and Morris Halle, Preliminaries to Speech Analysis (1952), and with Halle, Fundamentals of Language (1956); on the preference for binary oppositions in of English release

air

distinctive-feature analysis, see Halle, "In Defense of the

Studies Presented to Joshua

Whatmough

(ed.

Number Two,"

Ernst Pulgram, 1957).

Post-"Bloomfieldian" developments

came to an end in 1957, with Chomsky's Syntactic Structures. In a sense this is a justifiable statement. Chomsky is the major figure in contemporary linguistics, and transformational-generative grammar, of which he was in effect the founder, is the most widely known and vigorously developing version of linguistic theory in the world of scholarship today. While Chomsky had put out papers on his theory before 1957 for somewhat limited circulation, the publication of Syntactic Structures really launched his name and his work before the general linguistic public. But in any It is

often said that the "Bloomfieldian" era

the publication of

Noam

survey of the history of ideas exact dates are misleading. In the nature of things, to

modes

of thought

and theories do not

rise

Transformational-generative linguistics, though

fall

and give place

it

is

the best

known

of

one of which we must take notice. Others came into prominence shortly before and after Syntactic Structures, and 1958 saw the publication of a standard textbook covering the whole subject and written almost entirely on "Bloomfieldian" lines as they had been established during the preceding two decades. 36 Moreover, important and lasting work in linguistic scholarship is still current developments,

214

and

each other at specific dates like governments or individual statesmen.

is

certainly not the only

Robins

R. H.

being carried out on "Bloomfieldian" principles, and this continue for

many

Nonetheless,

it is

to

likely

to

significant that by the latter half of the 1950s increas-

ing discontent was being

come

is

years.

felt

with the state of linguistic theory as

it

be accepted, particularly in America, where there was then

an overwhelming preponderance of pared with the rest of the world. It

this is

branch of scholarship

legitimate to speak in

as

had still

com-

Kuhnian

terms of the successful challenge at this time to the accepted "Bloomfieldian

paradigm"

198).

(p.

The

reaction of Firth in phonology has

al-

ready been noticed; a more general revision of linguistic theory in Great Britain

is

associated with

M. A. K. Halliday,

first

in

London, who developed a number of the strands

Edinburgh and then

in Firth's

in

thought into a

systematic theory of linguistic description at all levels (something that Firth, in the phonology-dominated 1930s and 1940s, had never done). Halliday and those working with him or along lines suggested by him

Chomsky, one must take into account the rise of tagmemic theory, inspired by K. L. Pike, and more recently S. M. Lamb's stratificational theory. These groups of linguists have varied in the extent to which they have retained or rejected various basic concepts of the "Bloomfieldian" period— the phoneme, the morpheme, etc.— but it must never be forgotten that none of their work or their thinking would or could have taken the forms that it has taken but for their own thorough understanding of the linguistics— Saussurean, Trubetzkoian, and "Bloomfieldian"— that had predominated in the preceding decades. Theories do not arise in a vacuum but grow from the reactions of thinkers to the theories and practices with which they have grown up. are sometimes called "Neo-Firthians." In America, besides

Dissatisfaction with the relative neglect of semantics, which, intentionally or not,

had been

a

consequence of Bloomfield's teaching, was being

independently voiced by a number of linguists in the 1950s, among whom Jakobson was prominent. Jakobson had never wholly approved of the extreme theoretical position of distributionalists like Harris, and he had been urging that more attention should be paid to meaning in the grammatical analysis of languages. 37

In fact, during the 1950s anthropologists and some Linguists who were working near ethnographic research had been applying a somewhat Praguean concept of distinctive-feature analysis to certain areas of vocabu-

In particular, the kinship terminologies of various languages rradils lend themselves to this kind of treatment; in English the semantic t


Vol. 22. Vols. 26

GBWW, Vol. 7, pp. 85-114. See GBWW, Vols. 19 and 20. GBWW, Vol. 35.

5

under Language

2).

(GBWW,

Vols. 36

and

37).

Wade

published Paris, 1916; English translation by

Baskin (New \. 7. " Indian linguistic Families of America North of Mexico (Washington, s "l now Harry Hoijcr in Linguistic Structures of Native America, ed. Corneliui Osgood, Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology 6 (New Nik: Viking Fund, 194 iBCf. C. C. Fries, "The B loom field School/ Trends in European and American Lin guistia 1930-1960, ed. Christine Mohrmann, Alf Sommerfelt, and [oshua \\ hatmough 11

Selected Writings

(

i^

l

1

(Utrecht: Spectrum, 1961), pp. 196-224. 16 Cf. Universal and Particular in the Syntopicon,

ChapU

I

96

(CBH

H

Principes de phonologie, pp. 41-46. 'vsapir, "The Psychological Reality ol

\l

17

Phonemes," Selected Writing* and Personality, ed. I). (-. Mandelbaum (Berkeley: University (19 1949), pp. 46-60; "Sound Patterns in Language." Language

in

Langua(

i

California

Culture, Press,

Selected

1

Writings, pp. 33-45 (this article

ment of American

linguistics);

Winston, 1933), chap.

5.

is

considered very

Bloom field, Languagi

(New

importanl N. that is to s \. stand world (Russell calls them atomic particulars) which in the present case are related to one another in that one is north oJ the other; accordingly, just as items a and /; in the proposition stand toi real the fact

>t

for real entities in the

R

particulars in the world, so also the symbol for the real relation that holds

between

Nevertheless, this early realism

ol

which the constituents ol an atomic correspondence with the constituents ism was soon shattered as

a result ol

a

and

analytic

b.

in the

proposition stands

:'

philosophy, according to

proposition Stand in oi

the-

a

corresponding lad

one

to one-

this real-

three quite different and largely inde-

pendent philosophical tendencies which are still very much alive and uncut with us and indeed might even be said to now dominate- thec

philosophical scene.

Philosophy and Ethics

The

of these was a tendency that arose

first

more

or

less

within the con-

developments in formal logic and that, tor want of a better identification, might be associated with the name of Rudolf Carnap.* For one thing, Carnap distinguished between what he called material and formal modes of speech: the former contains expressions that refer to extralinguistic entities, whereas expressions of the latter type refer only to vartext of

ious kinds of linguistic expression.

trained

it

upon

directly

Wheeling up

this distinction,

Carnap

the very foundations of Russell's realism, par-

ticularly upon Russell's contention that the logical structure of any atomic sentence of our language must needs correspond directly to, and even mirror, the structure of the corresponding fact. For example, as we have already noted, in a sentence such as "This is to the left of that," the terms this and that may be taken to refer to extralinguistic entities called

particulars,

and

which might be But Carnap would summarily dis-

to the left of to refer to a real entity,

called simply a relational universal.

miss this entire account as involving a simple confusion of the formal

with the material

mode

of speech. For terms like particular

signify only linguistic expressions tities

at all.

and universal

refer to extralinguistic en-

Consequently, philosophical sentences of the sort "There

exist particulars" call

and do not

or

"There

exist universals"

are

what Carnap would

pseudo-object sentences: they appear to refer to extralinguistic en-

certain kind but really are only syntactical sentences in disguise." Moreover, the upshot of such a critique was that the very foundations of Russell's thoroughgoing realism in logic and philosophy were quite tities of a

On the Carnapian view, the logical structure of propno wise requires the existence of special kinds of extralinentities— e.g., particulars and universals or relations— correspond-

effectively blasted.

ositions in guistic

ing to the structure of the proposition. Quite the contrary, the formation

system— those rules that prescribe what a wellsystem— are entirely a matter of arbitrary choice. "In logic there are no morals," Carnap declared in The Logical Syntax of Language (1934); and, in consequence, countless alternative logics and formal systems can be proliferated almost at will. And if one were then to inquire, "But what is that logical structure that is the proper structure of the world and of the facts in the world?" Carnap's answer would be that the world does not have any logical structure of its own at all. Or, what comes down to the same thing, the facts of the world have rules of a given logical

formed proposition

is

for that

only such a logical structure as we choose to confer upon them. But with this the transcendental it is

232

made and made decisively: we can ever hope to know relative to us and to our human

turn has already been

not the structure of the world in

itself

that

and understand but only its structure ordering schemes and systems of logic. However, the transcendental turn is not only evidenced in the theory of formal logic. A similar development occurred with respect to inductive logic, and this time the name to conjure with is not that of Carnap but

H. B.

book The Logic

of Sir Karl Popper. In his

Veatch and M.

S.

Gram

Popper

of Scientific Discovery,

sought not to solve the problem of induction but rather to break its back. He repudiated induction as a means of scientific discovery. His argument—

and the argument which brought about a transcendental turn in inductive logic— was this: Induction as a logical procedure is indefensible just because any attempt to infer from particular observed cases anything like a properly universal law is an inference which, when cast in syllogistic form, involves a fallacy of

illicit

minor.

And

to

suppose that a

scientific

hypothesis can be verified as a result of events that have been predicted on the basis of that hypothesis

is

to

commit

the fallacy of affirming the

consequent. 8 Instead of induction, Popper

recommended

as the only proper method procedure that has now come to be known as the hypothetico-deductive method. According to this method, one begins by recognizing that the observed facts and regular occurrences in nature

of scientific discovery a

stand in need of explanation. Silver melts at 960. 5°C; the planets are

observed at regularly recurrent positions at regular intervals of time— but

why? What

is

the explanation of such

phenomena? The answei

or discovered in the facts,

it

that

is

since scientific explanations are not the sorts of things that can be

found

must be we ourselves who make up or devise

the relevant explanations. Thus, to cite a classic example, given certain

data as to the observed positions of the planets at different times,

hannes Kepler simply drew upon tion to

come up with

but of an

his

own

fertile

Jo-

mathematical imagina-

the notion of an orbit in the shape, not of a circle,

ellipse, as a possible

be in the various positions

it

explanation of why

had been observed

a

given planet should

to be in at different tin

Moreover, once such an explanatory hypothesis as Kepler's theory of the elliptical orbits of the planets

has been thus devised,

it

is

Popper's con-

tention that the business of the scientific investigator must not be thought to

be one of trying to verify such a hypothesis or of showing that may at such and such a moment of time be observed

given planet

in fat

t

a

to be in

was predicted on the hypothesis of its orbit being No, for such an attempted "verification" of the hypothesis would be but another attempt at induction and would involve once more

just the position that

an

ellipse.

the fallacy of affirming the consequent.

Accordingly, rather than to try to verify the hypothesis, the real business of the scientist,

Popper

thinks,

is

to try

to falsify

it Since there ire

certain deducible consequences from an) hypothesis, the sciential should

concern himself with trying to find out not whether such consequences do occur but rather with whether they do not oo in Foi it a dedu< ible coiu

quencc of fied, and

a hypothesis fails to occur, then the hypothesis falsified

in

accordance with

procedure, not of affirming, but rather

the ol

perfectl)

is

clearly

falsi

impeccable logical

denying the consequent

Popper supposes thai by putting forward this hypothetico-deductive method as the only proper method oi scientific discovery, lie has quite

Philosophy and Ethics

and deftly renouncing the use of induction in science altogether. But what Popper never seems to have realized is that in thus obviating the traditional problem of induction, he is forced, unwillingly and unwittingly, to make the transcendental turn. broken

its

back, by simply

Indeed, there are at least three features of the hypothetico-deductive

method,

make

at least as this

is

expounded by Popper,

that

would appear

to

the transcendental turn quite ineluctable for anyone wishing so to

construe the nature of scientific discovery.

how one

The

first

such feature has to do

an explanatory hypothesis in the first place. For Popper is careful to insist that there is nothing about the observed facts in the case that could be said to make such a hypothesis logically plausible or from which it could be logically inferred. If there were, then the inference could only be an inductive one, and this is the very thing with

that

arrives at such

Popper wishes

to get

away from.

