The first of a series of books, Studia Humanitatis, published in Switzerland, is written in German by two friends, Ernesto Grassi, an Italian scholar interested in the ‘Humanist’ writers of the Renaissance, and Thure von Uexküll, son of the German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, famous for his Theoretical Biology. The book1 which deals with The Origin and the Limits of the Moral and the Natural Sciences, is part of a movement of considerable interest that aims at re-awakening the spirit of the humanists. This neo-humanist movement is characteristically Central European, born of the disasters suffered by the Continent during this century; and although the book under review is not only scholarly but also serene, some of its moods, and some of the conclusions drawn, may not easily be appreciated by those who have no personal knowledge of the shattering experience of social disintegration through which it was the lot of these European thinkers to live. The neohumanist movement is inspired by the conviction (shared by a number of other movements) that it knows both the causes and the cure of the widespread depravity and perversion of everything human which Central Europe has had to witness. Its message is that only the understanding of man and his ‘essential nature’—his cultural creativity—can bring relief to our ills; and it tries, as is made clear by Grassi’s ‘Introductory Remark’, to take up again the task of developing a philosophy of man and of that important human activity, science. Science, according to this philosophy, is to be reinterpreted as a part of ‘humanism’; consequently a meaning of ‘humanism’ and of ‘humanistic’ which confines humanism to the ‘humanities’—that is, to historical, philological and literary studies—is rejected as too narrow.
The book may thus be said to aim at a new philosophy of man which puts both the humanities and the natural sciences in their proper place. It consists of two parts—On the Origin and the Limits of the Humanities (Geisteswissenschaften2) by Grassi, and On the Origin of the Natural Sciences, by Uexküll. The two parts are loosely connected by a vague relativistic pragmatism (reminiscent of F. C. S. Schiller, who also called himself a humanist) combined with a repudiation of pragmatist views. No doubt the authors will disagree with this opinion which they may take as proof that the reviewer is incapable of seeing their main point; but their various attempts to stress the identity of their views appear somewhat forced. This, however, does not diminish the value or the interest either of the whole or of its two parts.
The first part, Grassi’s contribution, is a philosophical essay on the essence of humanism. Its main topic is indicated by the German word Bildung (often translated by ‘culture’), which is here understood as the growth, the development, or the self-formation of the human mind; and it attempts to reestablish an educational ideal of mental growth designed to meet the criticisms raised against the old humanistische Bildungsideal (the educational aim of the humanities) which, according to Grassi, has become pointless owing to the disappearance of the social and cultural traditions in which it was rooted. The text on which Grassi’s neo-humanistic sermon is based is a disputation concerning the relative merits of legal and medical science, C. Salutati’s De nobilitate legum et medicinae. (Written in 1390, it was published in the middle of the fifteenth century; a critical edition by E. Garin was published in 1947 by the Istituto di studi filosofici in Florence. Together with Petrarch’s famous attack on medical men it is perhaps the earliest ancestor of Kant’s Streit der Fakultäten.) Grassi takes this as a discussion of the relative merits of the humanities and the natural sciences, and as a vindication of the claim of the humanities to superiority. This superiority, he says, was much better understood at the time when the natural sciences were founded than it is today.
The superiority claimed is threefold. First, it is claimed that the various natural sciences have the character of ‘arts’ (in the sense of artes = technai) rather than of science or knowledge (scientia or epistēmē); this means, in Salutati’s view, that they have to take their ‘principles’ (corresponding to Bacon’s ‘middle principles’) from elsewhere, i.e. from philosophical knowledge, and that they are therefore logically inferior to those disciplines which establish their own principles. (This view derives from Aristotle and was shared by contemporaries of Salutati as well as by later thinkers such as Leonardo.) Secondly, it is claimed (with Francis Bacon) that the natural sciences are arts (artes) in the sense of techniques or rather technologies—that they give us power; but such power is not, as Bacon thought, knowledge, for true knowledge springs from first principles rather than from secondary or middle principles. Thirdly, although these technologies may be the servants of man, and although they may be of some help to him in his ultimate and essential task of furthering his mental growth, they cannot carry him on to the fulfilment of this task; for they inquire into reality only within the narrow limits of their particular secondary principles without which their efforts would be pointless.
