The Logic of Liberty

Reflections and Rejoinders

Michael Polanyi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136232084
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This is Volume XI of eighteen in the Political Sociology Series and looks at the rejections and rejoinders of the logic of liberty, originally published in 1951.

PART I

THE EXAMPLE OF SCIENCE

I

SOCIAL MESSAGE OF PURE SCIENCE¹
(1945)

APPLIED science has a clear purpose: it serves our welfare and security. But what about pure science? What justification is there in scientific studies which have no visible practical use? Until fairly recently it used to be commonly assumed that such studies served their own purpose, the discovery of knowledge for the love of truth. Do we still accept that view? Do we still believe that it is proper for a scientist to spend public funds for the pursuit of studies such as, say, the proof of Fermat's theorem —or the counting of the number of electrons in the universe: studies which, though perhaps not lacking in some remote possibility of practical usefulness, are at any rate as unlikely to yield a material dividend as any human activity within the realms of sanity? No, we do not generally accept the view today, as we did until the nineteen-thirties, that it is proper for science to pursue knowledge for its own sake, regardless of any advantage to the welfare of society. Nor is the change due to altered circumstances, but it represents a fundamental turn of popular opinion, induced by a definite philosophical movement of recent times.

The philosophical movement which has thus called in question the traditional standing of science, has launched its attack from two different sides. One line of attack is directed against the claim of science to speak in its own right. This is the line of modern materialistic analysis, which denies that the human intellect can operate independently on its own grounds and holds that the purpose of thought is, at bottom, always practical. Science in this view is merely an ideology, the contents of which are determined by social needs. The development of science is then explained by the successive rise of new practical interests. Newton, for example, is represented as discovering gravitation in response to rising navigational interests and Maxwell as discovering the electromagnetic field stimulated by the need for transatlantic communications. Such a philosophy denies that pure science has a purpose in itself and wipes out the distinction between pure and applied science. Pure science is then valued mainly for not being altogether pure—for the fact that it may turn out to be useful in the end.

The other line of attack is based on moral grounds. It insists that scientists should turn their eyes to the misery which fills the world and think of the relief they could bring to it. It asks whether, on looking round, they can find it in their hearts to use their gifts for the mere elucidation of some abstruse problem—the counting of the electrons in the universe, or the solution of Fermat's theorem. Could they possibly prove so selfish …? Scientists are morally reproached for pursuing science for the mere love of knowledge.

Thus we can see the position of pure science to-day under the crossfire of two attacks based on rather disparate grounds; forming a somewhat paradoxical combination—but one that is actually typical of the modern mind. A new destructive scepticism is linked here to a new passionate social conscience; an utter disbelief in the spirit of man is coupled with extravagant moral demands. We see at work here the form of action which has already dealt so many shattering blows to the modern world: the chisel of scepticism driven by the hammer of social passion.

This recalls the wider implications of our problem, revealed by the spectacle of Europe. The destruction of our civilization over large stretches of the Continent was not due to some accidental outbursts of Fascist beastliness. The events which, starting from the Russian Revolution, have ravaged the Continent represent on the contrary a single coherent process: one vast general upheaval. Great waves of humanitarian and patriotic sentiments were its prime impulses, and it was these sentiments which actuated the destruction of Europe. Savagery is always there lurking among us; but it can break loose on a grand scale only when rebellious moral passions first break up the controls of civilization. There are always some potential Hitlers and Mussolinis about, but they can gain power only if they succeed in perverting moral forces to their own ends.

We must ask, therefore, why moral forces could be thus perverted?; why the great social passions of our time were turned into violent and destructive channels? The answer can only be that there was no other channel available to them. A radical scepticism had destroyed popular belief in the reality of justice and reason. It had stamped these ideas as mere superstructures; as out-of-date ideologies of a bourgeois age; as mere screens for selfish interests hiding behind them; and indeed, as sources of confusion and weakness to anyone who would trust in them.

There was no sufficiently strong belief in justice and reason left in which to embody social passions. A generation grew up full of moral fire and yet despising reason and justice. Believing instead in what?—in the forces which were left for them to believe in—in Power, Economic Interest, Subconscious Desire. These they accepted therefore as the ultimate reality to which they could entrust themselves. Here they found a modern, acid-proof embodiment for their moral aspirations. Compassion was turned into merciless hatred and the desire for brotherhood into deadly class-war. Patriotism was turned into Fascist beastliness; the more evil, the more patriotic were the people who had gone Fascist.

