The inclusion of subjective experiences in the world of reality knowable by the scientist (for us now defined as wanting to know all of reality, not just the shared, public portions of it) breeds two consequences at least. One is the obvious differentiation between the immediacy of experiential knowledge and the distance of what I have called "spectator knowledge". The other is the notion that scientific work has two directions or poles or goals: one is toward utter simplicity and condensation, the other toward total comprehensiveness and inclusiveness.
If there is any primary rule of science, it is, in my opinion, acceptance of the obligation to acknowledge and describe all of reality, all that exists, everything that is the case. Before all else science must be comprehensive and all-inclusive. It must accept within its jurisdiction even that which it cannot understand or explain, that for which no theory exists, that which cannot be measured, predicted, controlled, or ordered. It must accept even contradictions and illogicalities and mysteries, the vague, the ambiguous, the archaic, the unconscious, and all other aspects of existence that are difficult to communicate. At its best it is completely open and excludes nothing. It has no "entrance requirements". Furthermore it includes all levels or stages of knowledge, including the inchoate. Knowledge has an embryology, too; it cannot confine itself to its final and adult forms alone. Knowledge of low reliability is also part of knowledge. At this point, however, my main intention is to include subjective experiences in this all-inclusive realm of being and then to pursue some of the radical consequences of this inclusion.
Such knowledge is of course apt to be less reliable, less communicable, less measurable, etc. And of course one push of science is toward the more public, toward the more "objective". In that direction lies the shared certainty that we all seek and enjoy. And ordinarily this is ultimately the direction in which technological progress is most likely. If I could only discover some external indicator of, for example, happiness or anxiety, some litmus paper test of the subjective, I would be a very happy man. But happiness and anxiety now exist even in the absence of such objective tests. It is the denial of this existence that I consider so silly that I won't bother arguing about it. Anyone who tells me that my emotions or desires don't exist is in effect, telling me that I don't exist.
Once the break has been made and experiential data have been acknowledged as part of knowledge and therefore of science (comprehensively defined), we are confronted with many real problems, difficulties, and paradoxes. For one thing, it seems that we must begin, philosophically and scientifically, with experience. For each of us it is precisely some of his subjective experiences that are the most certain, the most undoubted, the least questionable of all data. Especially is this true if I am a schizophrenic. Then my subjective experiences may become the only reliable reality. But just as the schizophrenic is not content with his subjective world alone and makes desperate efforts to reach the reality outside and to cling to it, so do we all seek to know and to live in the extra-psychic world of "reality", almost from birth on. We need to know it at all the levels of meaning of the word "know". The intrapsychic world, much of it, is too fluctuating, too changeable. It doesn't stay put. Too often we don't know what to expect of it. And it is obviously influenced by happenings "outside" of it.
Not only the world of nature but also the social world of people beckon us out of our private inner worlds. From our beginnings we cling to the mother as she clings to us, and here too an outside-the-ego kind of reality starts forming. In such ways we begin to make the differentiation between our subjective experiences that we share with others and those which we discover to be peculiarly our own. And it is this world that correlates with the shared experiences that we finally learn to call external reality, a world of happenings and things that you and I can point to, i.e., that produce similar experiences in you and me at the same time. In various senses this external world is discovered to be independent of our wishes and fears, our attention to it, etc.
Science or knowledge in sum total can be considered a codification, a purification, a structuring and organizing of all these shared experiences. It has been a way of enabling us to grasp them and to make them comprehensible by unifying and simplifying them. This monistic trend, this pressure toward simplicity and parsimony, this yearning to make a single inclusive formula out of a lot of little ones, has come to be identified with science and with knowledge.
For most people the far goal of science, its end and therefore its ideal and defining essence, still is its comprehensive "laws", elegant and "simple" mathematical formulas, pure and abstract concepts and models, ultimate and irreducible elements and variables. And so for these people these ultimate abstractions have become the most real reality. Reality lies behind the appearances and is inferred rather than perceived. The blueprints are more real than the houses. The maps are more real than the territory.