As opposed to all this, legal science, which is political science, is the science of right and wrong. As such it is not only useful to man (‘ius … a iuvando’, says Salutati), but useful in an essential sense, for it ‘saves his humanity’, it ‘aims at his completion’. Only by leaving the primitive jungle or bush (hūlē) and settling in ordered political communities do men transcend the beasts, as Protagoras taught. This is the first step in their mental growth (Bildung), and the basis of all others; and ‘human history is nothing but the success or failure of man-designed norms, enabling community life in the political and social spheres to proceed’ (p. 106).
This is by no means a complete outline of Grassi’s contribution, which deals at length with such problems as the Aristotelian doctrine that all poetry is imitation, with problems of the theory of tragedy, especially that of katharsis, and with the philosophy of time. Yet the discussions of these latter topics suffer severely from insufficient clarity and coherence; they do not, in my opinion, shed new light on the problems discussed, even though they contain some interesting asides. Outstanding among these are Grassi’s emphasis on imaginative power (Phantasie) as an essential element in human nature and mental growth; but his hint (pp. 102–3) that its role in the natural sciences is confined to that of tracing out their framework does not appear to me to do justice to them. One of the most interesting remarks from the educational or self-educational point of view is contained in Grassi’s analysis of the ‘humanistic conception of mental growth’ (Bildung). In trying to interpret a literary passage we may discover that in the context in question the words have an unusual and even a new meaning. ‘This leads us to something new and unexpected. An unsuspected world opens itself before us—and thus we “grow” (und dabei “bilden” wir uns).’
Grassi very fairly concedes that the natural scientist’s mind can ‘grow’ in precisely the same way when he finds himself compelled to adopt a new ‘interpretation’ of a natural phenomenon; but this concession seems to me to destroy his attempt to make use of Salutati’s arguments to establish the educational priority of the humanities.
Returning to Grassi’s central claim—the threefold superiority of the humanities—I admit that the natural sciences are in danger of stifling mental growth, instead of furthering it, if they are taught as technologies (the same is probably true of painting and of poetry); and that they should be treated (like painting and poetry) as human achievements, as great adventures of the human mind, as chapters in the history of human ideas, of the making of myths (as I have explained elsewhere3), and of their criticism. Neither the possibility of such a humanistic approach to science, nor the need for it, is mentioned by Grassi; on the contrary, he seems to believe that salvation lies in the realization and explicit recognition of the inferior technological character of the natural sciences—in other words, in making them keep their place. But while I am ready to admit the educational priority of a ‘humanist’ approach, I cannot admit the validity of the Grassi-Salutati theory of the natural sciences—a theory which, of course, is directly derived from Aristotle. That the natural sciences have blindly to accept their principles from First Philosophy is a doctrine whose truth I cannot admit in any sense. Grassi tries to meet this criticism (p. 52) by conceding that the natural sciences may question, criticize, and replace their ‘principles’ (an admission which seems to me tantamount to abandoning Salutati and Aristotle), and by asserting that it is (a) the aims of science, and (b) the conception of a ‘principle’ (rather than their various principles) which the various natural sciences must blindly presuppose. But this position, although not incompatible with the Aristotelian view on which Salutati’s argument is based, is nevertheless completely different from it.
The truth of the matter seems to be this. Although medicine happens to be an ‘art’, a technology, it is a mistake to conclude that it may be taken as representing the natural sciences; for it is an applied rather than a pure science. As to the latter, I agree that natural science—as opposed to pure mathematics—is not scientia or epistēmē; not, however, because it is a technē, but because it belongs to the realm of doxa—just like the myths which Grassi rightly values so highly. (The realization that natural science belongs to the realm of doxa, but that it was usually mistaken, until fairly recently, for epistēmē is, I believe, fertile for understanding the history of ideas.) Thus Grassi’s central claim that we ought to return to Salutati’s superior understanding of the status and significance of the natural sciences seems to me unfounded. Moreover, in Britain at least, the (Aristotelian) view of the matter which Grassi tries to reestablish never lost its hold, and it is therefore hardly in need of a restatement—not even of a restatement that uses valid arguments.
