Showing posts with label Morgenthau. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Morgenthau. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

'Scientism' 6 - a Chicago School? (cold war)

Sixth in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8910111213, & 14).

I looked in the New York Times archives for that publication's first use of 'scientism'. Excluding an earlier use in connection with Christian Science, the term 'scientism' first appeared in the Times on July 15, 1923, in a story about William Montgomery Brown, an Episcopal Bishop in Arkansas who was later deposed for heresy after he became a Marxist materialist. Here's the cover of one of  Brown's later books:


In 1920, Brown published Communism and Christianism, in which he embraced 'naturalistic scientism in its socialist form' (p. 127). He contrasted scientism, according to which 'only scientifically demonstrated facts count in any argumentation' (p. 91), with 'supernaturalistic traditionalism' (p. 127), which he repudiated.

So, already in 1920 scientism is associated with Marxism (this time by someone who affirms the doctrine).

There's quite a gap between this occurrence of 'scientism' and its next appearances in the Times, which were prompted in the early 1940s by two figures: Robert Maynard Hutchins and Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.

Hutchins led the University of Chicago in the 1930s and 40s as its President and then Chancellor. He's known for having pioneered the 'great books' model of education. In his book Education for Freedom (1943), he warned that 'the cults of skepticism, presentism, scientism and anti-intellectualism will lead us to despair' (p. 38).

In the Nov. 16, 1942 issue of the Times (p. 22), a Times reporter summarized Archbishop Sheen's presentation at St. John's University in a report titled 'Mgr. Sheen Assails Worldly Philosophy'. Sheen is there said to have called for 'stamping out the barbaristic barnacles of misdirected progress, scientism, and relativism.' The Times reporter says that according to Sheen, 'the seed of Japanese aggression was sown in the training given Japanese exchange students by American universities that espouse utilitarian philosophic systems.' Sheen is then quoted as saying, 'Pearl Harbor ... had the effect of killing every pragmatic philosopher in the United States.'

The reference to 'every pragmatic philosopher' is intriguing. John Dewey was charged with scientism by Hutchins and by Hans Morgenthau, who met Hutchins at the University of Chicago. (For more on Morgenthau, see the 2nd post in this series.)

Another opponent of Dewey's, the early Chicago-school economist Frank Knight, preferred a term even uglier than 'scientism'. Here's Knight in a 1933 paper:
On the one hand, as Scylla, is the absurdity of Behaviorism. ... On the other side is the Charybdis of Nihilism, perhaps momentarily the nearer and more threatening of the two reefs. Of course, the two are related; nihilism is a natural correlate of "scientificism." (Frank H. Knight, contribution to 'Six Criticisms of "The Arbitrary as Basis for Rational Morality"', International Journal of Ethics 43 (1933): at 148)
In 1936, Knight again used 'scientificism', this time in a discussion of Dewey's book Liberalism and Social Action, where Knight wrote: 'From the standpoint of human liberty, a rationalistic philosophy will virtually begin where scientificism is bound to end.' (Knight, 'Pragmatism and Social Action', International Journal of Ethics 46 (1936): at 235) Later, in the 1940s, Knight switched to the more popular 'scientism'. He used that word twice in his 1946 paper 'The Sickness of Liberal Society' (Ethics 56 (1946): at 94-95).

[Added (Dec. 24): It turns out that William James used 'scientificism' in at least two of his papers: 'The Dilemma of Determinism' (1884) and 'Reflex Action and Theism' (????), both collected in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897).]

So, the popularization of 'scientism' owes partly to three influential authors who overlapped at the University of Chicago in the 1930s and 40s. Two of them (Knight and Hutchins) began using the term (or something like it) in their 1930s polemics with John Dewey. The third (Morgenthau) adopted the term later and also applied it to Dewey's views.

Added (Jan. 22): For more about Dewey and James, see post 12.

Thursday, December 18, 2014

'Scientism' 3 - Observations (cold war)

Third in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 910111213, & 14).