Clearly, then,

if

the

propounding

of

an explanatory hypothesis is in no sense a logical process, or governed in any way by canons of sound reasoning, then it would appear to be more like

an act of

free creation or imaginative

invention— comparable,

say, to

the composition of a symphony or thinking up a plot for a novel.

And

Popper does liken the devising of hypotheses in science to just such things. As soon as one views the matter in this light, scientific hypotheses cease to have the look of genuine accounts of the nature of things, or of the way things are in themselves, and take on instead the cast of just so many ways we human beings have of picturing things to ourselves and of causing them to appear to us, not as they are in themselves, but only as they are relative to us and to the imaginative constructions that we place upon them.

The same

conclusion, moreover,

is

reinforced by the second feature of

Popper's hypothetico-deductive method, which, to put this:

No

explanatory hypothesis or

scientific

regarded as a true statement about what

is

it

bluntly,

is

simply

theory can ever properly be in the world. Indeed, such a

excluded when Popper says that the only way in which a theory can come into contact with the world is by such of its logical consequences as can be falsified. For what this means is that reality can view of a theory

is

view but cannot tell us whether the view we have is really adeit: there can be, in other words, indefinitely many different theories that are capable of generating the same experimental consequences. And if this is so, then we can never know whether any theory that we have is a true description of the world. Thus Popper says that "Theories are our own inventions, our own ideas; they are not forced

reject a

quate to

upon

us,

but are our

self-made instruments of thought." 9

It is true,

Popper goes on in the very next sentence to say that theories can clash with reality and so may be held to be mistaken. But this does not show that any theory can be known to be a true picture of the way the world is. The most it shows is that certain theories are not true pictures of course, that

234

own

H. B.

Veatch and M.

S.

Gram

we can ever know which theory is such a picture; hence, any theory that has not been disconfirmed is as much a statement about the way in which we choose to look at the world as it is about the world. In fact, it can be argued, although Popper is at pains to avoid this conclu-

of reality, not that

any theory we adopt is in part an expression of our determinaone way rather than another. For, after all, if there nothing to decide between a number of competing theories that we

sion, that

tion to view reality in is

have not disconfirmed or falsified, the reason that we decide to adopt one is not dictated by the facts but rather by human

rather than another decision. 10

We

come now

to feature

and

number

three of Popper's account of the logic

knowledge in general. Already we how, in the context of such a method of discovery, explanatory have noted theories in science— and by extension in philosophy as well— are not based on the facts or in any way derived from the facts; rather they represent of scientific discovery

but so

many

different

of scientific

ways of seeing the

facts.

That

is

to say, given a dif-

ferent theory or explanatory hypothesis in either science or philosophy,

the facts themselves will be seen in a different light; indeed, they will even as, and be seen as, different facts. And with this, one would seem compelled to take a step beyond Popper, a step that any number of younger philosophers of science have taken and taken decisively. The step is this. Granted that the facts are seen as being of this character or that, depending upon the particular overall scientific theory or conceptual scheme into which they have been integrated, then it will no longer be possible to have the sort of unequivocal falsification of theories and hypotheses that Popper had envisaged. So-called crucial experiments simply become out of the question. Why? Because the relevant facts will no longei

appear

have an independent character of their own; rather they current expression has

will be, as the

completely "theory laden"; and as such, so

it,

fai

from being able to stand out in conflict with the relevant theory, and so have no features, no nature, no characteristics of any kind save those that have been bestowed upon them by the theory. In short, just as Popper had maintained thai overarching scientific theories were in no wise to be inferred or derived from the fa< ts, to offer evidence of its falsity, they will

so

now

by the

it

would appear that they are not subject to even being falsified As a result, the change from one all-embracing scientific another— say, from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican system is

facts.

theory to

never warranted by evidence that

changes

in the history of science

is

and

logically decisive.

of

be understood simply as "revolutions."

and mode, given at

for

which no

logically

human i

.is

Instead, such sea

culture generall)

radical changes ol

compelling grounds

»>i

.o
|

the like-

would

he-

may, indeed, be the ease- that Hut il it does, then what counts .is

the-

it

ic-suh of the- application of the-

proposition

is

ii

i

ational

is

presupposed

and not certified by the universalizability test. And Hare docs not tell us on what grounds we would defend the irrationality o\ (4). Yel a large clan of ethical judgments is concerned to pronounce desires like that expressed this is so. thru in (4) as unjustified, irrational, or even immoral. \nd a large class of ethical propositions lies outside the scope ol the- univer i!

salizability test. It

is,

accordingly, no accident that other contemporary moral philoso

phers have been dissatisfied both with Hare's account

oi

goodness and

his

Philosophy and Ethics

account of ethical reasoning. As diverse as the alternatives to Hare are, they have one thing in common: they are all attempts to show that there

between ethical predicates and the world than the "Good and Evil," argues that good is used descriptively both in and out of ethical contexts. 45 He undertakes to assimilate the use of good to that of such terms as big and small: such words have a definite sense in each context. Thus good is descriptive, although it functions this way only when used with reference to kinds or classes. And Geach holds, accordingly, that it is a mistake to say, as some previous moral philosophers have said, that because good by itself is not a closer connection

is

transcendental turn claims. P. T. Geach, in

descriptive,

it is

not descriptive at

What Geach wants all

hold

to

is

all.

that the term

good has

a definite sense in

contexts but that the sense changes from context to context. But

would seem

that, in

order to be able to say

this,

Geach would

it

also have

is nothing that is common to all of these contexts. True, major point is that good describes, not alone, but only in the context of some natural kind or other. But while this is true enough— and something that Hare not only admits but accounts for by distinguishing between the meaning and the criteria for the application of a term— the question that Geach does not raise is whether the term that describes only by specification of a context has any sense that is not completely specified by that context. If it has, then he must give an account of what it is. If it lacks such a sense, then Geach would appear to have obliterated Hare's important distinction between describing a thing and saying that it is good. Kurt Baier, in his Moral Point of View, propounds another alternative

to say that there his

to the transcendental turn. 46

Attacking the conclusions that other ethicists have drawn from the descriptive -evaluative distinction, Baier argues that you can verify statements of value in every way in which you can verify descriptive statements. To say, for example, that a is faster than b, while it is

factual, is— in

one

from saying that a is and this requires refer-

respect, at least— no different

better than b: in both cases you are ranking things,

difficulties with ranking from those inside ethics; hence, Baier concludes that ethical claims can have a truth value. Ethical argumentation is not, for Baier, mere persuasion, because there are beliefs that govern ethical reasoning which can be true or false. Baier

ence to a criterion of correct ranking. But the outside of ethics are

no

different

consideration-making

calls these

beliefs,

defining

them

as statements or

reasons for doing something (every such belief takes the form: so because

.

.

."). 47

Such

sentences are

cal justification, for they

meant

"Do

so

and

to restore rationality to ethi-

can function as major premises in ethical argu-

ments (thus making such reasoning deductive) and can be shown to be true or false by some standard. But what is this standard? Baier says that such beliefs can be seen to be true

when

they are seen "to be required

or acceptable from the moral point of view." 48 258

view

is

To

adopt such a point of

to elect only those ends that can be rationally willed by everybody

Veatch and M.

H. B.

S.

Gram

and to which there are no exceptions on grounds of inclination. But this merely perpetuates the problem of the transcendental turn: do we have any reason to reject those ends that, though they meet the restrictions of

would still be counted as immoral ends? Baier's that there are certain fundamental consideration-making beliefs that they are true because those who refuse to adopt them "must even

the moral point of view,

answer

and

is

be said to be mad." 49 But this

move

dental turn by pointing out that

consideration-making beliefs

deny that

this

is

solves the

problem

of the transcen-

advantageous to say that some of the founding one's culture are true. Some would

a solution at

it is

all.

Moral Notions

(1967) represents one such denial. 50 Like him, Kovesi attacks the descriptive-evaluative distinction. But Baier before

Julius Kovesi's

he holds, unlike Baier, that the distinction has been used by philosophers as

an inadequate account of the very different distinction between the

formal and material elements in our use of language. 51 Such elements, so far from being present only in ethical locutions, are to be found in main

we are able, for example, to with very different shapes, sizes, and things good that have very different properties. The ma-

so-called descriptive locutions as well. Just as cite as instances of a table things

colors, so terial

we

call

elements of tables differ widely, while the formal element— that

virtue of

which

point can be

tables are given their

made about

predicates

name— does not like good. And

vary. so,

if

And

we hold

object-words like table can occur in sentences that are true or

in

the same

false,

that

win

should we deny that typically ethical predicates can occur in sentences in exactly the

words: thing,

same way? Moral words, then, are

we we must if

in the

same boat

as other

refuse to say that moral words can be used to describe somealso refuse to say that a host of other

words can be used

in this way.

The

possibility of identifying the formal

enables us, on Kovesi's account, to

make

element in ethical predicates

true statements about what

is

good. But statements about formal elements are, for Kovesi, statements

about functions; and these reduce, on his account, to statements about the

term we use to refer to something. 89 Thai any array of different things can be grouped under one fun< tional des< iption is not, then, the result of something that is in the world but ratlin the result of our linguistic conventions: the objectivity of ethi< al din OU1 K criteria of application of the

I

is

made

tions.

to stand and fall with the public character oi Linguistii convenKovesi can thus say that moral judgments "simpl) are not about

the world." 53

problem problem is insoluble: The strategy is to hope that what has been conceded al one level—thai ethical predicates are not about the world— can be recovered if Wt trans

But

this, so far

from dealing

effectively with the

of the transcendental turn, tacitly concedes that the

late ethical

statements into statements about Language.

There remains another attempt to reverse author of which accepts the presuppositions

the transcendenta] turn, the oi thai

turn but denies that

Philosophy and Ethics

such a turn istic

is

outcome of them. D. H. Monro defends a naturalwhich runs like this: "x is good" is x has a given external characteristic p and (b) p is ap-

the logical

analysis of ethical predicates

equivalent to "(a)

proved (by me or by men in general).""' 4 What distinguishes this version from the usual naturalistic analysis is not the attempt to show that goodness is, after all, analyzable but that we can preserve rationality in approval or disapproval. Monro does this by showing that we can apply the universalizability test to our expressions of approval or disapproval: if anything has properties in virtue of which it is approved or disapproved, anything else having the same properties must also be approved or disapproved. Thus Monro can say that "whenever we express our emotions not merely by grunts, groans, or smiles but by projecting them onto the we do imply that the same emotion will be objects that evoke them roused by similar objects." 55 Monro concludes that expressions of emotion are not unrelated to their objects: just as we cannot consistently apply a predicate to one object and refuse to apply that predicate to other objects having the same properties, so we cannot consistently express approval for one object and withhold approval from anything else having the same .

.

.

,

description.

But alike.

this criterion

Recognizing

can be

this,

satisfied

Monro

by moral and nonmoral approvals

proposes to distinguish distinctively moral

principles from others by claiming that the former are not only univer-

what he calls overriding. To say that a Monro, to say that acting on it takes precedence over acting on any other principle. 56 This may succeed in separating moral from nonmoral principles; but it does not succeed in separating moral from immoral principles. It is still possible, for example, to say that a principle is overriding but immoral. And there is no way, on Monro's account, to justify one rather than another overriding principle except to say that it expresses something beyond which there is nowhere else to go. And the consequence would seem to follow that Monro has introduced no more ultimate rationality into ethical deliberation than Stevenson, Hare, Baier, Geach, and Kovesi before him: what he has shown

salizable but also that they are

principle

is

that

And

overriding

we cannot

this

is,

for

give or withhold expression of approval inconsistently.

does not prevent us from rationally approving of anything at

long as the approval we express is consistent. This also aligns Monro with those with whom he professes to disagree. For all the ethicists we have been considering so far have, each in his separate way, been attempting to restore a descriptive content to ethical predicates and thus to show that there is an ontological foundation for attributing a predicate like goodness to something. But the way in which this is done leaves it an open question whether there is, after all, any such foundation for the application of ethical predicates. For whether you call it a fundamental moral belief, a decision of principle, a considerationmaking belief, or an overriding principle, the problem that confronts all all so

260

is

H. B.

Veatch and M.