The second part of the book, written by Thure von Uexküll, is an excitingly original attempt to develop a new theory of science—a biologically orientated epistemology. A beautifully clear piece of writing, perhaps the best piece of contemporary German prose I can recall, it introduces us to a new approach to biology, a new development of ideas which originated with the author’s father, Jakob von Uexküll.
The fundamental category (p. 248) of this approach is that of a biological action (Handlung). To explain it, we may perhaps start from the obvious fact that the natural sciences try to describe and explain the behaviour of things under various conditions, and especially any order or regularity which may be discovered in this behaviour. This is true for physics, chemistry and biology. In the biological sciences we are interested in the behaviour of organs, tissues, cells, and, of course, whole organisms. The central idea of Uexküll’s biology is that the most successful way of describing the behaviour of a whole organism is in terms of actions which follow certain schematic patterns or ‘schemata’, and that these ‘schemata of action’ and ‘rules of the game’ may be understood as elaborations and modifications of a small number of fundamental schemata and rules. This idea appears at first sight attractive if not very surprising, although one may be inclined to suspend judgment until it has proved its fruitfulness. But the fruitfulness of the idea is shown, I believe, by Uexküll’s brilliant application of it to the problem of the behaviour of the parts of the organism (organs, tissues, etc.), and to a most interesting and truly revolutionary analysis of ‘the significance of physical and chemical methods within biology’ (p. 166).
According to Uexküll’s theory, there exists for each kind of organism a definite number of action schemata, each of which is released by a certain ‘release-signal’ (Auslöser), whose nature can be found by experiment, by constructing an imitative contraption (Attrappe, dummy). These, in most cases, can be reduced to astonishingly simple schematic representation. The Viennese biologist Konrad Lorenz found, for example, that (p. 162) certain species of geese follow, as if it were their mother, the first moving object they encounter upon breaking their shells, and that they continue to do so even when they are confronted by their real mother.4 For certain other fledglings (p. 169) the imitative contraption which may replace the parent by operating as a release signal for normal actions (opening their beaks) consists simply of two round pieces of cardboard or sheet metal giving something like a generalized silhouette of the head and body of the parent bird. ‘With the help of such imitative contraptions, we can make our entry into the scene of life of some animals. It is a moving and even a shattering experience for a sensitive mind to realize the strangeness of this world. The magical and threatening character of this reality creates an impression before which all our old ideas and conception of nature must fail’ (p. 169). Uexküll’s extension of this approach to the problem of tissue-reactions, and of the use of physical and chemical methods, is, I can only repeat, of the greatest interest. He suggests that what we actually do in biochemistry is to construct imitative contraptions (dummies) serviceable as release signals for the actions of organs or tissues. This, I believe, is an idea with a great future, likely to throw much light on some vexed questions. (I have in mind, for example, the question of the functional equivalence of certain chemical and electrical stimuli in some neuro-muscular reactions in the face of even such subtle tests as the measurement of ‘end-plate potentials’. Another of the many cases which, I think, might be used to illustrate Uexküll’s point is a well-known hypothesis which has been used to explain bacteriostasis: the bacteria, it is suggested, absorb a certain chemical which they cannot assimilate, mistaking it for food; that is, the chemical acts, and is acted upon, like a dummy.)
All that Uexküll has to say about the application of his ideas to biology is beyond praise. I do not know whether his theories are true, but they are strikingly original. They not only have great explanatory power, but also the power to put familiar things in an entirely new light; and one day they may well open a new era in biological thinking, especially in the fields of physiology and biochemistry—provided, of course, that the experimentalists take notice of these new ideas and their countless applications in almost all fields of biology.
Yet Uexküll speaks in this book not only as a biologist (and methodologist of biology) but also as a philosopher.
