Mr. Wheelwright's Wisdom
Ernest Nagel
IN
the Spring 1943 issue of
The' Chimera,
Mr. Philip Wheelwright
takes the trouble to corntment on my contribution to the
PARTISAN
REVIEW
"New Failure of Nerve" symposium. His article shows him
to be highly skilled in the arts of condescension and polysyllabic name–
calling, and I shall not dispute his mastery in these fields.* But he also
tries to defend the thesis that "there are sources of valid insight, and
indispensable factors in man's total wisdom, which cannot be decisively
tested by scientific techniques." It is with this issue that I wish briefly
to concern myself.
What is Mr. Wheelwright's defense? Apart from dogmatic affir–
mation, it consists entirely in pointing out certain alleged limitations
of "scientific techniques," and in asserting as a consequence that
"essentially human canons"-incapable of being stated as propositions
verifiable "by the strict techniques of science"-must be taken as
authoritative in considering problems affecting human destiny. How–
ever, he makes a case for his conclusion only by adopting a sophistical
though familiar rhetorical device: he deliberately caricatures the
claims of his critics by exaggerating them, and then scornfully rejects
those claims as utterly absurd. More specifically, he identifies scientific
method
with the special techniques of a special science, namely, phy–
sics; and since he can challenge with apparent plausibility the prac–
ticality of employing that "method" for settling specifically human
questions, he succeeds, to his own immense satisfaction, in laying low
hi~
naturalistic adversaries.
In point of fact, however, none of the contributors to the "New
Failure of Nerve" symposium did identify the use of scientific method
*
Since Mr. Wheelwright's style of thinking, unlike mine, is presumably not
"mor.osemantical," he has suffered a curious lapse in interpreting my use of the
term "malicious" (which I employed to characterize certain philosophies of
science) as a term of abuse. My use of the word was modelled upon Santayana's
characterization of Locke's psychology. Santayana employed it, as I did, to de–
scribe the outcome, and not the
motives,
of a certain type of analysis.
37
