Historically science first concerned itself with physical impersonal, inanimate things - planets, falling objects - and with equally impersonal mathematics. It went on to study living things in the same spirit, and finally about a century ago it deliberately brought the human being into the laboratory to study him in the same ways that had already proved so successful. He was to be studied as an object dispassionately, neutrally, quantitatively, in controlled experimental situations. The choice of "problem" tended to be whatever was susceptible to handling in this way. (Of course, at the same time an entirely different kind of psychology was evolving among psychiatrists in the clinic, out of an entirely different tradition and with different laws, rules, and methods).
The "scientific" study of the human being was simply a more difficult, more exasperating application of the methodology of physics, astronomy, biology, etc., to an irritatingly unsuitable object.
He was a special case, so to speak, a peripheral example on the edge of impersonal scientific method. I propose that instead of this impersonal centering point we take the human person as the starting or centering point. Let us try to take knowledge of the person as the model case from which to create paradigms or models of methodology, conceptualization, and Weltanschauung, of philosophy and epistemology.
What are the consequences (for the moment) of taking as the ultimate bit of knowledge that which occurs in the I-Thou, interpersonal, Agapean-love relationships between two people? Let us think of this knowledge as "normal", "basic", routine, as our basic measuring stick to judge how "knowledgy" any bit of knowledge is. Examples, not always reciprocal, are a friend knowing a friend, two persons loving each other, a parent knowing a child, or a child knowing a parent, a brother knowing a brother, a therapist knowing a patient, etc. In such relationships it is characteristic that the knower is involved with what he knows. He is not distant; he is close. He is not cool about it; he is warm. He is not unemotional; he is emotional. He has empathy, intuition for the object of knowledge, i.e., he feels identified with it, the same as it, to some degree and in some manner identical with it. He cares.
The good mother can often communicate better with her child than pediatricians or psychologists can. If these doctors have any sense, they use her as an interpreter or translator, and often enough they ask, "What is he trying to say?" Long time friends, especially married ones, understand each other, predict and communicate with each other in ways totally mysterious to spectators.
The ultimate limit, the completion toward which this kind of interpersonal knowledge moves, is through intimacy to the mystical fusion in which the two people become one in a phenomenological way that has been best described by mystics, Zen Buddhists, peak experiencers, lovers, estheticians, etc. In this experience of fusion a knowing of the other comes about throughb e c o m i n g the other, i.e., it becomes experiential knowledge from within. I know it because I know myself, and It has now become part of myself. Fusion with the object of knowledge permits experiential knowledge. And since experiential knowledge is the best kind of knowledge for many human purposes, a good mode of cognizing an object is to move toward fusion with it. And certainly since a good move toward fusion with anyone is to care for him and even to love him, we wind up with a "law" of learning and cognizing: Do you want to know? Then care!
Less extreme than mystical fusion is the therapeutic growth relationship. I confine myself here to all the insight-uncovering, Taoistic, nondirective therapies, e.g., Freud, Rogers, existential therapy. Much has been written about transference, encounter, unconditional positive regard, and the like, but all have in common the explicit awareness of the necessity of a particular kind of relationship that dispels fear, that permits the one receiving therapy to see himself more truly and thus gives him control over self-approved and self-disapproved aspects of himself.
Let us now consider this therapeutic and growth relationship primarily as a method for acquiring knowledge. And then let us contrast this cognitive tool with a microscope or a telescope:
1.A. Involves a split between subject and object, the so-called "Cartesian split". This split and "distancing" are considered good, useful, necessary for the purpose.
1.B. Moves toward lessening this split and this "distancing" on the part of both therapist and patient, each in a different way but toward the same purpose of better understanding of the patient rather than of the therapist.
2.A. The ideal is perfect detachment of the spectator sort, perfect "othering" of each other. Not identified, disengaging, disentangling.
2.B. The ideal is fusion, melting, merging.
3.A. The observer is a stranger, an alien, a nonparticipant.
3.B. The observer is a participant-observer.
4.A. Less reafference and commerce-with. My view of a table, or of a sculpture. More alienation and less identification-with.
4.B. More reafference and commerce-with. A carpenter's view of the table that he has made. A sculptor's view of a sculpture. Less alienation and more identification-with.
5.A. Trying to be unrelated to avoid the relationship (in order to be able to be a neutral judge).
5.B. Trying to be related and more intimate.
6.A. Unawareness of and no use of split between experiencing ego and self-observing ego. No use of self-knowledge in the cognitive process.