What I propose here is that this is only one direction in which science can develop, one limit toward which it yearns to approach. Another direction is toward comprehensiveness, allness, and the acceptance of all concrete experience, all suchness, all esthetic savoring of the full richness of everything without needing to abstract. I would equally avoid reduction to the concrete or reduction to the abstract [8-1]. I would remind you again that any abstraction loses something of concrete, experiential reality. And with equal emphasis I would remind you that the abstractions are necessary if we are to avoid total insanity and if we wish to live in the world. The solution of this dilemma that I have worked out for myself and that works well for me is to know when I am abstracting and when I am concretizing, to be able to do both, to enjoy them both, and to know the values and shortcomings of both. With Whitehead, we can then "seek simplicity and distrust it". Accepting experiential data as scientific data creates problems. But also many problems disappear if we accept both worlds. On the one hand we have the traditional scientific world, unifying and organizing multiplex experience, moving toward simplicity, economy, parsimony, succinctness, and unity. On the other hand we accept also the world of subjective experiences, affirming that these too exist, that they are part of reality, that they are worthy of our interest, and that there is even some possibility of understanding and organizing them (quite apart from the primary rule of science - to accept what exists as real, i.e., not to deny any reality, even if we cannot understand it or explain it or communicate it).
Science, then, has two directions or tasks, not just one. It moves toward abstractness (unity, parsimony, economy, simplicity, integration, lawfulness, "graspability"). But it also moves toward comprehensiveness, toward experiencing everything, toward describing all these experiences, toward accepting all that exists. Thus we may speak about the two kinds of reality that many have spoken of, for instance Northrop (58) [8-2]. The world of experience exists and comprehends all experiences, i.e., the experiential, phenomenological, or esthetically experienced world. The other, the world of the physicists, mathematicians, and chemists, of abstractions, "laws", and formulas, of systems of postulates, is a world that is not directly experienced but rather rests upon the experiential world, is inferred from it, and is an effort to comprehend it and to make sense of it, to see behind its contradictions, to order it and structure it.
Is the abstract world of the physicist more "real" than the world of the phenomenologist?
Why need we think so? If anything the contradiction of this statement is easier to defend. What exists here and now and what we actually experience is certainly more immediately real than the formula, the symbol, the sign, the blueprint, the word, the name, the schema, the model, the equation, etc. What exists now is in this same sense more real than its origins, its putative constituents or causes or precursors; it is experientially more real than anything it can be reduced to. At the very least we must reject the definition of reality as being only the abstractions of science.
This continuum from comprehensiveness to simplicity can help us to understand better the important difference between "empirical theories" and "constructed" or "abstract theories". The former are more an expression of science's effort to be comprehensive (at the same time that it organizes and classifies multiplicity in order to make it more graspable by the limited human being). It is essentially an effort to order the facts rather than to explain them.
The Linnaean system is the classical example. The original Freudian system is another such "empirical theory", in my opinion. It seems to me to be primarily a taxonomy, one might say almost a filing system in which all the clinical discoveries can find a place.
The abstract (or constructed) system is determined far more by its system properties than by its loyalty to the facts, as the empirical theory is. In principle it need have nothing to do with facts; it can be an arbitrary construction, e.g., the non-Euclidean geometries. A good theory in this sense is primarily like a good mathematician's demonstration. It is as succinct as possible, moving ideally toward a single equation. It is like a good system of logic, obeying its own given rules. It may or may not be "useful" but need not be. This kind of "pure" theory has often come before the fact, like a suit of clothes playfully designed for some fantasied, nonexistent species that later may have turned out to be useful for some other, unforeseen purpose; or like a chemical newly synthesized for its own sake, for which uses are subsequently sought and perhaps found ("I have discovered a cure; but for what disease?").
A good empirical theory may be a sloppy abstract theory, self-contradictory, complicated, incoherent, with overlapping categories (rather than mutually exclusive ones), with unclear and equivocal definitions. Its first loyalty is to include all the facts somewhere within its jurisdiction, even if this makes for sloppiness.