Encouraged, perhaps, by his biological applications, Uexküll tries to apply his fundamental categories to the whole problem of the theory of knowledge. Starting from the Kantian question whether it is possible to know things ‘in themselves’, he discusses the old aspirations of physics to discover the innermost secret of nature itself (das Innere der Natur), and the failure of these aspirations; and after an elaborate (but I do not think successful) attempt to determine the role of physics in a world of biological actions, he ultimately arrives at a biological ontology—the doctrine that reality (which can only be our world, a reality-for-us5), is a structure of actions; of ‘actions of various kinds and various extension’ (p. 248); and he replaces the problem of our knowledge of the world-in-itself by that of our participation in the structure of actions which is the world.
Although much of this is reminiscent of certain forms of pragmatism, operationalism, and instrumentalism, it is nevertheless one of the most original attempts since Schopenhauer and Bergson to erect a new metaphysical world, and one capable of accommodating modern science. This new attempt commands respect; but it does not carry conviction. On the contrary, it seems to me clear that Uexküll’s theory of knowledge and his ontology are founded upon a mistake. Anybody acquainted with the pitfalls of idealistic epistemology will have no difficulty in seeing that the mistake made must be akin to that of identifying what is with what is known; or esse = sciri. This led to Berkeley’s esse = percipi as well as to Hegel’s esse = concipi, and it now leads a biologist for whom knowledge is, rightly, a kind of action, to esse = agi, i.e. to the doctrine that ‘reality’ is the thing acted upon, or the object in the way of action, or a factor—the situational factor—of the schemata of our biological actions.
To be more specific, three mistakes may be pointed out in Uexküll’s argument. The first can be found in his analysis describing the failure of the aspirations of physics. This analysis appears to me to exhibit some typical and popular misunderstandings of the theory of relativity. (It is a mistake to maintain that the relativist universe does not know continuous time or continuous space, but only ‘islandlike space-time connections’; and it is a mistake to infer from the principle of the equivalence of reference systems the relativization of reality: on the contrary, relativity teaches both the reality and the invariance of spatio-temporal intervals.) Modern physics (pace Heisenberg) does attempt to give us a picture of the universe; whether this is drawn well or badly is, of course, a very different question. If we realize this, the suggestion that we must replace an allegedly dissolving world-view of physics by a new world-view of biology loses much of its force.
The second mistake is an extremely interesting one. It is made at a point (pp. 201 ff.) where Uexküll blames Lorenz for reasoning in a circle, and for failing to realize the full consequences of his own (and Uexküll’s) new biological attitude. Lorenz, he tells us, believes that the action schemata (including those of ‘biological experience’) have developed by adapting themselves to the external world by the method of trial and error. This view is rejected by Uexküll. Lorenz, he claims, ‘fails to grasp the new attitude which is the result of the discovery’ (due partly to Lorenz himself) ‘that the world around us, as it is given to our senses, is only the sum total of the biological release signals, and that it exists therefore only as a factor of the schemata of our biological actions’ (p. 202). Uexküll asserts that Lorenz’s circular argument is due to his failure ‘to rid himself of the objectivist assumptions upon which the picture of the universe of classical physics rests’ (p. 203).
I have no doubt that the accusation of arguing in a circle falls back on Uexküll, and that his faulty reasoning is at least partly due to his untenable subjectivist interpretation of modern physics. For Uexküll overlooks the fact that his whole biological analysis presupposes the possibility of a (more or less) objectivist approach. It is only such an approach which enables us to speak, for example, of an ‘imitative contraption’ taking over the functions of a bird’s mother. It is only because we know—in our ‘objective’ world, which goes beyond the bird’s ‘subjective’ world—what its real mother is, and what a contraption is, that we can say that, if animal A differentiates by its actions between its real mother and an imitative contraption of a certain kind while animal B does not, then A has, to that extent, the greater powers of discrimination or differentiation, and is, to the same extent, better adapted to certain possible environmental situations.
Lorenz’s view (which I have shared for many years6) is not only defensible, but necessary for understanding the peculiar human situation—the phenomenon, based on the argumentative use of the human language,7 of critical knowledge, as opposed to the uncritical and, as it were, accidental adaptations of the animal’s ‘knowledge’.
