In my Religions, Values and Peak-Experiences I pointed out that both orthodox science and orthodox religion have been institutionalized and frozen into a mutually excluding dichotomy. This separation into Aristotelian a and not-a has been almost perfect, as if a line had been drawn between them in the way that Spain and Portugal once divided the new world between themselves by drawing a geographical line. Every question, every answer, every method, every jurisdiction, every task has been assigned to either one or the other, with practically no overlaps.
One consequence is that they are both pathologized, split into sickness, ripped apart into a crippled half-science and a crippled half-religion. This either-or split forces a kind of either-or choice between them, as if one were confronted with a two-party system in which there is no alternative to voting a straight ticket and choosing one means giving up the other altogether.
As a result of this forced either-or choice, the student who becomes a scientist automatically gives up a great deal of life, especially its richest portions. He is like a monk who is asked to enter a monastery and to make vows of renunciation (because orthodox science has defined out of its jurisdiction so many portions of the real human world).
The most important parceling out of jurisdictions is that science has nothing to do with values. Orthodox science has been defined as value-free, as having nothing to say about the ends, the goals, the purposes, the rewards, or the justifications of life. A common phrasing is "science can tell us nothing about why, only about how". Another is "science is not an ideology or an ethic or a value system; it cannot help us to choose between good and evil". The unavoidable implication is, then, that science is only an instrument, only a technology, to be used equally by either good men or by villains. The Nazi concentration camps are an instance. Another implication is that being a good scientist is compatible with being a good Nazi; one role exerts no intrinsic strain on the other. When the existentialists ask why we should not commit suicide, the orthodox scientist can only shrug his shoulders and say, "Why not?" (Just so we don't get confused here, notice that I am not talking about a priori "should" or "ought": organisms make a choice between life or death; they prefer life and hang on to it; but it cannot be said of oxygen or electromagnetic waves or gravitation that they have preferences in this same sense).
This situation is now even worse than it was during the Renaissance, because more recently all the value fields, all the humanities and all the arts, have been included in this world of nonscience, that is, of the unscientific. Science began originally as a determination to rely on one's own eyes instead of on the ancients or upon ecclesiastical authority or pure logic. That is, it was originally just a kind of looking for oneself rather than trusting anyone else's preconceived ideas. Nobody then said anything about science being value-free. This was a later accretion.
Orthodox science today attempts to be free not only of values but also of emotions. As youngsters would say, it tries to be "cool". The basic notions of detachment and objectivity, of precision, rigor, and quantification, of parsimony, and of lawfulness, all imply that emotion and emotional intensity are contaminants of cognition. The unquestioned assumption is that "cool" perceiving and neutral thinking are best for discovering any kind of scientific truth. As a matter of fact, many scientists are not even aware that there are other modes of cognition. An important by-product of this dichotomizing is the desacralizing of science, the banishment of all the experiences of transcendence from the realm of the respectably known and the respectably knowable, and the denial of a systematic place in science for awe, wonder, mystery, ecstasy, beauty, and peak experiences.
"For example a psychologist may describe a subject's thinking as paranoid but nevertheless . . . refrains from expressing judgments of value regarding such behavior. On the other hand, the philosopher, whose task it is to express value judgments, states whether or not paranoid thinking is good or bad, true or false, desirable or undesirable, etc. . . . This distinction delineates philosophy from all other sciences. Philosophers evaluate; they state whether a person, his behavior or character, is good or bad, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly; in fact, this is precisely the way Plato defined philosophy, namely, the study of the true, the good, the beautiful. Scientists refrain from evaluations since they consider the practice unscientific, and rightly so. . . . Only philosophers evaluate, while scientists describe facts as accurately as they possibly can". [12-1]
Obviously this statement needs many qualifications. The distinction is too simple. Far more subtle differentiations are necessary, even though we may accept the general tenor of the statement, i.e., that in general scientists do less evaluating than nonscientists and are perhaps also more concerned with description than nonscientists - although I doubt that you could convince an artist of this.
For one thing the whole scientific process is itself shot through with selectiveness, choice, and preference. We could even call it gambling if we wanted to, as well as good taste, judgment, and connoisseurship. No scientist is a mere camera eye or tape recorder. He is not indiscriminate in his activities. He doesn't do just anything. He works at problems that he characterizes as "important" or as "interesting", and he comes up with "elegant" or "beautiful" solutions. He does "pretty" experiments, and prefers "simpler" and "cleaner" results to confused or sloppy ones.
