56
PARTISAN REVIEW
formed? We adopt our most cherished preferences in such a welter of
approximation, prejudice, and passion that later, when confronted by a
novel fact, we sniff at it and weigh it less for its exactness than for its ca–
pacity to serve or to counter our system of interpretation, our sense of
moral comfort, our attachment to a network of personal relationships
and loyalties. According to the laws that govern the mixture of words,
attachments, wishes, hatreds, notions, and fears that we call "opinion," a
fact is neither real nor unreal; rather, it is desirable or undesirable. It
serves as an accomplice or plotter, as an ally or adversary, not as an ob–
ject that needs to be known. At times we even elevate this priority of
possible utilization over readily available knowledge
to
the status of a
doctrine, thus justifying it in principle.
That our opinions, no matter how disinterested, stem from diverse
influences among which a genuine knowledge of the subject or of the
objective situation is often in last place - behind beliefs, cultural factors,
chance, appearances, different forms of bias, the desire to see reality con–
form to our prejudices, mental laziness - none of this is really new. Such
has been the case since the day Plato taught us the difference between
opinion and science. And indeed, the novelty is even less today, inasmuch
as the development of science since Plato's time has steadily accentuated
the distinction between the verifiable and the unverifiable, between a
process of reasoning that is demonstrable and one that is not. But simply
to realize that we are now living in a world fashioned more than ever by
the applications of scientific research is not to guarantee that more hu–
man beings than ever think in scientific terms. Most of us use tools fash–
ioned by science, take care of our health thanks to science, have or do
not have children thanks to science, without, intellectually speaking,
having anything to do with the scientific disciplines responsible for the
discoveries from which we benefit. In addition, even the tiny minority of
persons who are engaged in those disciplines acquire their nonscientific
convictions in irrational ways. By virtue of its specific nature, scientific
work imposes criteria that cannot in the long run be eluded. In the same
way a sprinter, no matter how crazy or stupid he may be outside, accepts
the rational law of the stopwatch once he has entered the stadium.
There would be no point in his copying the politician or the artist by
putting up posters or advertisements, or by holding public meetings in
order to proclaim himself a world champion and to announce that he
can run the hundred-meter dash in eight seconds, when everyone can
verify the fact that he has never been clocked under eleven seconds.
Though obliged by the rules of the track to behave rationally, he is,
however, quite capable of running down an ascending escalator. A great
scientist can forge his political and moral opinions in just as arbitrary a
fashion and under the sway of considerations that are as insane as those
