THE GOOD SOCIETY
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may not be irrelevant to his nature. Once we assign a term to a refer–
ent and seek to discover the nature of the latter, we find that the
nature of a thing is always construed from its activity or behavior.
But the activity or behavior of man depends upon many things within,
and outside of, his body. It is therefore the sheerest dogmatism to
deny that the nature of man can change. Speaking of permanence and
change in things, Van Doren writes: "The most familiar form of the
problem has to do with the nature of man, concerning which the edu–
cated person will know what he knows about any nature, namely that
insofar as it is a nature, it does not change. For then we should have
another nature; meaning that in the: case of man he would have
another name."
Apparently Van Doren's educated man cannot distinguish be–
tween things and names. Names are intelligently used to facilitate
control of things. The names we choose to attach to things have no
bearing on how they behave. Van Doren's argument is tantamount to
saying that kittens can never become cats or water ice or steam because
they have different names when they do. The whole of modern science
would come to a stop if it took this naive word-magic seriously. Van
Doren, who is fond of quoting Pascal, would do well to ponder
Pascal's remark: "They say that habit is second nature. Who knows
but that nature is first habit?" Since the changes that men undergo
are part of their nature, it is absurd to argu_e from a definition of the
term
'human nature' that human nature cannot become different.
For if it is true by definition it is an analytic statement or tautology
that does not tell us anything about the world (except about how a
word is to be used). But Van Doren sets great store by this statement
as a momentous truth about men.
Even more startling is what Van Doren does with this conception
of unchanging human nature. Instead of establishing the ends of edu–
cation by an evaluation of the consequences of different educational
proposals, he states these ends in terms of what is appropriate to the
unchanging nature of man. Liberal education "studies an art br system
of
arts ..•
to secure that human beings should be precisely or perma–
nently human." But we have just been told that what makes a man
precisely or permanently human is that he is
called
a man.
If
he has to
become
human, then he might not become human. But this is what
Van Doren regards as impossible. On Van Doren's conception of
man's unchanging nature, there is no reason why he should be given
an education at all. Because he has not clearly distinguished things
from names, his argument at all key points begins with a tautology
and ends with an absurdity. The attempt to derive the necessity of