And this brings me to the third mistake in Uexküll’s argument; a mistake which is very hard to understand in one who admires Kant. It is the gravest mistake of the book, and one which both authors share. It is their complete (and it seems, almost hostile) neglect of human reason—of man’s power to grow, to transcend himself, not only by the imaginative invention of myths (whose importance is so well emphasized by Grassi), but also by the rational criticism of his own imaginative inventions. These inventions, if formulated in some language, are from the start somewhat different from other biological actions; this may be seen from the fact that each of two schemata of biological actions which otherwise are indistinguishable may contain a myth (concerning, say, the origin of the world) which is contradictory to the other. For although some of our beliefs may be immediately relevant to practice, others are only remotely relevant to it, if at all. Their differences may make it possible for them to clash, and their comparative remoteness may make it possible for them to be argued about. In this way, rational criticism may develop, and standards of rationality—some of the first inter-subjective standards—and the idea of an objective truth. And this criticism may, in time, develop into systematic attempts to discover what is weak and untrue in other people’s theories and beliefs, and also in one’s own. It is by this mutual criticism that man, if only by degrees, can break through the subjectivity of a world of biological release signals, and, beyond this, through the subjectivity of his own imaginative inventions, and the subjectivity of the historical accidents upon which these inventions may in part depend. For these standards of rational criticism and of objective truth make his knowledge structurally different from its evolutionary antecedents (even though it will always remain possible to subsume it under some biological or anthropological schema of action). It is the acceptance of these standards which creates the dignity of the individual man; which makes him responsible, morally as well as intellectually; which enables him not only to act rationally, but also to contemplate and adjudicate, and to discriminate between, competing theories.
These standards of objective truth and criticism may teach him to try again, and to think again; to challenge his own conclusions, and to use his imagination in trying to find whether and where his own conclusions are at fault. They may teach him to apply the method of trial and error in every field, and especially in science; and thus they may teach him how to learn from his mistakes, and how to search for them. These standards may help him to discover how little he knows, and how much there is that he does not know. They may help him to grow in knowledge, and also to realize that he is growing. They may help him to become aware of the fact that he owes his growth to other people’s criticisms, and that reasonableness is readiness to listen to criticism. And in this way they may even help him to transcend his animal past, and with it that subjectivism and voluntarism in which romantic and irrationalist philosophies may try to hold him captive.
This is the way in which our mind grows and transcends itself. If humanism is concerned with the growth of the human mind, what then is the tradition of humanism if not a tradition of criticism and reasonableness?
This review, written in 1951, appeared first (with considerable cuts, made by the Editor, to save space) in The Philosophical Quarterly, 2, 1952.
1 Von Ursprung und Grenzen der Geisteswissenschaften und Naturwissenschaften, by E. Grassi and T. von Uexküll, Berne, 1950.
2 The term ‘die Geisteswissenschaften’ (‘the humanities’) has become a typical German term, and almost untranslatable, even though it can be literally translated as ‘mental sciences’ (or ‘moral and mental sciences’), and even though it seems to have reached Germany, ironically enough, through Theodor Gomperz’s translation of J. S. Mill’s expression ‘the Moral Sciences’. (I say ‘ironically enough’ because the term has, in its present German usage, a strong irrationalist and even anti-rationalist and anti-empiricist flavour; but Gomperz and Mill were rationalists and empiricists.)
3 See chs. 4 f. of this volume. Cf. also note 6 to ch. 11 of my Open Society (revised editions).
4 See K. Z. Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring (published in English in 1952, after the present review was first published).
5 Compare the following remarks made by the older von Uexküll in 1920 in his Theoretical Biology (see the English translation, 1920, p. xv; the second set of italics is mine): ‘All reality is subjective appearance: this must be the great fundamental admission even of biology…. We always come up against objects that owe their construction [and so, presumably, their existence] to the subject.’
6 Cf. chs. 1 and 15, above.
7 Cf. chs. 4 and 12, above.