204
PARTISAN REVIEW
IN GOD-DELUSION STILL MORE RASH,
WILL PRESENTLY BE SEEN TO CRASH.
The car of consequence, Dear Reader,
Without recourse to coupled meter,
From here, should travel like a shell.
This letter is complete. Farewell.
Letters
COUNTER-SYMPOSIUM
Sirs:
1
The academic triptych of Hook-Dewey–
Nagel in
Partisan Review
evades focus,
at first. Each appears to be occupied in
expressing a typical 19th Century re–
sponse to an atypical challenge, that is,
the response that Epicurus and Lucretius
charted and which was brought, in prin–
ciple, to complete competence in the em–
pirico-metrical techniques of the 19th
Century. But this is a false reading. The
whole action is more sensitive. • . .
Actually, each is offering a prayer-in
the confessional form of
non possuTTii–
to petition for a way through the present
painful sense of drift. They are saying,
and they are philosophers, that philos·
ophers have lost their functions and don't
know where to find them. Trying to re·
member where philosophers last had
them seems not to work. As Marx ob–
serves
(Capital,
p. 384, Mod. Lib. ed.):
"If
it (scil. Manufacture: competitive se–
lection) develops a one-sided specialty
into a perfection, at the expense of the
whole of a man's working capacity, it
also begins to make a specialty of the
absence of all development."
Mr. Nagel appears to be fingering a
scratch from that claw. He observes:
"Professional scientists have frequently
used their specialized knowledge to but·
tress or criticize the institutions of their
day; but publicists, religious leaders, and
philosophers
(sic!)
have usually played
a more prominent role in this task of
evaluating the general social import of
scientific methods and scientific theories.
Such evaluations do not, in most cases,
flow from the specific character of sci–
entific methods or their technical achieve–
ments. ..•" Mr. Nagel is quite correct.
FRANCIS FERGUSSON
The philosopher in his present incarna·
tion is not a person possessed of the
specific skills and techniques, the 'tech·
nical achievements,' of the chemist, math·
ematician, physicist, etc. However, Mes–
sers Hook, Dewey and Nagel insist that
science is to be evaluated by scientific
methods, that is, specific skills and rou·
tines.
If
so, the philosopher in his evalu·
ating role has no proper and intrinsic
function
qua
philosopher. Scientists who
do possess proper and intrinsic functiona
have been pointing this out for some
time.
Mr. Nagel, in effect, Is saying that
though philosophers do not produce sci–
ence in its neutral sense, they do serve
to distribute it in an exhortatory way.
Theirs is the pseudo-function of writing
advertising copy for the scientific indus–
tries.
What offers an imitation in place of
the operation itself must go, doubtless,
as the triptych says in unison. It is sad,
though. In the strictly functional
uni·
versities of post-war reconstruction, some–
how we shall miss the philosophers, the
myth-makers, as somehow we know that
we miss wisdom. However, a confessional
mood is an attitude of invitation if it
is not an attitude of answer. Perhaps the
City will come later.
ERASMUS MINOR
NEw YoRK
CITY
2
Sirs:
Here are a few questions on "The New
Failure of Nerve" as described in your
last issue.
1.
If,
as Sidney Hook and John Dewey
both suggest, the cause of present
diJ.
orders is more probably a lack than
an
excess of scientific method in approachln,
social problems, what in turn is the cauao