A good abstract theory stresses rather the simplifying and neatening function of science.
In other words, we see exemplified also here in the realm of theory-making the twofold task of science. On the one hand it must describe and accept the "way things are", the actual world as it is, understandable or not, meaningful or not, explainable or not. Facts must come before theories. On the other hand it also presses steadily toward simplicity, unity, and elegance, toward condensed, succinct, and abstract formulas for describing the essence of reality, its skeletal structure, the ultimate to which it can be reduced [8-3]. Ultimately the good theory does both, or at least tries to. Or more accurately said, the good the orist does both and gets satisfactions from both kinds of success, especially if both can come simultaneously. Any scientific theory has not only system properties, which are the characteristics of a "good theory", but also empirical determinants. That is, it tries not only to be a good theory but also to be true as a description and organization of what exists. It is faithful to the nature of reality and tries to make it more graspable, essentially by simplifying and abstracting.
If this twofold nature of any scientific theory were fully accepted, we should have far less trouble with crude empirical theories like psychoanalysis. The Freudian system is primarily a description of many experiences. It is far from being a "formal" or elegant theory. But the fact that it is not "formal" or "hypothetico-deductive" is distinctly secondary to the fact that it describes systematically and correctly a multitude of clinical experiences. First one should ask how accurate and how true to experience it is rather than how elegant and how abstracted it is. Most qualified people - that is, with the proper kind of experience and training-would agree, I think, that Freud's set of clinical descriptions is mostly veridical, i.e., that his collection of "facts" is largely true. This is so even though certain of his specific efforts at grand theorizing and at constructing a "system" can be argued with or rejected.
A scientist's first duty, then, is to describe the facts. If these conflict with the demand for a "good system", then out with the system. Systematizing and theorizing come after the facts. Or, to avoid ruminating over what a fact is, let us say that the first task of the scientist is to experience truly that which exists. It is amazing how often this truism gets lost.
Much confusion in the world of science could be bypassed by realizing that "system properties", i.e., the properties that inhere in theoretical, abstract structures of thought, apply only to the simplifying direction of scientific thought. They do not apply to the world of comprehensive experience, in which the only scientific requirement is to accept what exists. Whether experience is meaningful or not, mysterious or not, illogical or contradictory simply does not matter in the realm of experience. Nor is it required that experience be structured, organized, measured, weighed, or aligned in any way to other experiences. The ideal pole here is the innocent and fully concentrated experiencing of the suchness of the experience. Any other process or activity can only detract from the full reality of the experience and therefore constitutes a kind of interference with the perception of this kind of truth.
The ideal model of a theoretical or abstract system is a mathematical or logical system like Euclid's geometry, or better for our purposes, the Lobachevski geometry or one of the other non-Euclidean geometries because they are more independent of reality, i.e., of nonsystem determinants. Here apart from truth, reality, or veridicality we can talk about a theory being a "good" theory because it is internally consistent, it covers everything, it is parsimonious, economical, condensed, and "elegant". The more abstract it is, the better theory it is. Each variable or separable aspect of the theory has a name and just this name, and nothing else has this name. Furthermore it is definable. One can say exactly what it is and what it is not. Its perfection consists in the most fully abstracted inclusion of everything in the system in a single mathematical formula. Each statement or formula or equation has a single meaning and can have no other (unlike a figure of speech or a painting), and it conveys this and only this same meaning to each onlooker. The good theory is obviously a generalization. That is, it is a way of classifying, organizing, structuring, simplifying huge numbers of separate instances, even infinite numbers of them. It does not refer to any one experience or to any one thing or object but to categories or kinds of things or experiences.