S.

Gram

is the same: we are not given a reason for condemning some principles that most or all men would condemn as immoral so long as the principles under consideration are consistently held. Perhaps this is too much to ask of moral philosophy. But if it is, then it should be admitted that the moral decisions we make are somehow ultimately ir-

of these solutions

rational, because

we cannot

rationally

contrary decision so long as they hold to

The transcendental

turn

condemn people who make it

the

consistently. 57

and phenomenological-existentialist ethics

In turning to a consideration of recent developments in ethics within the context of contemporary phenomenology and existentialism, one can

hardly

fail to

be struck by the fact that while philosophers of this per-

suasion are forever given to

making

ethical judgments, they are scarcely

ever given to writing about ethics. Neither Heidegger nor Sartre nor

Merleau-Ponty— to mention only the more obvious "greats" in sophical tradition— has ever written an ethics.

Nor

is

it

this philo-

generally agreed

down the very principles for an ethics, which might then someday eventually develop. True, Heidegger, as is well known, distinguishes between authentic and inauthentic existence. 58 Sartre, in his novels and plays, as well as in his articles, and even in Being and Nothingness, does not hesitate to satirize various modes and that they have even laid their followers

human behavior, castigating this person for being a "coward," one for being a "stinker," 59 another for being a "serious man," and all for being "in bad faith." Besides, both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty have engaged in no end of political discussion, pouring out streams of articles, pamphlets, and even books of polemics against the enormities of capitalism and bourgeois society generally, as well as against historical Marxism, particularly that form of it to which the dirty label of "Stalinist" might be attached. 60 But why in all of this has there never appeared anything that these philosophers would themselves claim was an ethics? Or why have not more of their followers undertaken to supply what would seem to be such an obvious lack on the part of their masters? 61 The answer, we believe, is to be found in that peculiar kind of transcendental philosophy that is so much a part of the warp and woof of contemporary phenomenology and existentialism. And by way of illustration, let us consider just briefly a certain seeming sort of ethical investigation that one not infrequently finds undertaken in the context of phenomenology of the stricter and less existentialist variety. Such investigations might be loosely characterized as aiming at what one might call a phenomenology of values, or "a phenomenology of moral experience." • Alter all, there is no denying that in the experience of human beings things do appear to us, at least under certain tin umstani es and in ertain ontexts, as being morally colored, shall we say. Thus, in our awareness ol most natural phenomena, such as that of water flowing downhill, lor example. types of

that

c

c

261

Philosophy and Ethics

hardly the case that we experience this as being in any way right or wrong, or good or bad. But that the Soviet armies should move into Czechoslovakia, or that certain personal friends or associates should be it is

found

to

be secretly conniving to defame us or undermine our reputaUnited States should be maintaining a presence in Viet-

tions, or that the

nam—these as

are things that

morally colored,

as reprehensible or

we cannot very

well avoid experiencing save

as defensible or indefensible, or as

i.e.,

commendable,

etc.

noble or

vile,

Accordingly, given the fact that

human experience things do appear or present themmorally neutral but as morally colored, the phenome-

in certain reaches of

selves to us not as

nologist can rightly claim that these ways of appearing that things have in so-called

moral experience are

phenomenological de-

just as deserving of

scription as are the ways of appearing that things have in aesthetic ex-

perience, or in the experience of everyday

life,

or in scientific experience,

or in religious experience or whatnot.

Unfortunately, however justified the phenomenologist

may be

in thus

seeking to provide a phenomenological description of moral experience,

and indeed of the entire range of value phenomena, such an undertaking is still far from being an ethics. It is one thing to know that things do in fact appear to us under the guise of good or bad or of right or wrong, etc.; it is another thing to recognize that such distinctions have some sort of a real basis, which not only justifies us but even obligates us to observe them and abide by them in our day-by-day conduct and behavior. Moreover, it is

precisely the latter sort of concern, rather than the former, that

proper business of

ethics.

the transcendental turn, can only find

beyond the phenomena given

up any and

But what about the

it

difficult if

of ethics to the reality.

for the fact that in recent years pure

much

is

Accordingly, the phenomenologist, having

all

And

the

made

not impossible to get

doubtless this accounts

phenomenologists seem to have pretty

attempts at developing an ethics.

existentialists?

For we have already noted in our

discussion of the contemporary situation in philosophy generally that pure

phenomenology has in recent years often given place to a phenomenology mixed with existentialism. What, then, is one to say about ethics in the context of such a phenomenology-cum-existentialism?

might be recalled how in our foregoing discussion of contemporary philosophy in general, it was pointed out that the characteristic influence of existentialism on those who make the transcendental turn is to shift the seat or locus of the transcendental activity of "world constitution" to the individual human subject. So, likewise, when it comes to Again,

it

it would not be inaccurate to say that the effect of the existentialist ferment in phenomenology has been to regard that moral coloration, which our human experience in certain of its reaches does indeed have,

ethics,

as

being something that the individual

things 262

and

create our

is

own

values; and, as

human

That Sartre and

himself responsible

for.

subject has bestowed

is

to say,

so

many

we human

upon

beings

other existentialist

H. B.

writers

would have

What

then,

is

it,

in so doing,

man

Veatch and M.

S.

Gram

creates himself.

the import of this characteristic existentialist move, so far

as the rehabilitation of ethics

is

concerned?

Initially, of course,

it

is

only

phenomenology makes the transcendental turn does pure phenomenology: values, moral distinctions, stanthan

too clear that existential

no

less

dards of conduct are held not to pertain to things as they are in themselves

but only to things as they appear to

us.

At the same time, the

existentialist has in effect shifted the locus or center of ethical

concern

and in the world to the human subject who creates such values and bestows them upon things, and who is thus responsible for the sense and meaning that things come to have for him, but which they do not have just in themselves. from what we might

call values in things

very crudely, it is as if the existentialist were saying that it no importance to ethics whether a certain social order, let us say, which men have come to regard as being just, is really just or not; or whether a certain way of life or pattern of behavior, which men have come to esteem, is really estimable or not. No, what matters ethically, and all that matters ethically, are the human decisions and resolves, as a result of which certain ways of life or institutions of society have taken on the value and significance that they have. For what of the human choices and decisions and commitments that were the sources of such estimates and evaluations: were they authentic, were they genuine, were they what they should have been? These are the only properly ethical questions, as the existentialists see it, questions that have their point and locus simply with reference to the human subject in his choices, his decisions, and his evalua-

Putting

really

is

it

of

tive activity generally.

And how would tions are to be

the existentialists say that such properly ethical ques-

answered? After

all,

in

much

of traditional ethics,

it is

sup-

posed that in order that a man's choices and decisions be the right ones, he

must first know what the good is, and what he as a human being ought to do and be, and how he should conduct himself. Not so, though, the existentialists. Instead, they would repudiate the whole idea of knowledge as being a guide to action. For such an idea makes for an ethics of the type known as that of "the serious man," a type that has been repeatedly satirized in existentialist literature, beginning with Kierkegaard and coming down to Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. For the serious man is said to be just such a one as must first know what course of action he ought to take before deciding to take

and decisions on anything

it.

Yet thus to

try to base one's ethical choices

knowledge and understanding is, the exiswould say, at once ridiculous and wrongheaded. It is wrongheaded because there simply can be no objective knowledge of what is really right or wrong, or good or bad: these are distinctions that we ourselves create, and hence they are not distinctions thai are alread) there and, as it were, simply waiting to be known. Indeed, the transcendental turn in existentialist ethics precludes any knowledge of li s sort. But. also, like

tentialist

1

1

263

Philosophy and Ethics

the serious man's procedure

is

as ridiculous as

it

is

wrongheaded. For

as

Kierkegaard so amusingly observes:

The

serious

with respect

man to

continues: If he were able to obtain certainty

he would venture everything for

wag; it is clear enough that raw recruit who takes a run

like a

the

and

the water,

When it

its

sake.

in preparation for

actually takes the run

the certainty

mean

know that it is really there, The serious man speaks he wishes to make fools of us like

such a good, so as to

to venture?

is

and

there he will venture

A

venture

is

jumping

into

gives the leap a go-by. all.

But what then does

the precise correlative of an un-

when the certainty is there the venture becomes impossiour serious man acquires the definite certainty that he seeks he will be unable to venture all; for even if he gives up everything, he will under such circumstances venture nothing— and if he does

certainty; ble. If

not get certainty, our serious ture of our serious

hope but

no

And

to gain in

man

man becomes

venturing

is

so at last

existentialist,

it

hold the pear in

merely a

itself certain, I

make an exchange. Thus

risk if I

says in all earnest that he refuses

would be madness. In

to risk anything, since that

in giving

my hand

this

way

the ven-

false alarm. If

do not

what

I

risk or venture,

an apple for a pear,

I

run

while making the exchange. 63

begins to emerge just what

it is

that, in the eyes of the

guarantees the genuineness and authenticity of our choices

decisions. It is not that they are made in the light of knowledge and understanding but rather that they are made at a risk and as a venture, precisely in the absence of knowledge. Nor is this really to say any more than that such authentic choices are free choices, in the existentialist sense of freedom. For if there are no objectively based guidelines for human life and existence, no values or obligations written into the very nature of

and

things, then assuredly it,

cisions

264

man

is

free,

and

free precisely in the sense, as Sartre

is to say, in making deand choices man has nothing to appeal to, nothing that he can fall back on for guidance, nothing that he can turn to by way of finding out what he should do and be or how he should conduct himself. Instead, he must simply decide, and decide in a full awareness of the sheer and total risk that he is running, there being no principles or maxims of any kind that can serve him either by way of guidance or of justification. Likewise, he must decide, and decide in full awareness of his own sole and absolute responsibility for his decisions. After all, there being no things "twixt heaven and earth," or even in heaven or earth, that a man can even dream of appealing to for support or guidance in such a philosophy, 65 it follows that a man's decisions are entirely his own, and decisions for which no one other than he himself is responsible. In summary, then, may not one say that existentialist ethics amounts

puts

of being

"condemned

to

be free." 64 That

H. B.

to

but

little

What one chooses, so

much

more than an freely

and

S.

Gram

and authentic choices? moment, but only how one

ethics that calls for free

chooses would appear to be of no

viz.,

Veatch and M.

authentically.