6.B. Specific enhancement of the interplay between experiencing ego and self-observing ego and of their fruitful dependence and interdependence. Self-knowledge is an essential part of this cognitive process.
7.A. The nature and uniqueness of the observer is not a great problem. Any competent observer is as good as any other and will see the same truths.
7.B. The nature of the knower is a sine qua non of the nature of the known. Knowers are not easily interchangeable.
8.A. The observer is not seen as creating the truths in any important way. He discovers, witnesses, or perceives them.
8.B. The observer in part creates the truth by being what he is and who he is and by doing what he is doing.
9.A. Laissez-faire (uncaring) cognition.
9.B. Ultimately (Taoistic) non-interfering that emerges from caring.
10.A. I-It (Buber).
10.B. I-Thou (Buber).
11.A. More mental activity, theorizing, hypothesizing, guessing, classifying.
11.B. More receptivity, more willingness to experience purely before permitting secondary processes to take over.
12.A. Active attention, willed concentration. Purposefulness.
12.B. Free-floating attention, patience, waiting. Primary process, preconscious, unconscious.
13.A. Entirely conscious, rational, verbal.
13.B. Primary process, preconscious, unconscious, preverbal.
14.A. Spectator detachment, neutrality, and objectivity of non-involvement, noncaring of laissez faire. It doesn't make any difference what the intrinsic nature of the percept may be.
14.B. Detachment and objectivity of noninterference, of caring, enjoying, willingness to let the person be himself. Cognition of the being of the other (B-Cognition). No illusions about the person, realistic perceiving, nondenying, no need to improve the percept, no a priori demands upon it. Accepting its suchness. Keeping hands off because one loves the way it is, wants it to be itself, and doesn't want it to be other than it is.
15.A. The percept is perceived. The histological slide, the microscope, and the biologist all go their own way. They are divorced. Neither the microscope nor the slide falls in love with the biologist.
15.B. The perceived responds back. It is grateful for being understood. It demands to be properly perceived. It projects fantasies and hopes upon the perceiver. It gives a halo to the perceiver. The perceived loves the perceiver and may cling to him. Or the perceived may hate or be ambivalent about the perceiver. The person has something to say about the "cognitive tool". This in him can change the "cognizer" (counter-transference, etc.).
Knowing persons is complicated by the fact that so much of their motivational lives are interpersonal. The basic needs are satisfied or frustrated generally by other people. If you are trying to understand another person, it is better if he feels unthreatened with you, if he feels you accept, understand, and like him, perhaps even love him, if he feels that you respect him, and if he feels that you do not threaten his freedom to be himself. If on the other hand you dislike him or disrespect him, if you feel contempt or disapproval, if you look down on him, or if you "rubricize" him, i.e., if you refuse to see him as an individual (43, ch. 9), then the person will close off much of himself and refuse to let himself be seen. (This is on about the same principle that makes me show you the pictures of my children if you love children. If you do not like children, I will not want to show them to you.) He may even with secret malice deliberately give you wrong information. This happens often enough to ethnologists, psychotherapists, sociologists, public opinion pollers, child psychologists, and many others.
There is a large research literature to support such conclusions, e.g., on interviewing, on the techniques of psychotherapy, on ethnological practice, on public-opinion polling, on being understood, on interpersonal perception, on interrelations between the strong and the weak, etc. But offhand I don't remember that these research findings have been applied to the epistemological problem of "acquiring" reliable and veridical knowledge. I suspect that few people in these areas of research are aware of this particular application of their findings, or perhaps they are aware but are overawed by the implications. This is understandable. We have been taught and re-taught thatt h e path to reliable knowledge is always the same whether you wish to study molecules or men. And now we are being told that maybe there are different paths for these two kinds of study. Occasionally there is even an implication that maybe the technique for studying humans may be generalized one day so as to include the study of molecules, so that we may even wind up again with a monistic epistemology but with a different centering point!
Something of this sort, this acquiring of knowledge through an interpersonal relationship of intimacy between knower and known, also happens, perhaps in lesser degree, in other areas of science. Ethology comes to mind at once. But all forms of knowledge derived "clinically" by physicians share some of these characteristics also. So does social anthropology. So do many branches of sociology, political science, economics, history, and possibly all the social sciences. Perhaps also we could add all or many of the linguistic sciences.