Some quick observations about the mid-20th-Century use of 'scientism':
  • It was used in a more overtly political way by both religious and non-religious authors who tended towards the right end of the political spectrum. 
  • The term was generally used to brand its target as a Faustian, secular religion, implying that adherents of the targeted view, though they pretended to superior rationality, had in fact made their own leap of faith. 
  • The destination of this leap of faith was in the first instance a 'liberal' ideology, in which a Whiggish belief in progress and an overly rosy view of human nature figured prominently. (This aspect of the term's function fades in the libertarian uses.)
  • The phrase was rhetorically convenient for right-wing authors, since it assimilated secular liberalism with Marxism (a more obvious secular religion that was optimistic about history and human nature and that made a great show of being a purely rational science).
The overtones of imputed religiosity are especially clear in the quotations of Foerster ('devotion'), Morgenthau ('dogmatic'), and Voegelin ('creed' and 'dogmas').

Some of the quoted passages seem haunted by a fear of Marxist communism, which is more pronounced in the passage by Polanyi ('soul-destroying tyrrany'). The fear also comes through as a concern about loss of freedom (esp. in the passages from Lewis and Polanyi), with the suggestion in Hayek's 1942 statement that there's something 'slavish' about scientism.

It's interesting to see how the French 'scientisme', originally directed against Saint-Simon and Comte (who really did envision secular institutions that mimicked religion), morphed into the English 'scientism', which was used just before and during the Cold War as an epithet for a broader array of secular views.

My sense is that today, 'scientism' has largely shed its overtly political connotations and is more often used simply to imply that someone has illegitimately applied phsyical-scientific method beyond its proper domain.

'Scientism' 2 - Sample of uses (cold war)

Second in a series of fourteen posts (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8910111213, & 14).

Norman Foerster (1937):
By a belief in scientism I mean a more or less exclusive devotion to the methods, mental attitudes, and doctrines appropriate to science, ordinarily culminating in some form of naturalistic speculation. (Foerster, The American State University: Its Relation to Democracy [University of North Carolina Press, 1937], p.116)
Hans Morgenthau (1946):
The failure of the dogmatic scientism of our age to explain the social and, more particularly, political problems of this age and to give guidance for successful action calls for a re-examination of these problems in the light of the prerationalist Western tradition [p. 9]. ... Scientism assumes that the significance of nature and society for man exhausts itself in isolated sequences of causes and effects [p. 124] .... The quest for the technical mastery of social life, comparable to his mastery over nature, did not find scientism at a loss for an answer: the fundamental identity under reason of physical nature and social life suggested identical methods for their domination. ... There is only one truth, the truth of science, and by knowing it man would know all [pp. 125-6]. (Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, [University of Chicago Press, 1946])



Eric Voegelin (1948):
The scientistic creed ... is characterized by three principal dogmas: (1) the assumption that the mathematized science of natural phenomena is a model science to which all other sciences ought to conform; (2) that all realms of being are accessible to the methods of the sciences of phenomena; and (3) that all reality which is not accessible to sciences of phenomena is either irrelevant or, in the more radical form of the dogma, illusionary. (Voegelin, 'The Origins of Scientism', Social Research 15 [1948]: 462)



Michael Polanyi (1958):
Modern scientism fetters thought as cruelly as ever the churches had done. It offers no scope for our most vital beliefs and it forces us to disguise them in farcically inadequate terms. Ideologies framed in these terms have enlisted man's highest aspirations in the service of soul-destroying tyrannies. (Polanyi, Personal Knowledge [University of Chicago Press, 1958], p. 279)
C. S. Lewis (some time between 1946 & 1963):
'Scientism'—a certain outlook on the world which is usually connected with the popularization of the sciences, though it is much less common among real scientists than among their readers.  It is, in a word, the belief that the supreme moral end is the perpetuation of our own species, and this is to be pursued even if, in the process of being fitted for survival, our species has to be stripped of all those things for which we value it—of pity, of happiness, and of freedom. (Lewis, 'A Reply to Professor Haldane' in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories [Mariner Books, 2002]. at pp. 76-77; Lewis's 'Reply' was first published in 1966; posthumous)