As Kierkegaard puts

it,

"it is

not

a question of choosing the right as of the energy, the earnestness,

which one chooses ... it is not yet a question of the choice something in particular, it is not a question of the reality of the thing chosen, but of the reality of the act of choice." 68 But what is this, then, if not seemingly an ethics almost without content, an ethics whose one ultimate imperative is simply the imperative to be free? And if, indeed, this is the case, then it is little wonder that the socalled existential phenomenologists should have traditionally been so ready with ethical pronouncements and yet so chary about ever discussing ethics. Nevertheless, just in the last two or three years, in this country at least, there would appear to be a slight change in this respect. For there have appeared two books, as well as an occasional article or two, which, although they are not impressive as to quantity, are very much so as regards quality, and which do address themselves directly to questions of existentialist ethics. As to the books, the one by Hazel Barnes, entitled An Existentialist Ethics (1967), and the other by Frederick A. Olafson, the pathos with

of

and Persons: An Ethical Interpretation

entitled Principles

of Existential-

ism (1967), 87 they do not profess to present systems of existentialist ethics (as if there could be any such thing), so much as apologiae designed to

show that there

is

an

existentialist ethics after all.

character of these books,

summarize three to

make

of the stock difficulties that

of existentialism an ethics

books addresses

The

1.

we perhaps could not do seem

and then

To

give a taste of the

better than simply to

any attempt which of these

to attach to

to indicate

itself to these issues.

first difficulty

might be stated thus: On what grounds does the he places on freedom itself? For, having

existentialist justify the value that

made

the transcendental turn, the existentialist then insists that the things

and happenings of the world are neither good nor bad, neither right nor wrong, in themselves. Rather such is but the way things sometimes present Moreover, the reason they thus make their appearances to us under this guise of value is because we human beings freely bestow such values upon them. And yet what about this very freedom itself, this very power to bestow a significance and importance upon things? Is that something whose value itself comes from themselves to us or appear to

this if

same freedom

to

us.

bestow value?

If so,

then

it

would begin

to look as

somehow trying to other hand, if our own human

the entire existentialist account of value were

itself

dom

by is

its

own

bootstraps.

On

the

hoist free-

not something that we give value to but rather something that has

value in

itself

and absolutely and compromising

to involve a serious

in

its

own

right,

then this would seem

of the transcendental turn

itself,

to say

nothing of being inconsistent with the entire existentialist account of how values arise in the world.

265

Philosophy and Ethics

Now

it

is

among others, that Professor Barnes how successfully she meets the difficomment. And yet one wonders if she may not

to just this difficulty,

addresses herself in her book. As to culty,

we do not propose

to

be found to have defended an ethics of freedom only by inadvertently turning the supposedly free man into a type very much like that of Kierkegaard's serious

man.

human

freedom, by which as men we are said to make ourfreedom which in the final analysis is subject to no norms or standards, save such as are of our own free invention and manufacture, or if in our free choices what is ethically relevant is not what we choose but rather simply that we choose and choose freely, then will this not make for a complete and utter relativism in ethics? After all, considered with respect to the content of our choices, it would appear to make not the slightest difference whether one's choice be for the way of life of a Hitler or for that of a St. Francis; rather, all that would matter presumably would be "the energy, the earnestness, the pathos with which one chooses." With respect to this issue and its attempted resolution from the standpoint of existentialist ethics, the reader might be referred, not so much to either of the two books just mentioned, but rather to a very interesting article by John Wild, entitled "Authentic Existence: A New Approach to " 'Value Theory.' 68 Again, in Wild's case, no less than in that of Barnes, one wonders whether in his efforts to free existentialist ethics from the charge of relativism, Wild may not have had to fall back on an appeal to our common human nature as men, a tactic which smacks rather of the ethics of the serious man than of that of existentialism. 3. Finally, if in an existentialist ethics, that which is held to be of supreme value for a human being is no more and no less than one's own 2.

If that

selves, is a

free, subjective commitment to one's freely chosen goals, as well as one's continued affirmation and vindication of that same freedom of oneself, then why should anyone have the slightest regard for the needs and interests of other human beings? What possible obligations can a man have to

human

To

beings other than himself?

this issue in

regard to existentialist ethics Olafson addresses himself

some of his most effectively argued pages. What he suggests is that Sartre and others, in making their enigmatic pronouncements to the effect that "in choosing myself I choose man," may really be appealing to the principle of the so-called universalizability of moral judgments which, as we have already noted, is a marked feature of much recent ethics in the analytic tradition. Indeed, Olafson's whole book is directed toward showing how, despite great differences in language and terminology, some of in

many of those of recent analytic ethics. Need we add that our own concluding comment would be that such a parallelism is ultimately traceable to that common partiality the leading ideas of existentialist ethics parallel

266

of both of these schools for the transcendental turn in philosophy?

H. B.

Veatch and M.

S.

Gram

1 This limitation means that we must leave out of account a number of contemporary philosophical activities which have had a certain popular appeal, but little effect on academic philosophy— e.g., the work of Herbert Marcuse, Teilhard de Chardin, the partisans of "situation ethics," etc. We shall further limit ourselves by not discussing sur-

veys of the literature as, for example, William K. Frankena's "Ethics," in Philosophy in

the Mid-Century, 4 vols., ed. Raymond Klibansky (Firenze: Nuova Italia, 1958), 3: 42 ff.; Geoffrey Warnock's Contemporary Moral Philosophy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967); and Mary Warnock's Existentialist Ethics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967). 2 An exception might be the new development of so-called structuralism in French philosophy, as represented by such thinkers as Levi-Strauss and Louis Althusser. 3 It might be remarked that of those comparatively few contemporary tendencies in American philosophy that are not marked by the transcendental turn at all, many are

pre-Kantian or even anti-Kantian in their philosophical allegiances. Two which display a predominantly Aristotelian or Thomistic realism in philosophy, as contrasted with a more Kantian type of transcendentalism, are An Interpretation of Existence by Joseph Owens (Milwaukee, Wis.: Bruce Publishing Co., 1968), and Two Logics: The Conflict Between Classical and Neo-Analytic Philosophy by Henry Veatch (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1969). 4 Cf. G. E. Moore, "Proof of an External World," British Academy Proceedings, vol. 25 (1939), pp. 273-300; also "A Defense of Common Sense," in Contemporary British Philosophy (second series), ed. J. H. Muirhead (London: The Macmillan Co., 1926), pp. explicitly

recent books, for instance,

193-223.

Bertrand Russell, "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism," in Logic and KnowlMarsh (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956), pp. 177-281. This Russellian program of logical atomism has been continued and brilliantly developed by Gustav Bergmann. See Meaning and Existence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960), Logic and Reality (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), and Realism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967). The work of Professor Bergmann and his school constitutes a notable exception to the philosophical developments that we are about to describe under the heading of the transcendental turn. 6Cf. The Logical Syntax of Language, trans. Amethe Smeaton (Paterson, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1959), esp. pp. 284 ff. i Ibid., pp. 297-99. For a parallel line of argument, see Gilbert Ryle's "Systematically Misleading Expressions," in Essays on Logic and Language (first series), ed. Antony Flew (Oxford: Basil Blackwell & Mott, 1951). 8 Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Sciences Editions, 1961), pp. 59 ff. Cf. N. R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni5 Cf.

edge, ed. Robert C.

versity Press, 1958), for a similar view.

Conjectures and Refutations (New York: Basic Books, 1962), p. 117. This view of change in scientific theories has been worked out historically by Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). For the broader metaphysical implications of this view of theory construction, see Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), and Philosophical Perspectives (Springfield, 111.: Charles C. Thomas, 9

10

Publishers, 1967).

See Philosophical Studies (Paterson, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1959). Reprinted in Ordinary Language, ed. V. C. Chappell (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1964), pp. 5-23. 11 12

N.J.:

13 These examples are taken from P. H. Nowell-Smith, Ethics (Baltimore, Md.: Pen guin Books, 1954), p. 70. 14 See Benson Mates, "On the Verification of Statements About Ordinary .111411.141 in Chappell, op. cit., pp. 64-74; and Stanley Cavell, "Must We Mean What \\ S in Chappell, pp. 75-112. 1


\ analogy. The example leads to the formulation of a rule through generalization *

See

J. S. Mill,

Utilitarianism;

ClilVW, Vol.

43, pp. 443

IT.

293

The

New

Rhetoric

from a particular cast- or through putting a new case on the same footing an older one. Illustration aims at achieving presence for a rule by illustrating it with a concrete case. The argument from a model justifies an action by showing that it conforms to a model. One should also mention the argument from an antimodel; lor example, the drunken Helot as

to

whom

the Spartans referred as a foil to

show

their sons

how

they should

not behave. In the various religions,

God and

divine or quasi-divine persons

all

are obviously preeminent models for their believers. Christian morality

can be defined as the imitation of Christ, whereas Buddhist morality

Buddha. The models that a culture proposes

consists in imitating

members

for imitation provide a convenient

The argument from

analogy

is

way

extremely important in nonformal rea-

soning. Starting from a relation between two terms call the

theme

since

to its

of characterizing it.™

A and

B, which

we

provides the proper subject matter of the discourse,

it

we can by analogy present its structure or establish its value by relating it to the terms C and D, which constitute the phoros of the analogy, so that A is to B as C is to D. Analogy, which derives its name from the Greek word for proportion, is nevertheless different from mathematical proportion. In the latter the characteristic relation of equality

whereas the phoros called upon

metrical,

establish the value of the

theme.

When

as a child

is

theme must,

to

as a rule,

clarify

an adult,

it is

sym-

be better known than the

Heraclitus says that in the eyes of

in the eyes of

is

the structure or

God man

is

as childish

impossible to change the phoros

one that knows the and an adult. It is also worth noting that when man is identified with adult, the analogy reduces to three terms, the middle one being repeated twice: C is to B as B is to A This technique of argumentation is typical of Plato,

for the theme,

and

vice versa, unless the audience

God and man

relationship between

is

better than that between a child

.

Plotinus,

and

all

those

Within the natural the intent

is

who

establish hierarchies within reality.

sciences the use of analogy

is

mainly

heuristic,

ultimately to eliminate the analogy and replace

it

and

with a

formula of a mathematical type. Things are different, however, in the social sciences and in philosophy, where the whole body of facts under study only offers reasons for or against a particular analogical vision of things. 34

which Wilhelm Dilthey refers when he claims that the natural sciences aim at explaining whereas the This

is

one of the differences

human sciences seek The metaphor is

294

to

for understanding.

the figure of style corresponding to the argument from analogy. It consists of a condensed analogy in which one term of the theme is associated with one term of the phoros. Thus "the morning of life" is a metaphor that summarizes the analogy: Morning is to day what youth is to life. Of course, in the case of a good many metaphors, the reconstruction of the complete analogy is neither easy nor unambiguous. When Berkeley, in his Dialogues* 7 speaks of "an ocean of false learning," *

Chaim Perelman there are various ways to supply the missing terms of the analogy, each one of

which

stresses a different relation

unexpressed in the metaphor.

and metaphors best reveals the creative and litThe For some audiences their use should be argumentation. erary aspects of avoided as much as possible, whereas for others the lack of them may make the discourse appear too technical and too difficult to follow. Specialists tend to hold analogies in suspicion and use them only to initiate students into their discipline. Scientific popularization makes extensive use of analogy, and only from time to time will the audience be reminded of the danger of identification of theme and phoros. 36 use of analogies

The dissociation

of ideas

Besides argumentative associations,

we must

also

make room

for the dis-

sociation of ideas, the study of

which

torical tradition. Dissociation

the classical solution for incompatibilities

is

is

too often neglected by the rhe-

an alteration of conventional ways of thinking. Philosophers, by using dissociation, often depart from common sense and form a vision of reality that is free from the contradictions of opinion. 37 The whole of the great metaphysical tradition, from Parmenides to our own day, displays a succession of dissociations where, in each case, reality is opposed that call for

to

appearance.

Normally, reality signs referring to

it.

is

perceived through appearances that are taken as

When, however, appearances

are incompatible— an

oar in water looks broken but feels straight to the touch— we must admit, if

we

are to have a coherent picture of reality, that

illusory

and may lead us

some appearances are

to error regarding the real.

One

is

thus brought

conception of reality that at the same time

is

capable of being used as a criterion for judging appearances. Whatever

is

to the construction of a

conformable to value and

Any

is

it

is

given value, whereas whatever

is

opposed

is

denied

considered a mere appearance.

idea can be subjected to a similar dissociation.