But I wish to make a more important point. It is not necessary to "choose up sides" or to vote a straight party ticket. It is true that we could make a hierarchy of sciences or of all areas of knowledge, ranging from greatest to least involvement in a relationship. But I wish to raise the more radical question: can all the sciences, all knowledge be conceptualized as a resultant of a loving or caring interrelationship between knower and known? What would be the advantages to us of setting this epistemology alongside the one that now reigns in "objective science"? Can we simultaneously use both?
My own feeling is that we can and should use both epistemologies as the situation demands. I do not see them as contradictory but as enriching each other. There is no reason not to include both weapons in the armory of any knower who wants to know anything . We must entertain the possibility that even the astronomer or geologist or chemist might be able to perceive more wholly even that which is least personal. I mean the conscious, verbalized, formulated possibility, because I am already convinced that some astronomers and some chemists, etc. secretly relate to their "problems" in ways analogous to those of lovers to their loved ones.
The meaning of "love for" the object to be known, understood, and appreciated has to be seen more clearly in its complexities. At the least it must mean "interest in" the object of study. It is difficult to see or hear that which is totally uninteresting or boring. It is also difficult to think about it, to remember it, to keep oneself at the job, to stick to it. All the defensive and resistive powers of the person can be mobilized into action when one is forced by some external pressure to study something totally uninteresting. One forgets, one thinks of other things, the mind wanders, fatigue sets in, intelligence seems to diminish. In a word, one is likely to do a poor job unless one is minimally interested in the task and drawn to it. At least a little passion (or libidinizing) seems to be needed.
True, it is possible to be dutiful, and even a child will do many jobs in school without interest or with only external interest in order to please the teacher. But such children bring up other problems, too profound to go into here, of training of the character, of the enriching of autonomy, of the dangers of mere docility. I mention them because I do not wish to fall into the black-white dichotomy that is so easy here. In any case there is little question about the simple statement that for the best learning, perceiving, understanding, and remembering of a person, it is desirable to be interested, involved, to have "a little bit of love", to be at least a little fascinated and drawn.
So far as the scientist is concerned, he knows that this is true for him if only because scientific study especially needs patience, stubbornness, stick-to-it-iveness, unswerving concentration on the task, the fortitude to overcome inevitable disappointments, etc. This is a minimal statement. What is really needed for long-time scientific success is passion, fascination, obsession. The fruitful scientist is the one who talks about his "problem" in about the same spirit as he does about the woman he loves, as an end rather than as a means to other ends. Rising above all distractions and becoming lost in his work means that he is not divided. All his intelligence is available for the one purpose that he is entirely given to. He gives it everything he's got. [11-1]
This can be meaningfully called an act of love, and there are certain definite advantages in such a phrasing. Similarly it is meaningful to expect better work from the one who loves his work and his problem. This is why I think it will help us, even as scientists in the strictest sense, to study carefully the paradigm of "knowledge through love" that we can see most purely in lovers or in the parent-child relationship or, suitably translated into naturalistic terms, in theological and mystical literature.
The picture of truth and of reality that we have inherited from the classical science of the impersonal is that it is "out there", perfect, complete, hidden but uncoverable. In the earlier versions the observer simply observed. In later versions it was understood that the observer had spectacles that distorted but which could never be removed. Most recently physicists and psychologists have learned that the act of observation is itself a shaper, a changer, an intruder into the phenomenon being observed. In a word, the observer partly creates the reality, i.e., the truth. Reality seems to be a kind of alloy of the perceiver and the perceived, a sort of mutual product, a transaction. For instance, see the many researches with reafference and with the effects of observer-expectation, to mention only two well-known lines of experimentation.
I mean here more than the "personal equation" of the astronomer or even Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy. I refer rather to the impossibility of finding out what, for example, a preliterate culture would "really" be like, undistorted by the observing ethnologist. Or to take an example I was recently involved in, how can you subtract the admittedly dampening effect of an outside observer from the "true" behavior of a store-front religious group? There was a story, probably apocryphal, that I heard during my college days, of a group of fraternity boys who agreed, for fun, to rush a homely, awkward wallflower of a girl. The story was that the rushing changed her into a confidently feminine and lovely girl, so that the boys fell in love with their own creation.
I quote from David L. Watson's The Study of Human Nature: 'When two men are arguing, I do not find that the truth of the matter always rests with the more dispassionate participant. Passion may enhance the disputants' powers of expression and thus lead, in the long run, to deeper regions of truth" (p. 187-188). "It is beyond question that certain kinds of emotion entirely distort our judgment. But I would ask the rationalist extremists: would we have any science, if truth did not inspire passionate devotion in the searcher?" (p. 188).
