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PARTISAN REVIEW
wi th everyone means that no privacy or sancti ty remains inviolate. Our
technologies remain unevenly applied throughout the world and where
they are employed, sometimes provoke troubling ethical questions. Our
ingenuity has not lessened famine, abolished poverty, eliminated war, or
eradicated racism.
Today and tomorrow, our distinguished participants will examine and
discuss how we have been breaking traditions, and may have created new
ones, and the extent to which our mastery of technologies has altered, and
will continue to alter, our thinking and being as we enter a new millenium.
S ESSION
I:
SOCIAL SCIENCES: FROM RATIONALITY TO
SUBJECTIVITY
Elliot Pruzan:
To provide some context for the introducers' remarks it
might be useful to pursue some of the themes Dr. Webb has just articulat–
ed. Certainly, when one thinks about what social science is and what it has
amounted to over the past two centuries, it might be important to bear in
mind what rationality amounted to in pre-modern societies. In the works
of individuals such as Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, one easily sees a
view of rationality that posits a
telos
or end point. One acts rationally in
order to develop oneself to achieve some kind of end. The end could be a
oneness with God, or salvation, but there is a notion of completion. This
completion is not something that is value-free: it is something that is good
for you, something you want to achieve. The meaning of your life finds its
fulfillment in your achievement of that end. As we move from the pre–
modern era into the modern era, one finds a jettisoning of this
conception-beginning with Descartes. Working one's way through the
rationalist philosophers of the seventeenth century, one begins to
encounter a conception of rationality that wishes to exclude from consid–
eration some notion of the telos or an end. Objectivity requires that values
do not intrude into an objective, empirical appreciation of what society is,
of how society works, and how society could be improved. Of course, as
one looks at the history of the western world from the seventeenth cen–
tury to the present, one sees that in a rational encounter with the world,
the role of religion, the possibili ties of spiri t and spiri tuali ty are becoming
more and more problematic. The notion that the social sciences bring an
objective account to the study of society, and of individuality, of why indi–
viduals act the way they do and what it is that they should be acting for
becomes a large issue in trying to come to terms with ourselves as human
beings within our cultures.