Mr. Attlee recently described the most urgent need in Europe at the present time: “We need”, he said, “a conception of justice not as a will of a section, but as something absolute” and a leadership “which will lift people up from a mere longing for material benefits to a sense of the highest mission of mankind”. Mr. Bevin has spoken in a similar fashion when, facing the starving masses of Europe, he talked of a “spiritual hunger which is even more devastating than physical hunger”.

But unfortunately, the doctrine which was so effectively hammered into our heads by the leading philosophical movement during the past generation taught precisely this: that justice is nothing but the will of one section; and that there can be nothing higher than the longing for material benefits—so that to talk about higher missions is just foolishness or deceit. The most urgent need of the day is to oppose this philosophy at every point. To us scientists it falls to attack it in connection with science. The most vital service we owe to the world to-day is to restore our own scientific ideals which have fallen into discredit under the influence of the modern philosophical movement. We must reassert that the essence of science is the love of knowledge and that the utility of knowledge does not concern us primarily. We should demand once more for science that public respect and support which is due to it as a pursuit of knowledge and of knowledge alone. For we scientists are pledged to values more precious than material welfare and to a service more urgent than that of material welfare.

How sharply the spirit of pure scholarship is opposed to the claims of totalitarianism has been sufficiently proven on many cruel occasions during contemporary history. Universities which upheld the purity of their standards under totalitarianism invariably had to stand up to harsh pressure and often suffered heavy penalties. The whole world recognizes to-day its debt to universities in Poland and Norway, in Holland, Belgium and France, where such pressure was withstood and such penalties endured. These places are witnesses to-day to the convictions underlying our European civilization and hold out the hope of a genuine European recovery. And where, on the contrary, universities have allowed themselves to be cajoled or terrorized into compromising their standards, we feel that the very roots of our civilization have been marred. In such places our hopes for the future burn low.

The world needs science to-day above all as an example of the good life. Spread out over the planet scientists form even to-day, though submerged by disaster, the body of a great and good society. Even at present scientists of Moscow and Cambridge, of Bangalore and San Francisco, respect the same standards in science; and in the depths of shattered Germany and Japan a scientist is still one of ourselves, upholding the same code of scientific work. Isolated though we are to-day from each other, we still bear the mark of a common intellectual heritage and claim succession to the same great forerunners.

Such is my conception of the relation of science to the community in our days. In the great struggle for our civilization science occupies a section in the front line. In the movement which is undermining the position of pure science I see one detachment of the forces assailing our whole civilization. I have said that these forces embody some of the most enterprising and generous sentiments of our days—but that makes them only the more dangerous in my eyes. We shall have to fight in this battle some of the best motives of human progress. But we cannot afford to be deflected by them. The easy wisdom of the modern sceptic, destroying the spiritual guidance of man and setting free so much untutored enthusiasm, has cost us too dearly already. Whatever scorn be poured upon us by those who find our faith in pure science old-fashioned, and whatever condemnation by others who think us selfish, we must persist in vindicating the ideals of science.

¹ In August 1938 the British Association for the Advancement of Science founded a new Division for the Social and International Relations of Science, which was largely motivated from the start by the desire to give deliberate social guidance to the progress of science. This movement gathered considerable momentum throughout the following years, so that when the Division met in December 1945 for a discussion on the Planning of Science, I expected the meeting to be overwhelmingly in favour of planning. My opening address, The Social Message of Pure Science, was written with this prospect in mind, but actually the occasion proved a turning point. Speakers and audience snowed themselves consistently in favour of the traditional position of pure science, pursued freely for its own sake. Since then the movement for the planning of science has rapidly declined to insignificance in Britain.

2

SCIENTIFIC CONVICTIONS¹

I

THERE are many jokes about the futility of philosophizing, and it is true that science is a much more business-like occupation in which every achievement, however modest, may give you sound satisfaction. For there your work stands, public, compelling and permanent; it testifies that for one moment you were allowed to make intellectual history. You have disclosed something that had never been known before and that—you may hope—will henceforth continue to be known as long as the memory of our civilization endures.

Some philosophers of the last century were so much impressed by this kind of positive achievement, that they decided to liquidate philosophy altogether and divide up its subject-matter among different sciences. A number of new sciences which took man or human affairs as their subject, were formed at that time and appeared to serve this purpose. Psychology and Sociology were acclaimed as the principal legatees in this sharing out of the substance of philosophy.