This is a characteristic expression of the rising discontent among psychologists with the old and widely held notion that emotions are only disrupting, that they are the enemy of true perception and good judgment, that they are the opposite of sagacity and are and must be mutually excluding of truth. A humanistic approach to science generates a different attitude, i.e., that emotion can be synergic with cognition, and a help in truth-finding.
These love relationships that can go over into the mystic experience of fusion with the world give us our end point( beyond knowledge through love for the object) of knowledge by fusion with the object, by becoming one with it. This can then be considered for theoretical purposes to become experiential knowledge, knowledge from within, by being what we are knowing. At least this is the ideal limit to which such knowledge approaches or tries to approach.
This is not so far-out as it may sound. A respectable way of studying schizophrenia is to try to be schizophrenic temporarily by the use of appropriate chemicals, or to have been schizophrenic and recovered. One can then more easily identify with the schizophrenic. One of the most loved and respected of the neobehavioristic rat psychologists, Edward Tolman, admitted once in defiance of his own official theorizing that when he wanted to predict what a rat would do, he tried to identify with the rat, to feel like one, and then to ask himself, "Now what would I do?" Much of what we know about Communists has been taught us by reformed Communists, who can remember how it felt to be one. The same would be true for John Birchers, and I await eagerly such a retrospective account of how it felt to be a John Bircher.
Another kind of example, following the same paradigm in a different field, is that of the ethnologist. You can learn many facts about a tribe that you dislike or by whom you are disliked, but there are definite limits to what you can then get to know. In order to know your Indians rather than merely to know about them, you have to melt into the culture to some extent. If you "become" a Blackfoot Indian, then you can answer many questions simply by introspection.
Even at the impersonal extreme it is possible to differentiate the two feels of looking through a telescope. One can peep through the telescope at the moon, like a peeping Tom (spectator, outsider) peeping through a keyhole at the alien, the distant, the other, the far away (which we are not and never can be). Or you can sometimes forget yourself, get absorbed, fascinated, and be out there in the middle of what you are looking at,i n that world rather than outside it peering in. This can be likened to the difference between being a member of a family and being an orphan out in the dark cold street, wistfully looking in through the window at the warm family inside. Colin Wilson's books are full of examples of outsiders and wistful peepers (80).
Similarly one can be within the microscopic world, or one can be outside it, looking with your eye through the microscope at the slide that is an object out there. You can listen to organ music judiciously, calmly examining it to hear how good it is and whether it is worth the money you paid for the ticket. Or you can suddenly get caught up by it and become the music and feel it pulse through your insides, so that you are not in some other place. If you are dancing and the rhythm "gets you", you can slip over to being inside the rhythm. You can identify with the rhythm. You can become its willing instrument.
The term "scientific objectivity" has, in effect, been pre-empted by the physics-centered theorists of science and bent to the use of their mechanomorphic Weltanschauung . It was certainly necessary for astronomers and physicists to assert their freedom to see what was before their eyes rather than having truth determined a priori by the church or the state. This is the kernel of sense in the concept of "value-free science". But it is this generalization, uncritically accepted today by many, that has crippled so many human and social scientists.
Of course, these students are now willing to study other people's values, from which the investigator can presumably detach himself and which can be studied as unemotionally as the "values" of ants or trees. That is, they can be treated as "facts", and thus they can become amenable at once to "normal" treatment by all the methods and concepts of classical, impersonal science. But this is not the real issue.
The point of this kind of "scientific objectivity" is clear; it is to guard against the projection into the perceived of human or supernatural motives or emotions or preconceptions which are not "there" in fact and therefore should not be seen as being there. Observe that this necessary rule of science to "see only what is actually there" (which began as not seeing "God's design" or Aristotle's dicta or human purposes in inanimate objects or in animals) is today primarily an effort to guard against the projection of the scientists' own values or hopes or wishes.
Though this can never be done perfectly, it can yet be approached in degree. Normal scientific training and normal scientific methods are efforts to get closer and closer to this impossible terminus. There is no doubt that this effort does in fact succeed to an extent. The person we call a good scientist is marked by his greater ability to perceive that which he dislikes and by his great skepticism when he perceives something that he approves of.
The question is: how possible is this goal? What is the best way of perceiving something as it is, least contaminated by our own hopes, fears, wishes, goals? And most important: is there only one path to this goal? Is there another path to "objectivity", that is, to seeing things as they really are?