To

real justice

we can oppose apparent

justice and with real democracy contrast apparent democracy, or formal or nominal democracy, or quasi democracy,

or even "democracy" (in quotes).

What

is

thus referred to as apparent

what the audience would normally call justice, democracy, etc. It only becomes apparent after the criterion of real justice or real democracy has been applied to it and reveals the error concealed under the name. The dissociation results in a depreciation of what had until then been an accepted value and in its replacement by another conception to which is accorded the original value. To effect such a depreciation, one will need a conception that can be shown to be valuable, relevant, as well as incompatible with the common use of the same notion.

is

usually

We may

call

"philosophical pairs"

all sets

of notions that are formed

295

The

New

Rhetoric

on the model of the "appearance-reality" pair. The use of such pairs makes clear how philosophical ideas are developed and also shows how they cannot be dissociated from the process of giving or denying value that is typical of all ontologies. One thus comes to see the importance of argumentative devices in the development of thought, and especially of philosophy. 38

Interaction of

arguments

An

argumentation is ordinarily a spoken or written discourse, of variable that combines a great number of arguments with the aim of winning the adherence of an audience to one or more theses. These arguments interact within the minds of the audience, reinforcing or weakening each other. They also interact with the arguments of the opponents as well as with those that arise spontaneously in the minds of the audience. This situation gives rise to a number of theoretical length,

questions.

Are there

limits, for

example, to the number of arguments that can be

Does the choice of arguments and the scope of What is a weak or an irrelevant argument? What is the effect of a weak argument on the whole argumentation? Are there any criteria for assessing the strength or relevance of an argument? Are such matters relative to the audience, or can they be determined objectively? We have no general answer to such questions. The answer seems to depend on the field of study and on the philosophy that controls its organization. In any case, they are questions that have seldom been raised and that never have received a satisfactory answer. Before any satisfactory answer can be given, it will be necessary to make many detailed studies in the various disciplines, taking account of the most varied audiences. Once our arguments have been formulated, does it make any difference what order they are presented in? Should one start, or finish, with strong arguments, or do both by putting the weaker arguments in the middle— the so-called Nestorian order? This way of presenting the problem implies that the force of an argument is independent of its place in the discourse. Yet, in fact, the opposite seems to be true, for what appears as a weak argument to one audience often appears as a strong argument to another, depending on whether the presuppositions rejected by one audience are accepted by the other. Should we present our arguments then in the order that lends them the greatest force? If so, there should be a special technique devoted to the organization of a discourse. Such a technique would have to point out that an exordium is allimportant in some cases, while in others it is entirely superfluous. Sometimes the objections of one's opponent ought to be anticipated beforehand usefully accumulated?

the argumentation raise special problems?

296

Chaim Perelman

and refuted, whereas in other spontaneously lest one appear In

such matters

all

it

cases to

better to let the objections arise

it is

down

be tearing

straw men. 39

seems unlikely that any hard-and-fast rules can

be laid down, since one must take account of the particular character of the audience, of

its

evolution during the debate, and of the fact that

habits

and procedures that prove good

other.

A

once for stances,

must be able matters, and audiences. all.

But

Reason and

The ideas

in

one sphere are no good in an-

general rhetoric cannot be fixed by precepts and rules laid to

adapt

itself to

down

the most varied circum-

rhetoric

birth of a

and and

it

new period

of culture

is

marked by an eruption of original and of academic classifica-

a neglect of methodological concerns

with various meanings that the future and disentangle. The fundamental ideas of Greek philosophy offer a good example of this process. One of the richest and most confused of all is that expressed by the term logos, which means among other things: word, reason, discourse, reasoning, calculation, and all that was later to become the subject of logic and the expression of reason. Reason was opposed to desire and the passions, being regarded as the faculty that ought to govern human behavior in the name of truth and tions

divisions. Ideas are used

will distinguish

wisdom.

The

operation of logos takes effect either through long speeches

or through questions

and answers, thus giving

noted above between rhetoric and lished as

an autonomous

dialectic,

rise

to

the distinction

even before logic was estab-

discipline.

and his development of the theory problem of the relation of syllogistic formal logic— with dialectic and rhetoric. Can any and every

Aristotle's discovery of the syllogism

of demonstrative science raised the

—the first form of reasoning be expressed syllogistically? Aristotle is often thought to have aimed at such a result, at least for deductive reasoning, since he was well aware that inductive reasoning and argument by example are entirely different from deduction. He knew too that the dialectical reasoning characteristic of discussion, and essentially critical in purpose, differed widely from demonstrative reasoning deducing from principles the conclusions of a science. Yet he was content to locate the difference in the kind of premises used in the two cases. In analytical, or demonstrative, reasoning, the premises, according to Aristotle, are true and ultimate, or else derived from such premises, whereas in dialectical reasoning the premises consist of generally accepted opinions. cases

The

was held to be the same, consisting

nature of reasoning in

in

both

drawing conclusions from

propositions posited as premises.*

*

Topics

I.

100a 25-32;

GBWW,

Vol.

8, p. 143.

297

The

New

Rhetoric

Rhetoric, on the other hand, was supposed to use syllogisms in a pe-

some premises unexpressed and so transforming them into enthymemes. The orator, as Aristotle saw, could not be said to use regular syllogisms; hence, his reasoning was said to consist of abbreviated syllogisms and of arguments from example, corresponding to

culiar way, by leaving

induction.

What

are

we

to think of this reduction to

the wide variety of arguments that

men

two forms of reasoning of all and in

use in their discussions

pleading a cause or justifying an action? Yet, since the time of Aristotle, logic has confined

its

study to deductive and inductive reasoning, as

though any argument differing from these was due to the variety of its content and not to its form. As a result, an argument that cannot be reduced to canonical form is regarded as logically valueless. What then about reasoning from analogy? What about the a fortiori argument?

Must we, rive

in using such arguments, always be able to introduce a De-

unexpressed major premise, so as to make them conform to the

syllogism? It

can be show^n that the practical reasoning involved in choice or

making can always be expressed

form of theoretical reais gained by such a move? The reasoning by which new premises are introduced is merely concealed, and resort to these premises appears entirely arbitrary, although in reality it too is the outcome of a decision that can be justified only in an argumentative, and not in a demonstrative, manner. 40 At first sight, it appears that the main difference between rhetoric and dialectic, according to Aristotle, is that the latter employs impersonal techniques of reasoning, whereas rhetoric relies on the orator's ethos (or character) and on the manner in which he appeals to the passions of his audience (or pathos).* 41 For Aristotle, however, the logos or use of reasoning is the main thing, and he criticizes those authors before him, who laid the emphasis upon oratorical devices designed to arouse the passions. Thus he writes:

decision

in the

soning by introducing additional premises. But what

// the rules for trials

which are now

laid

down

in

some states—

especially in well-governed states— were applied everywhere, such

people would have nothing

to say. All

men, no doubt, think that

the laws should prescribe such rules, but some, as in the court of

Areopagus, give practical

effect to their

thoughts and forbid talk

about non-essentials. This is sound law and custom. It is not right to pervert the judge by moving him to anger or envy or pity— one might as well warp a carpenter's rule before using it. For 298

this reason, after a

long discussion devoted to the role of passion in

oratorical art, he concludes:

Chaim Perelman

As to

a matter of fact, it,

To sum

as

up,

we it

it

[rhetoric]

is

a branch of dialectic

and similar

said at the outset.]

appears that Aristotle's conception, which

is

essentially

empirical and based on the analysis of the material he had at his disposal, distinguishes dialectic from rhetoric only by the type of audience and, especially,

by the nature of the questions examined in practice. His pre-

cepts are easy to understand

when we keep

in

mind

that he was thinking

primarily of the debates held before assemblies of citizens gathered

to-

gether either to deliberate on political or legal matters or to celebrate

some public ceremony. There also

consider

no reason, however, why we should not

is

and,

theoretical

especially,

questions

philosophical

ex-

pounded in unbroken discourse. In this case, the techniques Aristotle would have presumably recommended would be those he himself used in his

own work,

Nicomachean

following the golden rule that he laid that the

Ethics,

method used

for

down

in his

the examination

and

exposition of each particular subject must be appropriate to the matter,

whatever

its

manner

of presentation.:):

After Aristotle, dialectic

became

identified with logic as a technique

of reasoning, due to the influence of the Stoics. As a result, rhetoric

came

be regarded as concerned only with the irrational parts of our being,

to

whether sure.

role

will, the passions,

Those who, was

like

to bring

when they used

man

it,

imagination, or the faculty for aesthetic plea-

Seneca and Epictetus, believed that the philosopher's to

submit to reason were opposed

in the

name

of philosophy.

Those

to rhetoric,

like Cicero,

even

on the

other hand, who thought that in order to induce man to submit to reason one had to have recourse to rhetoric, recommended the union of philosophy and eloquence. The thinkers of the Renaissance followed suit, such as Valla, and Bacon too, who expected rhetoric to act on the imagination

triumph of reason.

to secure the

The more

rationalist thinkers, like

Ramus,

as

we have

already noted,

considered rhetoric as merely an ornament and insisted on a separation

form and content, the

of

latter

alone being thought worthy of a phi-

same conception and reinmethod as the only method fit regarded the geometrical for the sciences as well as for philosophy and opposed rhetoric as exerting an action upon the will contrary to reason— thus adopting the position of the Stoics but with a different methodological justification. But to make room for eloquence within this scheme, we need only deny thai reason possesses a monopoly of the approved way of influencing the will. Thus,

losopher's attention. Descartes adopted the

forced

it.

He

Pascal, while professing a rationalism in a Cartesian

»

Rhetoric Rhetoric

t

Ethics

*

I.

GBWW,

1356a 5-18; Vol. 9, p. 595. 1354a 19-27, 1356a 80 SI; Vol. 1094b 12-27; Vol. 9, pp. 339-40. I.

manner, does not

GBWW,

I.

GBWW,

9,

pp, 593. 595 96.

299

The

New

Rhetoric

hesitate to declare that the truths that are is,

most significant

him— that

for

the truths of faith— have to be received by the heart before they can

be accepted by reason:

We

all

know

that opinions are admitted into the soul through

two entrances, which are

The more

its

natural entrance

and will. we should but the more

chief powers, understanding is

the understanding, for

never agree to anything but demonstrated truths, usual entrance, although against nature,

is

men

the will; for all

whatsoever are almost always led into belief not because a thing is proved but because it is pleasing. This way is low, unworthy, and foreign to our nature. Therefore everybody disavows professes to give his belief

and even

his love only

it. Each of us where he knows

deserved.

it is

am

I

not speaking here of divine truths, which I

am

far

from

bringing under the art of persuasion, for they are infinitely above nature. God alone can put them into the soul, and in whatever way

He

know He

pleases. I

has willed they should enter into the

from the heart and not into the heart from the mind, * might make humble that proud power of reason. persuade about divine matters, grace

is

necessary;

us love that which religion orders us to love. Yet

it

is

He

.

.

To

mind

that

will

it

make

also Pascal's in-

tention to conduce to this result by his eloquence, although he has admit that he can lay down the precepts of this eloquence only in

to

a

very general way:

It

is

apparent

that,

no matter what we wish

to

persuade

we must we must and then

of,

mind and

heart

know, what principles he admits, what things he

loves,

consider the person concerned, whose

observe in the thing in question what relations

it

admitted principles or

So that the art

to these objects of delight.

of persuasion consists as

knowing how

has to these

much in knowing how to please as in much more do men follow caprice

to convince, so

than reason.

