Now that I have expounded on the virtues, the necessities and the priority of experiential knowledge to abstract knowledge, I turn to the virtues and beauties and necessities of abstract knowledge as well. By now my general point must be clear. It is the dichotomized, solely abstract knowledge that is so dangerous, the abstractions and the systems that are opposed to or dichotomized from experience instead of being built upon it and integrated with it. If I may say it so, abstract knowledge dichotomized from experiential knowledge is false and dangerous; but abstract knowledge built upon and hierarchically-integrated with experiential knowledge is a necessity for human life.
Abstractness begins with all orderings of experience, all interpretations of it, and all the hierarchical and Gestaltlike arrangements of experiential knowledge that make it possible for the limited human being to encompass it, grasp it, not be overwhelmed by it. In the same way that our immediate memory span for separate objects is about seven or eight or so, it is also known that six or seven or eight groups of separate objects may also be perceived and encompassed in an immediate perception. This is the simplest example of the holistic hierarchizing of many objects that I can think of. Make these groupings more and more inclusive, and finally it is possible for a human being, limited though he is, to encompass the whole world in a single unified perception. The contrast is with total anarchy, total chaos, a total lack of ordering, or clustering, or of relationships among all these separate things. This is the world, perhaps, of the newborn baby in some respects, or like the world of the panicky schizophrenic in another respect. In any case, it is hardly possible to live with for any length of time or to endure (although it can be enjoyed for a short time). This is even more true if we take into account the necessity for pragmatic living within the world, surviving in it, dealing with it, and having commerce with it. All the means-end relationships, and all the differential perception of ends and means also come under the head of abstractness. Purely concrete experience does not differentiate one experience from another experience in any way, certainly not in terms of relative importance or of relative hierarchy of means and ends. All classifications of our experiences of reality are abstractions, and so is all awareness of similarities and differences.
In other words, abstractness is absolutely necessary for life itself. It is also necessary for the fullest and highest development of human nature. Self-actualization necessarily implies abstractness. It is not even possible to conceive of human self-actualization without whole systems of symbols, abstractions, and words, i.e., language, philosophy, world view.
The attack upon abstractness dichotomized from concreteness must never be confused with an attack upon abstractness hierarchically-integrated with concreteness and experience. We might remind ourselves here of the contemporary situation in philosophy. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, to take two major examples, attacked not philosophy in general but the great abstract systems of philosophy that had long since cut themselves off from their foundations in actual living experience. Existentialism and phenomenology are in large part also a repudiation of these huge, verbal, a priori, abstract, total systems of philosophy. This is an attempt to get back to life itself, that is to say, to concrete experience upon which all abstractions must be based if they are to remain alive.
It will help here to make the distinction between an empirical generalization or theory and an a priori generalization or theory. The former is simply an effort to organize and to unify experiential knowledge so that we can grasp it with our limited human brain. An a priori theory makes no such effort. It can be spun entirely inside one's own head and can proceed without reference either to experiential knowledge or to areas of ignorance. Generally it is presented as a certainty. In effect it commits the great sin of denying human ignorance. The true empiricist or the empirical-minded layman is always aware of what he knows and what he doesn't know and of the relative reliabilities and different levels of validity of what he does know. An empirical theory is in a real sense humble. The classical, abstract, a priori theory need not be humble; it can be and often is arrogant. One might also say that the abstract theory or abstract system becomes functionally autonomous in the sense of divorcing itself from its empirical foundations, from the experiences upon which it rests and which it is supposed to explain or give meaning to or organize. It proceeds thereafter to live its own life as a theory per se, sufficient unto itself, having its own life. In contrast the empirical theory or empirical system remains connected with the experiential facts that it organizes into a manageable, graspable unity and in close parallel with these facts. As a consequence it can shift and change and easily modify itself as new information becomes available. That is, if it purports to interpret and organize our knowledge of reality, then it must of necessity be a changing thing, since our knowledge of reality keeps on changing, and it must be adaptable and flexible in the sense of adapting itself to this foundation of changing and increasing knowledge. There is a kind of mutual feedback involved here between theory and facts, a feedback which can be totally lacking in the functionally autonomous abstract theory or system which has become self-borne.
