PRAGMATISM AND DESIRE

We are trying to entertain the idea that the universe is like a great teaching so that we will be less afraid to question the picture of the universe that modern science gives us.

For most of us, the initial obstacle in this effort at skepticism is that science seems to work so well. A physicist I know once likened contemporary people, including himself and his fellow scientists, to a mob of savages so bedazzled by an interloper's tricks and baubles that they immediately make him into a god. It is really no laughing matter, this slavery to what we call the pragmatic criterion. We nee to look at it more closely.

Imagine that a certain man comes upon a gun. He has never before seen or heard of such a thing. Nor, we must imagine, does he have any need to kill for food or defense. He picks up the gun, turns it around, knocks it against a stone. What is this object? He takes it home and experiments with it. To his delight he finds that when he holds it by the barrel he can crush things and break them better than with his wooden mallet. To him, the gun is a hammer. That is his idea, his theory, so to say, and his theory works. When others ask him what that strange object is, he can prove his answer through the test of experience.

Why did this man not discover the proper nature of the gun? Because he did not ask of reality: How can I kill? And therefore reality never answered him or provided him with an instrument for killing. Here the limits of the pragmatic criterion are laid bare. When an idea or theory "works" it always does so relative to what we are asking of reality. If we have narrow intentions, our discoveries--no matter how ingenious--can never be bigger than our basic intentions.

This is what my physicist friend was speaking about. Rockets land on the moon, great bombs are exploded and certain diseases are cured. Such things so bedazzle us that we assume they are also answers to deep questions about reality. But I think the pragmatic successes of science need to be looked upon mainly as signs of the sort of questions we modern men are actually asking of reality.

If the man who came across the gun had been searching for a better way to kill, he would surely have discovered the real function of the gun. His intention would have matched the intention of the maker of the gun. And if someone else had tried to show him, by pragmatic proofs, how good a hammer it was he would have laughed at him. So we may say that unless a man is aware of his own aims, and unless he is sure that his aims correspond to the real purposes that exist in objects, then the pragmatic criterion is of little use as a key to knowledge.

We can imagine our man in search of a hammer puzzling for a moment over the bullets and guns chamber, and then we can see him "improving" his discovery by fashioning a gun without bullets!

The truth of this simple example of the gun was brought home to me recently when I attended a seminar of medical scientists on the nature of gout. The speaker was a brilliant and well known physiologist who carefully explained how for the most part the disease was a result of the human body's tendency to overproduce uric acid. No other animal does this, he said, and therefore no other animal suffers gout. "Here nature made a mistake, " he said, "similar to the mistake she made with the vermiform appendix. There is no good reason for the body to produce so much uric acid."

I was amazed. What picture of the universe lies behind the statement that nature makes mistakes? But, far more important, what picture of ourselves lies behind the easy belief that we can discern such mistakes? I do not doubt that this man was on the track of some new way to alleviate the painful symptoms of gout, but that is not the point. What amazed me was that this was all being passed off as knowledge about the human body and its functions. Technology? Yes. The ingenious manipulation of a narrow spectrum of observed data? Certainly. And of benefit to those poor souls suffering from pain? Well, perhaps, let us grant him that with qualifications to be elucidated later. But knowledge?

The audience of several hundred researches and physicians kept a respectful silence and asked thoughtful, sympathetic questions. I can imagine a similar audience listening to a lecture by the man in our example as he points out the mistakes inherent in his newly discovered hammer.

The fact that we are bedazzled by the pragmatic successes of science shows us that when we pursue science our real intentions do not match what we sometimes claim to be searching for. We say we want knowledge about the universe, but we test our knowledge only by its logical consistency, its power to predict and its production of marvelous feats. Our real intention, therefore, is to satisfy our desires or allay our fears--desire for explanations, a sense of security, or material gain; fear of the unknown, death, pain and loneliness.

We must therefore recognize that there is a great difference between the wish for knowledge and the wish to satisfy desire, which is the basis of pragmatism. And that knowledge in the service of our ordinary desires may produce a very different picture of the universe than knowledge which is connected to other motives.

What, then, are we to say to those who compare modern theories of the origin and structure of the universe to the systems of cosmology that were part of the ancient teachings? Such comparisons are usually made in order to show how superior our present theories are and, occasionally, to point out the foreshadowings of modern science among otherwise "prescientific" peoples. But was ancient man merely groping for what we believe we have found in our pragmatically testable hypotheses? Or did he mean something entirely different than we mean when he asked, "What is the origin and structure of the universe?"