This philosophy-to-end-all-philosophy may be designated, if somewhat loosely, as Positivism. It continued in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the rebellion against the authority of the Christian Churches, first started in the days of Montaigne, Bacon and Descartes; but it set out not only to liberate reason from enslavement by authority, but also to dispose of all traditionally guiding ideas, so far as they were not demonstrable by science. Thus, in the positivist sense truth became identified with scientific truth and the latter tended to be defined—by a positivist critique of science—as a mere ordering of experience.

Justice, morality, custom and law now appear as mere sets of conventions, charged with emotional approval, which are the proper study of sociology. Conscience is identified with the fear of breaking socially approved conventions and its investigation is assigned to psychology. Aesthetic values are related to an equilibrium of opposed impulses in the nervous system of the beholder.¹ In the positivist theory, man is a system responding regularly to a certain range of stimuli. The prisoner tortured by his gaolers in order to extract from him the names of his confederates, and similarly, the gaolers torturing him for this purpose, are both merely registering adequate responses to their situations.

Under the guidance of such concepts we are expected to become truly detached and objective in our approach to the whole world, including our own selves and all the affairs of men. Scientific man shall master both his inner conflicts and those of his social environment and, set free from metaphysical delusions, henceforth refuse to submit to any obligations that cannot be demonstrated to lie in his proper interest.

Such a programme implies, of course, that science itself is “positive”, in the sense that it involves no affirmation of personal beliefs. Since this is in fact untrue—as it is my purpose to show here—it is not surprising that the positivist movement, having first exalted science to the seat of universal arbitrament, now threatens to overthrow and destroy it. The tension between Marxism and science, which has made its appearance in Soviet Russia and has become steadily more intense during the past fifteen years, is a manifestation of this threat, and a logical consequence of the conflict between the aspirations of positivism and the true nature of science.

II

We shall get our own attitude to science into better perspective if we digress for a moment on some kinds of knowledge forming no part of science and held to be erroneous by most of us. Take sorcery and astrology. I shall assume that these are both held to be false by the reader; but obviously the same does not hold for everybody even to-day. Sorcery, for example, is being practised among primitive people throughout the planet. In order to bewitch somebody, the sorcerer gets hold of an appurtenance of his victim, such as a lock of hair, a bone he had spit out, or any excretion of his, and burns this object, pronouncing a curse on its owner. This is believed to be effective and it is common among primitive communities to ascribe the incidence of death invariably to the effects of sorcery.

Now if we ask, “What is sorcery?”, clearly we cannot say that “it is the destruction of human beings by burning a lock of their hair, etc.”, for we do not believe that man can be killed by such means. We have to say, “There is a belief in sorcery, which we do not share and which affirms the possibility of killing a man by burning a lock of his hair”. And similarly, we cannot define astrology as a method for predicting the course of men'ss lives by casting their horoscopes, but could only describe it as a belief—which we do not share—in the possibility of foretelling the future from the stars.

Naturally, a sorcerer or an astrologer would speak differently. The first may state that sorcery is the way of killing a man by burning a lock of his hair, or the like ; the second will describe astrology as the art of predicting the future from horoscopes. However, if pressed by our scepticism, they would be prepared no doubt to recast their accounts of sorcery or astrology into a statement similar in form to our own definition, but replacing the words, “a belief which we do not share”, by the expression, “a belief which we share”. And on these grounds we could both agree to differ.

All this has its obvious application to science. Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in, is essentially incomplete and a false pretension. It amounts to a claim that science is essentially different from and superior to all human beliefs which are not scientific statements, and this is untrue.

To show the falsity of this pretension, it should suffice to recall that originality is the mainspring of scientific discovery. Originality in science is the gift of a lonely belief in a line of experiments or of speculations, which at the time no one else considered to be profitable. Scientists spend all their time betting their lives, bit by bit, on one personal belief after the other. The moment discovery is claimed, the lonely belief now made public and the evidence produced in its favour, evoke a response among scientists which is another belief, a public belief, that can range over all grades of acceptance or rejection. Whether any particular discovery is recognized and developed further, or discouraged and perhaps even smothered at birth, will depend on the kind of b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY
• Full Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART I. THE EXAMPLE OF SCIENCE
• PART II. OTHER EXAMPLES
• Index