To add a final touch to this differentiation, I refer to a previously made distinction between reduction to the concrete as Goldstein described it (22) and reduction to the abstract as I described it (47). I will then contrast both of these with the finding in self-actualizing people that characteristically they were able to be both concrete and abstract.
I can push the whole matter even further. In a certain sense I see the acceptance of the prepotency and the logical priority of experience as another version of the spirit of empiricism itself. One of the beginnings of science, one of the roots from which it grew, was the determination not to take things on faith, trust, logic, or authority but to check and to see for oneself. Experience had shown how often the logic or the a priori certainty or Aristotle's authority failed to work in fact. The lesson was easy to draw. First, before everything else comes the seeing of nature with your own eyes, that is, experiencing it yourself.
Perhaps an even better example is the development of the empirical or the scientific attitude in the child. Here the major injunction is "let's take a look for ourselves", or "go and see with your own eyes". For the child this contrasts with taking things on faith, whether from daddy or mommy or from the teacher or from the book. It can be phrased in the harshest terms of "don't trust anyone, but look with your own eyes". Or else it can be phrased more mildly: "it's always a good idea to check just to make sure. There are individual differences in perceiving; somebody else might see it in one way, and you perhaps will see it in another". This is to teach the child that one's own perceptions usually constitute the court of last resort. If the empirical attitude means anything at all, it means at least this. First comes "knowing" in the experiential sense; then come the checks on the fallibilities of the senses and of experiential knowledge; then come the abstractions, the theories, i.e., orthodox science. As a matter of fact, the concept of objectivity itself (in the sense of the need to make knowledge public and to share it and not to trust it completely until it has been shared by at least several people) may be seen as a more complex derivative of a primary empirical rule, i.e., to check by one's own experience. This is so because public knowledge constitutes an experiential check by several people on your report of your private experience. If you go into the desert and discover some unexpected mine or some improbable animal, your experiential knowledge may be certain and valid, but you can hardly expect others to believe you entirely and on faith. They also have a right to see for themselves, that is, to acquire the ultimate validity of their own experiential knowledge. And that is just what objective public checking is, i.e., an extension of "see for yourself". This insistence upon the priority of the empirical theory over the a priori theory or system and the consequent insistence upon a close parallelism of the empirical theory with the facts that it ties together in a unity, differentiates between the person with the empirical attitude on the one hand and the doctrinaire on the other. For instance, Max Eastman in his autobiography thinks of himself, by contrast with the Soviet intellectuals, as a "vulgar empiricist who saw Socialism as a hypothesis, an experiment that ought to be tried". He was restless with the Soviet theorists, among whom he felt "an atmosphere of theology rather than of science". I have criticized the religious establishments on a similar basis (48). Since most of them have claimed to be revealed religions, that is, to be based upon an original prophets' vision of the perfect, final, and absolute truth, there is obviously nothing more to learn. There is no need for openness, for checking, for experimentation, not even for improvement (since it is already perfect).
This is as sharp a contrast with the empirical attitude as I can find. But in a milder form it is widespread and perhaps we could say almost universal in the mass of humankind. And I am not even inclined to exempt all professional scientists from this indictment. The empirical attitude is in its essence a humble attitude, and many or most scientists are not humble except in their own chosen areas of professional work. They are, many of them, as likely to charge out of their laboratory doors with a priori faiths and prejudgments of all kinds as are some theologians, if only about the nature of science itself. This humility that I consider to be a defining characteristic of the empirical or scientific attitude includes the ability to admit that you are ignorant and that mankind in general is ignorant about many things. Such an admission has the necessary consequence of making you in principle willing and eager to learn. It means that you are open rather than closed to new data. It means that you can be naive rather than all-knowing. And all of this means, of course, that your universe keeps on growing steadily in contrast to the static universe of the person who already knows everything.
This is a long way off from the point at which I started, that is, of simply insisting on a place in knowledge and in science for experiential data. But I believe that making a respectable place for experiential data finally strengthens the empirical attitude and therefore strengthens science rather than weakens it. It expands the jurisdiction of science because of its faith that the human mind need not be shut out of any area of life.