Classically, "scientific objectivity" has been most successfully achieved when its objects were most distant from human aspirations, hopes, and wishes. It is easy to feel uninvolved, detached, clear-eyed, and neutral if one is studying the nature of rocks or heat or electrical currents. One doesn't identify with a moon. One doesn't "care" about it as one does about one's child. It is easy to take the laissez-faire attitude with oxygen or hydrogen and to have noninterfering curiosity, to be Taoistically receptive, to let things be themselves. To be blunt about it, it is easy to be neutrally objective, fair, and just when you don't care about the outcome, when you can't identify or sympathize, when you neither love or hate.
But what happens with this framework of ideas and attitudes when we move over into the human and social realm, when we try to be objective about people we love or hate, about our loyalties or values, about our very selves? We are then no longer laissez-faire, impersonal, uninvolved, unidentified, without stakes. Accordingly it becomes far more difficult to be "laissez-faire objective" or "not-caring objective". Now there are new hazards.
In the effort to achieve "scientific", i.e., uninvolved, laissez-faire, don't-care objectivity, the anthropologist, for instance, may buy the whole package that he mistakenly ties to this kind of objectivity. He may become scientistic rather than scientific, may feel it necessary to drown his human feelings for the people he studies, may quantify whether necessary or not, and may wind up with accurate details and a false whole. (The best approach to reading in ethnology is still a discreet mix of technical monographs, the better travel reports, and the impressionistic writings of the more poetic and humanistic anthropologists).
Granted that not-caring objectivity can be enhanced to some extent by improved training; more important by far is the possibility of another kind of objectivity that comes from caring rather than from not caring. This is the kind which I have already described in various publications as a consequence of Being-Love, of peak experiences, of unitive perception, of self-actualization, of synergy, of Taoistic receptivity, of the "creative attitude", of Being-Cognition, and as one general aspect of a psychology of being, and that Nameche (56) has also analyzed fruitfully.
Briefly stated, my thesis is: if you love something or someone enough at the level of Being, then you can enjoy its actualization of itself, which means that you will not want to interfere with it, since you love it as it is in itself. You will then be able to perceive it in a noninterfering way, which means leaving it alone. This in turn means that you will be able to see it as is, uncontaminated by your selfish wishes, hopes, demands, anxieties, or preconceptions. Since you love it as it is in itself, neither will you be prone to judge it, use it, improve it, or in any other way to project your own values into it. This also tends to mean more concrete experiencing and witnessing; less abstracting, simplifying, organizing, or intellectual manipulation. Leaving it alone to be itself also implies a more holistic, global attitude and less active dissecting. It adds up to this: you may be fond enough of someone to dare to see him just as he is; if you love something the way it is, you won't change it. Therefore you may then see it (or him) as it is in its own nature, untouched, unspoiled, i.e., objectively. The greater your Being-Love of the person, the less your need to be blind.
Another aspect of this "caring objectivity" can be phrased in terms of transcendence. If objectivity includes among its meanings being able to see things as they are whether we like them or not, whether we approve of them or not, whether they are good or bad, then one becomes abler to achieve this standpoint the more one is able to transcend these distinctions.
This is difficult to do, but it is more or less possible in Being-Cognition, for instance, and in Being-Love, etc. It is also difficult to communicate, but since I have tried in other writings, I won't pursue it further here (see also 56).
To take only a single illustration, these two kinds of objectivity and their complementary quality are well exemplified in the undoubted advantages and the equally undoubted disadvantages of being an outsider. The Jew or the Negro has far more spectator objectivity about our society than has the insider. If you belong to the country club or the establishment, you are likely to take all its values for granted and not even notice them. This includes all the rationalizations, the denials, the official hypocrisies, etc. Just these the outsider (80) can see clearly and easily. There are therefore some truths that the spectator can see more easily than the experiencer, who is part of the reality to be cognized.
On the other hand, there is much evidence which I have already mentioned that in certain respects Negroes are better knowers of Negroes than whites are, etc. There is by now no need to repeat this.
Another fascinating set of research questions and hypotheses is generated also by the concept of "knowledge through Being-love". The ability to B-love is characteristic of a higher level of personal maturity. Therefore personal maturity is a precondition for this kind of perspicuity, and one way to improve this kind of knowing would be to improve the maturity of the knower. What could this imply for the education of scientists?