Now

of these two, the art of convincing

and the

art of pleasing,

I shall confine myself here to the rules of the first,

and

to

them

only in the case where the principles have been granted and arc

held to unwaveringly; otherwise I do not

would be an

know whether

there

art for adjusting the proofs to the inconstancy of our

caprices.

But the art of pleasing is incomparably more difficult, more more useful, and more wonderful, and therefore if I do

subtle,

300

not deal with

it,

it is

because I

am

not able. Indeed I feel myself

Chaim Perelman

unequal

so

to

its

regulation

that

I

believe

to

it

be a

thing

impossible.

Not

that I

do not believe there are as certain rules for pleasing

as

for demonstrating, and that whoever should be able perfectly to know and to practise them would be as certain to succeed in mak-

ing himself loved by kings and by every kind of person as in demonstrating the elements of geometry to those who have imagination

enough

But

to grasp the hypotheses.

my weakness

that leads

me

I consider,

to think so, that

it is

and

it

is

perhaps

impossible to lay

hold of the rules.] Pascal's reaction here with regard to formal rules of rhetoric already

heralds romanticism with

its

reverence for the great orator's genius. But

before romanticism held sway, associationist psychology developed in

eighteenth-century England. According to the thinkers of this school, feeling,

not reason, determines man's behavior, and books on rhetoric

were written based on this psychology. The best known of these is Campbell's The Philosophy of Rhetoric, noted above. 42 Fifty years later, Whately, following Bacon's lead, defined the subject of logic and of rhetoric as follows:

/

remarked

in treating of that Science [Logic], that

Reasoning may

be considered as applicable to two purposes, which I ventured to designate respectively by the i.e.,

terms "Inferring" and "Proving,"

and

the estab-

I there

remarked

the ascertainment of the truth by investigation

lishment of

it

to the satisfaction of another;

that Bacon, in his of the

Organon, has

laid

down

and

rules for the conduct

former of these processes, and that the

latter belongs to the

province of Rhetoric; and it was added, that to infer, is to be regarded as the proper office of the Philosopher, or the Judge;— to prove, of the Advocate.^

This conception, while stressing the social importance of rhetoric, makes it a negligible factor for the philosopher. This tendency increases under the influence of Kant and of the German idealists, who boasted of removing all matters of opinion from philosophy, for which only apodictic truths are of any importance. The relation between the idea that we form of reason and the role assigned to rhetoric is of sufficient importance to deserve studies of all the great thinkers who have said anything about the matter— studies similar to those of Bacon by Prof. Karl Wallace and of Ramus In Prof.

*

On

Geometrical Demonstration;

f Ibid., p.

441.

GBWW, Vol.

33, p. 440.

301

The

New

Walter

Rhetoric

J.

Ong. 44 In what

follows,

I

would

like to sketch

how

the positivist

climate of logical empiricism makes possible a new, or renovated, con-

ception of rhetoric.

Within the perspective of neopositivism, the rational is restricted to what experience and formal logic enable us to verify and demonstrate. As a result, the vast sphere of all that is concerned with action— except for the choice of the most adequate means to reach a designated end— is turned over to the irrational.

The

very idea of a reasonable decision has

no meaning and cannot even be defined satisfactorily with respect to the whole action in which it occurs. Logical empiricism has at its disposal no technique of justification except one founded on the theory of probability. But why should one prefer one action to another? Only because it is more

How

efficacious?

aim

can one choose between the various ends that one can

at? If quantitative

measures are the only ones that can be taken into

account, the only reasonable decision would seem to be one that

conformity with utilitarian calculations. to a single

one of pleasure or

utility,

If so, all

and

is

in

ends would be reduced

all conflicts of

values

would be

dismissed as based on futile ideologies.

Now

not prepared to accept such a limitation to a monism world of action and would reject such a reduction on the ground that the irreducibility of many values is the basis of our freedom and of our spiritual life; if one considers how justification takes place in the most varied spheres— in politics, morals, law, the social sciences, and, above all, in philosophy— it seems obvious that our intellectual tools cannot all be reduced to formal logic, even when that is enlarged by a theory for the control of induction and the choice of the most efficacious techniques. In this situation, we are compelled to develop a theory of argumentation as an indispensable tool for practical reason. In such a theory, as we have seen, argumentation is made relative to the adherence of minds, that is, to an audience, whether an individual deliberating or mankind as addressed by the philosopher in his appeal to reason. Whately's distinction between logic, as supplying rules of reaif

one

is

of values in the

soning for the judge, and rhetoric, providing precepts for the counsel, falls to

the

ground

as

being without foundation. Indeed, the counsel's

speech that aims at convincing the judge cannot rest on any different

kind of reasoning than that which the judge uses himself. The judge, having heard both parties, will be better informed and able to compare the arguments on both sides, but his judgment will contain a justification in no way different in kind from that of the counsel's argumentation. Indeed, the ideal counsel's speech is precisely one that provides the judge with all the information that he needs to state the grounds for his decision.

302

If rhetoric is regarded as complementary to formal logic and argumentation as complementary to demonstrative proof, it becomes of paramount importance in philosophy, since no philosophic discourse can

Chaim Perelman

develop without resorting to fluence of logical empiricism,

it.

all

This became clear when, under the

in-

philosophy that could not be reduced to

and of no worth. Philosophy, as contemporary culture. This situation can be changed only by developing a philosophy and a methodology of the reasonable. For if the rational is restricted to the field of calculation, measuring, and weighing, the reasonable is left with the vast field of all that is not amenable to quantitative and formal techniques. This field, which Plato and Aristotle began to explore by means of dialectical and rhetorical devices, lies open for investigation by the new rhetoric. calculation was considered as nonsense a consequence, lost

its

status in

Further developments

I

introduced the

new

rhetoric to the public for the

first

time over twenty

years ago, in a lecture delivered in 1949 at the Institut des

de Belgique. 4

"*

Hautes Etudes

In the course of the same year, the Centre National de

Recherches de Logique was founded with the collaboration of the professors of logic in the

Belgian universities. In 1953 this group organized an

international colloquium on the theory of proof, in which the use

method

and

was studied in the deductive sciences, in the natural sciences, in law, and in philosophy— that is, in the fields where recourse to reasoning is essential. 46 On that occasion Prof. Gilbert Ryle presented his famous paper entitled "Proofs in Philosophy," which claims that there are no proofs in philosophy: "Philosophers do not provide proofs any more than tennis players score goals. Tennis players do not try in vain to score goals. Nor do philosophers try in vain to provide proofs; they are not inefficient or tentative provers. Goals do not belong to tennis, nor of proof

proofs to philosophy." 47

What, then, is philosophical reasoning? What are "philosophical arguments"? According to Ryle, "they are operations not with premises and

upon operations with premises and concluwe are putting propositions through inference-hoops. In some philosophical arguments, we are matching the hoops through which certain batches of propositions will go against a worded recipe declaring what hoops they should go through. Proving is a one-level business; philosophical arguing is, anyhow sometimes, an interlevel conclusions, but operations sions.

In proving something,

business." 48 If

the notion of proof

is

restricted to the operation of

undeniable that philosophers and

inferences,

it is

what they

assert.

jurists

drawing valid rarely prove

onh

Their reasoning, however, docs aim at justifying the and such reasoning provides an example of the argumentation with which the new rhetoric is concerned. 48 The part played by argumentation in philosophy has given rise to numerous discussions and to increasing interest, as is shown In the special

points that they make,

303

The

New

Rhetoric

issue of the

subject,

1>\

Revue Internationale de Philosophie of 1961 devoted to the the colloquium on philosophical argumentation held in

Mexico Cit) In 1963, 60 b) the collection of studies published by Maurice Natanson and Henry W. Johnstone, Jr., entitled Philosophy, Rhetoric and Argumentation? 1 and by the special number of The Monist in 1964 on the same subject. Professor Johnstone has for many years been particularly interested in this topic and has published a book and many papers on it. 52 To further the study of the relation between philosophy and rhetoric, he organized with Prof. Robert T. Oliver, then head of the Speech Department at Pennsylvania State University, a colloquium in which philosophers and members of the speech profession met in equal numbers to discuss the question. The interest aroused by this initiative led to the founding in 1968 of a journal called Philosophy and Rhetoric, edited jointly by Professor Johnstone and Prof. Carroll C. Arnold. That so much attention should be focused on argumentation in philosophical thought cannot be understood unless one appreciates the paramount importance of practical reason— that is, of finding "good reasons" to justify a decision. In 1954 I drew attention to the role of decision in the theory of knowledge, 53 and Gidon Gottlieb further developed it, with particular attention to law, in his book The Logic of Choice?* Argumentation concerning decision, choice, and action in general is closely connected with the idea of justification, which also is an important element in the idea of justice. I have attempted to show that the traditional view is mistaken in claiming that justification is like demonstration but based on normative principles. 55 In fact, justification never directly concerns a proposition but looks instead to an attitude, a decision, or an action. "Justifying a proposition" actually consists in justifying one's adherence to it, whether it is a statement capable of verification or an unverifiable norm. A question of justification ordinarily arises only in a situation that has given rise to criticism: no one is called upon to justify behavior that is beyond reproach. Such criticism, however, would be meaningless unless some accepted norm, end, or value had been infringed upon or violated. A decision or an action is criticized on the ground that it is immoral, illegal, unreasonable, or inefficient— that is, it fails to

respect certain accepted rules or values. It always occurs within a

it is always "situated." Criticism and justification are two forms of argumentation that call for the giving of reasons for or against, and it is these reasons that ultimately enable us to call the action or

social context;

decision reasonable or unreasonable.

In 1967 a colloquium was held on the subject of demonstration, veriorganized jointly by the Institut International de

fication, justification,

Philosophie and the Centre National de Recherches de Logique. 56 At that meeting I emphasized the central role of justification in philosophy. 304

Among

other things,

it

enables us to understand the part played by the

Chaim Perelman

claimed J. Ayer on probability theory; 57

principle of induction in scientific methodology. Prof. A. that the principle of induction cannot be based yet

it

did seem possible to give good reasons for using induction as a

heuristic principle. 5s

But

this

justification in philosophy.

It

is

only a particular case of the use of

is

essential

wherever practical reason

is

involved. is neither deductive nor inductive, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, in his famous book La Morale et la

In morals, for example, reasoning

but

justificative.

science

cles

traditional

moeurs (1903), criticized the deductive character of much moral philosophy and proposed the conception of the science

of morals that

made

it

a sociological discipline, inductive in character.