This can be a game in itself and has been used often enough precisely as an intellectual exercise having nothing whatsoever to do with reality. One could manufacture a theory to cover some class of objects or happenings or some imaginary world, starting with completely arbitrary definitions, going on to completely arbitrary operations, and then playing the game of generating deductions from them. It is in this kind of system that many of our "scientific" words and concepts belong, "Definition" and especially "exact or rigorous definition" is of the world of abstractions, i.e., it is a system property. It is completely irrelevant to experienced suchness. It just doesn't apply. An experience of redness or of pain is its own definition, i.e., its own felt quality or suchness. It is what it is. It is itself. So ultimately is any process of classifying that is always a reference to something beyond the suchness of an experience. Indeed, this holds true for any abstracting process whatsoever, which by definition is a cutting into the suchness of an experience, taking part of it and throwing the rest away. In contrast the fullest savoring of an experience discards nothing but takes it all in.
So for the concepts "law" and "order" - these, too, are system properties, as are also "prediction" and "control". Any "reduction" is a happening within a theoretical system.
Long ago I learned from my artist-wife of her irritation with some of my scientist's obsessional classifying ways. For example, I asked always, in a kind of conversational tic, for the name of the bird or the flower or the tree that I admired. It was as if I were not content to admire and to enjoy but also had to do something intellectual about it. And often that "something intellectual" substituted for or displaced altogether the drinking in and contemplative enjoyment of "the way things are". This process of classifying in lieu of real perceiving and experiencing I call "rubricizing" (38) , which means the pathologizing of the "normal" or "healthy" effort to organize and unify a truly experienced world.
The reader may perhaps profit from my mistakes. I saw myself sometimes "rubricizing" in the art gallery as well, looking first at the name plate rather than the painting, and again not really perceiving but rather classifying, e.g., "Oh yes! a Renoir, quite typical, nothing unusual or startling, easily recognizable, nothing to attract attention, no need to study it (since I already "know" it), no novelty here, what's next?" And once, when I looked first at a most beautiful drawing - really looked and really enjoyed - I was startled to find out later that it was by Gainsborough - of all unfashionable people! I think that had I first looked at the name, I might not have really seen the drawing because of the a priori classification and filing system I carried in my head and in which I had already decided that Gainsborough gave me no pleasure and wasn't worth looking at.
I learned also, in a well-remembered illumination, that a robin or a bluejay is a most beautiful and miraculous thing, as all birds are. Even common ones are just as beautiful as the rare birds. The judgment of commonness is outside the experience itself and has nothing to do with its own nature. Such a judgment can be a way of dismissing the experience, a way of not paying attention to it. That is, it can be a way of blinding ourselves. Any sunset or oak tree or baby or pretty girl is a fantastic and unbelievable, unassimilable miracle if seen for the first time, or if seen as if for the first time (or as if for the last time), as a good artist sees or as any good experiencer sees. This fresh and defamiliarized experiencing becomes easy for any person as soon as he has sense enough to realize that it is more fun to live in a world of miracles than in a world of filing cabinets and that a familiar miracle is still a miracle.
The pertinent (and sententious) moral for both the lay knower and the scientist knower is that not fully experiencing is a form of blindness that no would-be scientist can afford. Not only does this maneuver deprive him of many of the joys of science, but it threatens to make him a poor scientist. Another blessing that came to me from insight into my rubricizing is that I did not have to oppose "experiencing" to "organizing-integrating" nor the esthetic to the scientific way. I learned that "scientific knowledge" actually enriched my experiencing rather than impoverishing it, if only I didn't use it as a substitute for experiencing. The knowledgeable experiencer can often be a better enjoyer than the ignorant experiencer, if we accept the formula "First look, and then know". We can now add to it, "and then look again", and we will see how much better cognizing becomes, how much more enjoyable, how much richer, how much more mysterious and awesome.
Fortunately "real experiencing" is so often enjoyable and even rapturous, if it is holistic enough, i.e., cosmic and mystical enough. It is often "enjoyable" even when it is also painful and sad. At any rate, by comparison with mere rubricizing, it is more often enjoyable. Rubricizing, i.e., shuffling, classifying, and filing the nonexperienced, is a thin and bloodless activity, rarely happy or enjoyable except at a low level in the hierarchy of pleasures. At best it is a kind of "relief" rather than a kind of positive enjoyment. To fall into this mode of "knowing" is, then, not only a way of being blind but also a way of being unhappy.