Nature as Animating: The Soul in the Human Sciences

NATURE AS ANIMATING: THE SOUL IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES HIS ESSAY ADDRESSES the problem of the fragmentation of knowledge on the contemporary scene, nd proposes that the rediscovery of the Aristotelian concept of nature can go far toward providing a solution.1 Well known is the situation in academe, where specialization is the price of advancement and tenure, and where few professors are capable of ranging outside their fields to assess truth claims or attain a comprehensive overview. No less serious is the compartmentalization of knowledge at research institutes and "think-tanks," where competent scholars are engaged in detailed analyses of problems in economics, political science, and international security, but where it has proven difficult to generate studies that direct prudent action by government leaders. Here the basic problem is the perennial gap that intrudes itself between knowledge and action, between what Aristotle identified centuries ago as theoria and praxis, which we may label, following him, as that between the theoretical and practical disciplines. The direction of sensible action in the sphere of human affairs, in Aristotle's view, pertained to ethics and politics, which he regarded as practical sciences-concerned not merely with knowing but with knowing as ordered to doing. The practical orientation of scholar1 The article is an expanded version of a colloquium paper read at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., on November 8, 1984, with the title "The Idea of Nature: Its Contemporary Relevance for Ethics and Politics." .An earlier draft was read in the Seminar on Problems of .Authority and Participation at the same Center on .August 13, 1984, with the title "The Modeling of Nature: Can the Soul Be Put Back Into the Human Sciences? " The author wishes to thank Edmund Pellegrino and Otto Bird for their helpful commentaries on the colloquium paper, and James Billington, Prosser Gifford, and .Ann Sheffield for providing the stimulating ambience in which it could be written and presented. 61~ THE SOUL IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES 613 ship-the ideal embodied in " knowing as ordered to doing "is a concern that goes far beyond the needs of academe and research institutes. Its neglect on the contemporary scene is but an instance of the more pervasive fragmentation of knowledge that characterizes our culture. The theme of this essay is that the concept of nature, particularly as animating and instantiated in the human soul, can be fruitful in overcoming such fragmentation in a basic way: by reuniting the physical and the human sciences and showing how action or doing can be related to both.2 By the physical sciences we mean the speculative or theoretical sciences concerned with nature, the phusis of the Greeks, whence the term "nature " in our title. Among such sciences one might include physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, psychology in its more theoretical aspects, and so on. The human sciences we take to embrace those concerned with man's affairs: the social and political sciences, ethics and politics, economics, the behavioral sciences in their more clinical aspects, etc. They less obviously are concerned with nature, and yet they are but manifestations of human nature in action, as will be shown in the sequel. Thus nature as seen in the world of nature and as embodied in human nature as part of that world is the concept around which we propose our integration. The regulative idea is simple: nature is an intrinsic principle of perfective activity, and the better we understand a nature or a natural kind the more we can appreciate how it should act. Thus we would bridge the " is " and the " ought " by rooting the norm for action in an objective standard: a nature that is not completely refractory to understanding. Here it is important to observe that there is a vast difference between knowing all there is to know about a nature and having no knowledge of it at all. By the somewhat elliptical expression, " a nature that is not completely refractory to understanding," 2 For an exposition of the concept of nature and the intellectual context in which the following development should be situated, see W. A. Wallace, "The Intelligibility of Nature: A Neo-Aristotelian View," Review of Metaphysics...