Yet in morals absolute preeminence cannot be given either to principles—

which would make morals a deductive discipline— or to the particular case— which would make it an inductive discipline. Instead, judgments regarding particulars are compared with principles, and preference is given to one or the other according to a decision that is reached by resorting to the techniques of justification and argumentation. 59

The

idea of natural law

is

also misconceived

when

it is

posed in onto-

Are there rules of natural law that can be known objectively? Or is positive law entirely arbitrary as embodying the lawmaker's sovereign will? A satisfactory positive answer cannot be given to either question. We know that it is imperative for a lawmaker not to make unreasonable laws; yet we know too that there is no one single manner, objectively given, for making just and reasonable laws. Natural law is better considered as a body of general principles or loci, consisting of ideas such as "the nature of things," "the rule of law," and of rules such as "No one is expected to perform impossibilities," "Both sides should be heard"— all of which are capable of being applied in different ways. It is the task of the legislator or judge to decide which of the not unreasonable solutions should become a rule of positive law. Such a view, according to Michel Villey, corresponds to the idea of natural law found in Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas— what he calls the classical logical terms.

natural law. 60

For government to be considered legitimate, to have authority, there must be some way of justifying it. Without some reasonable argumentation for it, political power would be based solely on force. If it is to obtain respect, and not only obedience, and gain the citizens' acceptance, it must have some justification other than force. All political philosophy, in fact, aims at criticizing and justifying claims to the legitimate exercise of power. 61

Argumentation establishes a link between political philosophy and law and shows that the legislator's activity is not merely an expression of un-

From

Hume

and Kelseil were and what ought to be and claiming that no inference can be made from one to the other.

enlightened right in

will.

making

a

lack of such a theory.

sharp distinction between what

is

305

The

New

Rhetoric

Things take

a different

outlook, however,

when one

recognizes the im-

portance of argumentation in supplying good reasons for establishing and interpreting norms. Kelsen's pure theory of the law then loses the

main part

of

its

logical justification. 6 -

theory of the law, as J0rgensen.

lias

The same

befalls Alf Ross's realist

been shown in the remarkable essay by Prof. Stig

,!;i

The new

new

rhetoric has also been used to throw

light

upon

the ed-

on the analysis of political propaganda, on the process of literary creation, as well as on the reasoning of the historian. 64 But it is in the field of law that it has made the largest impact. 6 Recent studies and colloquia devoted to the logic of law testify to the keen interest that ucator's task,

"'

the subject has aroused, especially

among French-speaking jurists. 66 The new series of lectures,

faculty of law at Brussels has just inaugurated a

and Argumentation." 67 Lawyers and philosophers working in collaboration have shown that the theory of argumentation can greatly illuminate the nature of legal reasoning. The judge is obliged by law to pass sentence on a case that comes before him. Thus Article 4 of the Code Napoleon declares: "The judge who, under pretext of the silence, the obscurity, or the incompleteentitled "Logic

ness of the law, refuses to pass sentence

He may

is

liable to prosecution for the

is an antinomy or lacuna in the legal system that he has to apply. He cannot, like the mathematician or formal logician, point out that the system is incoherent or incomplete. He must himself solve the antinomy or fill in the lacuna. Ordinary logic by itself would suffice to show the existence of either an antinomy or a lacuna, but it cannot get him out of the resulting dilemma: only legal logic based on argumentation can

denial of justice."

accomplish

To

not limit himself to declaring that there

that.

from exhaustive, survey, it is necesnew rhetoric is having for philosophy and the study of its history. Twenty years ago, for example, the Topics and Rhetoric of Aristotle were completely ignored by philosophers, whereas today they are receiving much attention. 68 Renewed interest in this hitherto ignored side of Aristotle has thrown new light upon his entire metaphysics 69 and attached new importance to his notion of phronesis or prudence. 70 Renewed attention is being given to the classical rhetoric of Cicero, 71 and we are now gaining a better understanding of the historical development of rhetoric and logic during the Middle Ages conclude

this general,

but

far

sary to stress again the import that the

and the Renaissance. 72 It is

possible too that the

new

rhetoric

may provoke

of the Hegelian conception of dialectic with

thesis

a reconsideration

and

antithesis cul-

which might be compared to a reasonable judge who retains the valid part from antilogies. This new rhetorical perspective may also help us to a better understanding of the American pragmatists,

minating in a 306

its

synthesis,

Chaim Perelman especially of C. logic,

aimed

at

S.

Peirce,

who, in his approximation

to Hegel's objective

developing a rhetorica speculativa.'*

For these inquiries to be pursued, however, the theory of argumentation must awaken the interest of philosophers and not merely that of lawyers and

members

subject, Professor

mentation well

is

known

still

of the speech profession. In a synoptic study of the

Johnstone deplores the fact that the theory of argulittle known in the United States, although it is now

in Europe. 74 Attention has

raised by the use of practical reason,

been focused on the problems field has been explored and

and the

and practitioners of the law. There is much from this work if they would cease confining their methodological inquiries to what can be accomplished by formal logic and the analysis of language. 75 A more dynamic approach to the problems of language would also reveal the extent to which language, far from being only an instrument for communication, is also a tool for action and is well adapted to such a purpose. 76 It may even prove possible to achieve a synthesis of the different and seemingly opposed tendencies of contemporary philosophy, such as existentialism, pragmaticism, analytical philosophy, and perhaps even a new version of Hegelian and Marxist dialectic. 77

mapped by

theoreticians

that philosophers could learn

307

New

The

1

Rhetoric

Duinaisais. Des

on des different* setts rf

unmended

that

men

almost expect to be

think

heists,

mumbling

for

in

their mouths,

veet"; and, as old as they are,

"Life

still

aiding, daily plastering their face,

is

.ill

perhaps you'll

unless

can neither

all

with

loin

armed with li\

ol

.1

because

he-

understood not grammar, nor ate cheese

ic\

is

kind,

luch because he

the warlike horse unfortunate,

ver

ge,

and

For

bull.

cakes;

to

it.

its

man

a

with birds, nor walk on

fly

But the best sport of all see our old women, even dead with and such skeletons one would think had stolen out of their graves, and for

the

make

and so

ill

the-

a

bull miserable, because he'd wrestler.

horse that has no miserable, that

u

the)

skill

more agree

ii

And iu

man

with

therefore, as

'41.1111111.11

in

nil

is

•»

not

tins respect,

nature.

But

catei

m.ikc

isp/utiij 26)

u n

.

Vol

337

Great Books Library

ma) »a\ that there was added to man the knowledge of sciences, by whose help he might recompense himself in understanding for what again, the virtuosi

particularly

nature cut him short in other things. As

added I know not how many more; mere torments of wit, and that so great that even grammar alone is work enough for any man for his whole life. to do,

il

had the least face of truth, that Nature that was so solicitously watchful in the

XXXII

this

production

of

gnats,

that he should have

need

flowers

she

made man

to be

helped by

when

should have so slept

and

herbs,

which that old devil Theuth, the evil genius of mankind, first invented for his destruction, and are so little conducive to

happiness that they rather obstruct which purpose they are properly said

be

first

found out,

argues touching the invention of

name imports when you that

is

to

say,

all

letters. 13

other mischiefs

devils,

it

call

for so the

them demons,

knowing. For that simple

people of the golden age, being wholly

ig-

norant of everything called learning, lived only by the guidance and dictates of nature; for

man

what use

of

grammar, where every

spoke the same language and had no

further design than to understand one an-

other?

no

What

bickering

common

sense, that

is

to say, folly. Divinel

are half-starved, naturalists out of heart,

as-

esteemed, even

with other the pests of mankind, from the spring; we'll suppose

these sciences those

only are in esteem that come nearest to

to

Sciences therefore crept into the world

same head from whence

among

it:

king in Plato

as that wise

yet

and logicians slighted; only the physician is worth all the rest. And among them too, the more unlearned, impudent, or unadvised he is, the more he is

sciences,

to

Though

trologers laughed

especially as

it

at,

among princes. For physic, is now professed by most

men, is nothing but a branch of flattery, no less than rhetoric. Next them, the second place is given to our law-drivers, if not the first, whose profession, though I say it myself, most men laugh at as the ass of philosophy; yet there's scarce any business, either so great or so

small,

but

is

managed by

These purchase their great lordships, while in the meantime the divine, having run through the whole body of divinity, sits gnawing a radish and is in continual warfare with lice and fleas. As these asses.

therefore those arts are best that have the

use of logic, where there was

nearest affinity with folly, so are they most

double-meaning

happy of all others that have least commerce with sciences and follow the guidance of Nature, who is in no wise imperfect, unless perhaps we endeavor to leap over those bounds she has appointed to us. Nature hates all false coloring and is ever best where she is least adulterated with art.

about

the

What need of rhetoric, where were no lawsuits? Or to what purpose words?

there laws,

where there were no ill manners? from which without doubt good laws first came. Besides, they were more religious than with an impious curiosity to dive into the secrets of nature, the dimension of stars, the motions, effects, and hidden causes of things; as believing it a crime for any man to attempt to be wise beyond his condition. And as to the inquiry of what was beyond heaven, that madness never came into their heads. But the purity of the golden age declining by degrees,

first,

as

I

said before,

were invented by the evil genii; and yet but few, and those too received by arts

Chaldean superstition and Greek newfangledness, that had little

XXXIII

Go

to

then, don't you find

among

the

several kinds of living creatures that they thrive best that understand no more than' what Nature taught them? What is more prosperous or wonderful than the bee? And though they have not the same judgment

of sense as other bodies have, yet wherein

has architecture gone beyond their build-

fewer. After that the

338

13

Phaedrus 274C-D;

GBWW,

Vol.. 7,

138d.

Erasmus: The Praise of Folly

What

houses?

of

ing

philosopher

ever

founded the like republic? Whereas the horse, that comes so near man in understanding and is therefore so familiar with him, is also partaker of his misery. For

gether

to-

should yet so far forget their condition as

not to mention those strong

bits,

shame

a

to lose the race,

while he contends for

battle,

he's

cut

down

with

his

rider,

earth";

14

sharp

spurs,

"lies

arms,

stables,

close

and,

himself,

submits

[men of

he so eagerly

valor,

revenged of the enemy.

will-

imitating

while,

to,

blows,

he

rider, and, briefly, all that slavery

ingly

those

strives

be

to

Than which how

[much more were the life of flies or birds to be wished for, who, living by the instinct of nature, look no further than the present, if vet man would but let them lalone in it. And if at any time they chance to be taken, and being shut up in cages endeavor strange

ire the

our

speaking,

'tis

they degenerate from their na-

much

So

better in every respect

works of nature than the adulteries

art.

In like i

imitate

to

how

tive gaiety.

pf

manner

can never

I

sufficiently

praise that Pythagoras in a dunghill cock,

bo

being but one had been yet every-

woman,

thing, a philosopher, a man, a

King, a private man, a lind,

I

fish,

a

a horse, a frog,

and at last conno creature was more miserable

believe too, a sponge;

Jzluded that

han man, for that all other creatures are lontent with those bounds that nature set [hem, only man endeavors to exceed them.

a

craft's

to affect the life of gods;

ample of the

make

gimcracks

ical

XXXIV again,

gives

tin

recedency not to the learned or the great, ut the fool.

Nor had

hose rather to

lie

that Gryllus

many the-

in

11

who

hog

a

other to so

sty

man)

Nor does Homer, that lathe l dissent from me; who not only called

hazards. rifles,

less wit

counsels,

grunting

han be exposed with

a

1

men "wretched and often

his

great

war upon nature:

they on the other side seem as able

so

miser-

little

is possible who come nearest to and never attempt anything beyond

as

beasts

man. Go

how demonstra-

to then, let's try

not by enthymemes or the im-

ble this

is;

perfect

syllogisms

the

of

but

Stoics,

by

and ordinary examples. And now, by the immortal gods! I think nothing more happy than that generation plain, downright,

men we commonly

of

and

wits,

call fools, idiots, lack-

splendid

dolts;

as

too,

titles

I

you a thing, which perhaps may seem foolish and at first absurd, yet nothing more true. And first they are not afraid of death— no small e\il. by Jupiter! They are not tormented with

conceive them.

tell

I'll

the conscience of evil acts, not terrified with

nor frightened with

fables of ghosts,

the

spirits

and

They are not evils to come nor

goblins.

with the fear of

distracted the hopes

of future good. In short, they are not dis-

turbed

with

which

this life

nor

modest,

thousand

those is

subject.

fearful,

They

nor

ol

cai

are neither

ambitious,

man. \ml

.tin

nor

lastly,

they should come nearer even t the vex) Ignorance of brutes, the) could not tin, foi

full

pattern

of

c

of

.1

Limit

\

And now

hold the divines.

so

wise

Tool,

with

how

mam

perplexed; heap

is

together

the discommodities

all

and then evils

I

continually

you'll be sensible

have delivered m\

."

wisdom.

tell DM troubleSOHM cues

your mind

i »

>ut

after the ex-

if

among men he

.han Ulysses with his

and

giants, with their philosoph-

envious, nor love the)

And

and Achil-

pray but that, like

I

the

the

in

victory,

why,

biting

it

often happens that he cracks his wind;

and

And

nowhere.

cunning fellow and one that was his master, he did nothing without the advice of Pallas? In a word, he was too wise, and by that means ran wide of nature. As therefore among men they are least happy that study wisdom, as being in this twice fools, that when they are born men, they

while he thinks it

Ulysses, "miserable"; Paris, Ajax, les

Virgil

M9b.

I

II

118;

«»t your life. from how ni.un

1«>1s.

GBW

Add

ii

.

to this

Vol.

13,

339

Great Books Library

MpHonfS

fcvyccTKp fislwo

princes about

nothing but grave, serious

and trusting and learning do not matters,

fi^J^om hums filianufc mi.

3>eceqi detinct.d

lypfo VlylTemi gia detinentcm gafltum c xemj;

cu?u£na/ecutn

to

own

their

parts

sometimes "to grate their tender ears with smart truths"; but fools

them with

fit

fear

that they most de-

light in, as jests, laughter, abuses of other

men, wanton pastimes, and the like. Again, take notice of this no contemptible blessing which Nature has given fools,

C iciro intcrp rc

that they are the only plain, honest

gigan rum fab u Sbjqs aduerfy

and such as speak truth. And what is more commendable than truth? For though that

tvirarnjCOjiaair*

proverb of Alcibiades in Plato attributes

fcrplina^ tnach Explicuit tncta

truth to drunkards

ram addito

uer

praise of

it

is

and children, 15

men

yet the

particularly mine, even fronr

the testimony of Euripides,

among whose

4

prio,madiihts"

other things there

is

extant that his honor-t

able saying concerning us, that they are not only merry,

play,

sing,

and laugh themselves, but make mirth wherever they come, a special privilege it seems the gods have given them to refresh

Whence

fool speaks

in his heart,

and expresses

he both shows it

wise men's are

it

in his looks

in his discourse; while the

those

two tongues which

that

the same Euripides mentions, whereof the

whereas the world is so differently affected one towards another, that all men indifferently admit them as their companions, desire, feed, cherish, embrace them, take their parts upon all occasions, and permit them without offense to do or say what they

one speaks truth, the other what they judge most seasonable for the occasion. These

the pensiveness of

like.

And

life.

it

is

so little does everything desire to

hurt them, that even the very beasts, by a

kind of natural instinct of their innocence

no doubt, pass by their injuries. For of them it may be truly said that they are consecrate to the gods, and therefore and not without cause do men have them in

XXXV

Whence

are they "that turn black into white," blow

hot and cold with the same breath, and carry

a

breast

different

in

their

their

far

tongue. Yet in the midst of

is it

else that they are in so great

Symposium 217E; Bacchantes 369;

mmiseriam?^P™f opuraddi isnccgpran.tix offtnt,

without them? Nay, and in some degree they prefer these fools before their crabbish

whom

for state's sake.

yet they keep about

Nor do

I

them

so

difficult,

strange

why

others,

for

or

that

yraria (olent

akrcdi

conceive the reait

should

these wise

men




C n h%. »-r-

Erasmus: The Praise

them

to tell

they are forced to re-

truth,

ucisfnon mihi

ceive flatterers for friends.

ib'habSdG c5f

someone may

ueft,idc$ dices

But,

say, the ears of princes

and for this reason they avoid those wise men, because they fear lest someone more frank than the rest should dare to speak to them things rather are strangers to truth,

true

than pleasant;

that they don't yet this fools,

is

for so

much

the matter

is,

And among my

care for truth.

found by experience

open

that not only truths but even

of Folly

Serifi

nimis.)

amdctentfkai ic| naulicrcs

co

moriaib^&c* )Cipc,putatesfa Elyfii

atilateat.

ilyduSuidasajt

V vcu

9JL

WV

0I

reproaches are heard with pleasure; so that the

same thing which,

if it

came from

a wise

For truth carries with

it

a certain peculiar

no accident fall in to give occasion of offense; which faculty the power of pleasing,

if

gods have given only to

same reasons

is

it

that

FU~$.

T-M f>V»1

man's mouth might prove a capital crime, spoken by a fool is received with delight.

fools. And women are

nestly delighted with this

ness, leanness, crassness,

what matter is it, when lived?); and such is the great wise man.

for the

time (though

so ear-

he die that never

kind of men,

as

and an

sore eyes,

old age and death contracted before their yet,

picture of this

being more propense by nature to pleasure

and toys. And whatsoever they may happen to do with them, although sometimes it be f the most serious, yet they turn it to jest and laughter, as that sex was ever Iquick-witted, especially to color their

own

XXXVII

And

me and say that nothing more miserable than madness. But folly the next degree,

what

•faults.

here again do those frogs of the

Stoics croak at

else

out of his wits? But to

XXXVI

for a

man

them

let

Muses' good favor we'll take pieces.

argued,

Subtly

how

with

the

this syllogism

must

I

to be

see

they are clean out of the way,

in

confess,

how

but as Socrates in Plato 17 teaches us

by splitting one Venus and one Cupid

make two

is

not the very thing. For

if

madness than

is

is

of either, in like

to

manner should

those logicians have done and distinguished madness from madness, it .it least the\ would be thought to be well in their wits themselves. For all madness is nof miserable, or [orace had never called his poel I

fury

ical

a

beloved

placed the raptun

i

ol

madness;

nor

[oven among the chiefesf blessings nor thai

life;

travels

sons

ol

sib)

I

in

Virgil called

labors. 18

Bui

madness, the

m'

mad

Symposium L80D; t.nn n

is

Aeneid

135;

GBH

and

R

.

.

Vol

this

ol

\< fleas'

two

an

there that

17

6.

Plato

poets, prophets,

which the

7,

p

I

Vol. 13, p. 214b.

341

Great Books Library

Furies send

revengeful

from

privily

hell,

and

as often as they let loose their snakes

put into men's breasts either the desire of or an

war,

insatiate

some dishonest

after

thirst

or

gold,

or parricide,

love,

or

in-

or sacrilege, or the like plagues, or

cest,

when

they

terrify

some

guilty

with

soul

not only errs in his senses but

that

is

judgment, and that too more than ordinary and upon all occasions— he. must confess, would be though!

deceived

also

his

in

I

come very near

As

if

anyone hear-

ing an ass bray should take

it

for excellent

to

to

it.

the conscience of his crimes; the other, but

music, or a beggar conceive himself

a king.

nothing

And

it

which comes from me and is of all other things the most desirable; which happens as often as some like

this,

that

pleasing dotage not only clears the of

its

troublesome cares but renders

And

jocund. special

this

it

was that which,

mind more as

a

blessing of the gods, Cicero, writ-

ing to his friend Atticus, wished to himself,

he might

that

be

the

less

sensible

hung over

of those miseries that then

yet this kind of madness,

monly happens,

that are possessed with that

behold

than the people take

man

among

and

so

if

his

friends,

good a master

kind

to

his wife,

to his servants that

they had broken the seal of his bottle, he

would not have run mad

But at last, and physic he was freed from his distemper and become his own man again, he thus expos-

when by

tulates

for

it.

the care of his friends

with them, "Now, by Pollux,

my

you have rather killed than preserved me in thus forcing me from my pleasure." By which you see he liked it so well that he lost it against his will. And trust me, I think they were the madder of the two, and had the greater need of helfriends,

lebore, that should offer to look

upon

so

pleasant a madness as an evil to be removed

though yet I have not deterwhether every distemper of the sense or understanding be to be called madness. For neither he that having weak eyes should take a mule for an ass, nor he that

in

And in this how many

and

it

much

is

to be.

if I

every

man

larger

For one beget

mad

them-

the more happy more he is mad;

is

respects the

were judge in the

be ranged in that culiarly mine,

he should

case,

class of folly that

which

in

truth

is

is

so

pe-

large

that I scarce know anyone in mankind that is wise at all hours or has not some tang or other of madness.

and universal all

And

do they appertain that comparison of hunting and protest they take an unimaginable pleasure to hear the yell of the horns and the yelps of the hounds, and I believe could pick somewhat extraordinary out of their very excrement. And then what pleasure they take to see a buck or the like unlaced? Let ordinary fellows cut up an ox or a wether, 'twere a crime to have this done by to this class

slight everything in

anything

less

his hat off,

for that is

as excel-

as the other, for

XXXVIII

by physic;

poem

mad

mutual pleasure. Nor does it seldom that he that is the more mad laughs at him that is less mad.

mined

should admire an insipid

it

them

to

but to those also

it

laughs at another and

happen

ant

com-

pleasure,

to

madness

the species of this

selves a

well enough, pleas-

as

though perhaps they may

it,

not be altogether so

the

man

turn

it

if,

brings a great delight not only

commonwealth. Nor was that Grecian in Horace much wide of it, who was so far mad that he would sit by himself whole days in the theatre laughing and clapping his hands as if he had seen some tragedy acting, whereas in truth there was nothing presented; yet in other things a

342

would be presently thought mad; but

lent lit

on

than a gentleman!

who

with

and a couteau every sword or knife

his bare knees,

purpose

(for

not allowable), with a curious supersti-

tion

and certain

postures,

lays

open

the

several parts in their respective order; while

they that as

hem him

some new

in

admire it with silence, ceremony, though

religious

perhaps they have seen

it

a

hundred times

Erasmus: The Praise

«habet^muncm.camplufcp Pendo p«m eflc dcicrat.fibicp maiorem in mo/

OdTfef«;;'Homc Vndt fubmdc^

run

,

Vo,u P a

,

;fe^!^,b

uenandi

d«mplaudit,fQriidtefmans,hucnulIus infanu appcllat, fpterea quod paflim

eod?uocac.Ouidr*,

Pcndopc

of Folly

poterat ta

multosfaJuaperan/ nos V»ucre,t3 mulf o$ fceminadignauiria

Ad hue

mantis hoc aaadJercuidcant,

ordwetn

Adhucordmem.) TaxatineptilTimumucnAdl ftudium^n

before.

And

if

any of them chance

piece of

the least

himself no small gentleman. In

more than

thev drive at nothing

to get

he presently thinks

it,

which

all

become

to

themselves, while yet they imagine

beasts

they live the

And

next these

that have

when

at last,

may be reckoned

they are quite lost in

with

this sentence,

attempt

"In great things the

And

very-

enough," and then complain of

is

the shortness of man's

those

all

up themselves

their expectations, they cheer

cient for so great

of princes.

life

And

that

life

not

is

suffi-

an understanding.

then for gamesters,

am

I

a

little

one while changing rounds into squares, and

doubtful whether they are to be admitted

presently again squares into rounds, never

ridiculous sight to see

knowing either measure or end,

it

such an itch of building;

till

reduced to the utmost poverty,

mains not

them

to

may

they

may

:hey

as a place

re-

where

wherewith

all this?

to

but that

pass over a few years in feeding

:heir foolish

:

And why

their bellies.

fill

much

so

lay their head, or

at last,

there

fancies.

And, in my opinion, next these may be reckoned such as with their new inventions

md

occult

lorms of

undertake

arts

tilings

and hunt

pertain fifth essence; [.his )f i

men

present hope that

their pains or

riving

how

they

having spent

all,

to

all

so

change the

about after a

bewitched with

never repents them

nuch

as in

them

scarce got

his clerks,

just debts than not pay lest

nun

ot

words.

their

with

see

old

spectacles?

not enough

lift

knuckles, to hire

same happiness.

d( v

in

put the dice thing,

the most

1

in

•