All these are value words, evaluating, selecting, preferring, implying a more desirable and a less desirable, not only in the strategy and tactics of the scientist but also in his motivations and goals. Polanyi (60) has set forth most convincingly the thesis that a scientist is at all times a gambler, a connoisseur, a man of good taste or bad taste, a man who makes acts of faith and leaps of commitment, a man of will, a responsible person, an active agent, a chooser and therefore a rejector.
All of these statements go double for the "good" scientist (as compared with the run-of-the-mill, average-to-poor scientist). That is, intelligence being held equal, the scientist we admire and value more highly and the one who is honored by his fellows and by the historians is even more characterizable as a man with good taste and good judgment, a man who has correct hunches, who trusts them and who can act courageously on them, a man who somehow can smell out the good problems, devise beautiful ways of putting them to the test, and can somehow come up with elegantly simple, true, and conclusive answers. The poor scientist doesn't know the difference between an important problem and an unimportant one, a good technique and a poor one, an elegant demonstration and a crude one. In a word, he doesn't know how to evaluate. He lacks good taste. And he does not have hunches that turn out to be correct. Or if he has them, they frighten him, and he turns away from them.
But beyond this insistence that choosing necessarily implies principles of choice, i.e., values, there is the even more obvious point that the whole enterprise of science is concerned with "Truth". That's what science is all about. Truth is considered intrinsically desirable, valuable, beautiful. And of course truth has always been counted among the ultimate values. That is to say, science is in the service of a value, and so are all scientists (9,10,11).
And if I wished I could involve other values in this discussion since it looks probable that the full, ultimate "Truth" is finally definable, only and altogether, by all the other ultimate values. That is, truth is ultimately beautiful, good, simple, comprehensive, perfect, unifying, alive, unique, necessary, final, just, orderly, effortless, self - sufficient, and amusing (44). If it is less than these, it is not yet the fullest degree and quality of truth.
But there are still other meanings for the statements about science being value-free or not value-free. For the psychologists one such issue is no longer in question. It is possible to study in fruitful ways the values of human beings. This is true in the most obvious way: e.g., we have the Allport-Vernon-Lindzey test for values which enables us to say crudely that a person prefers religious values, for instance, to political or esthetic ones. It is equally true, though less obvious, that the many studies of the food preferences of monkeys, for example, can be considered to be descriptions of what is valuable to the animal. So also for the free-choice and self-choice experiments that have been done in many areas. Any studies of choice or preference or selection may be considered to be, in a particular and useful sense, the study of values, either instrumental or final.
The crucial question to be asked is: can science discover the values by which men should live? I think it can, and I have advanced this thesis in various places, supporting it with whatever data I could muster (40, 43, 44, 46, 48, 50, 51). This support has been sufficient to convince me, but not yet more skeptical people. It had best be presented as a thesis, programmatic in nature, plausible enough to warrant attention but not solidly enough supported to be accepted as fact.
The data I turn to first are the accumulated experiences of dynamic psychotherapy, starting with Freud and continuing up to the present day in most therapies that have to do with discovering the identity, or the Real Self. I would prefer to call them all the "uncovering therapies" or Taoistic therapies in order to stress that they purport to uncover (more than to construct) the deepest self which has been covered over by bad habits, misconceptions, neuroticizing, etc. All these therapies agree in finding that this most real self partly consists of needs, wishes, impulses, and instinctlike desires. These may be called needs because they must be fulfilled or psychopathology results. As a matter of fact, the historical order of discovery was the other way about. Freud, Adler, Jung, and the rest agreed in this, that in their efforts to understand the origins of adult neurosis, they all wound up with biologically demanding needs violated or neglected early in life. Neurosis seemed to be in its essence a deficiency disease of the same sort that the nutritionists were discovering. And just as the latter, in a kind of reconstructive biology, could finally say, "We have a need for vitamin B'2", so also can psychotherapists say on the basis of the same kind of data that we have a need to be loved or a need for safety (50).
It is these needs, "instinctoid" in nature, that we can also think of as built-in values - values not only in the sense that the organism wants and seeks them but also in the sense that they are both good and necessary for the organism. And it is these values that are found, uncovered - recovered, perhaps we should say - in the course of psychotherapy or self-discovery. We may then regard these techniques of therapy and self-discovery as being also cognitive tools or scientific methods (in the sense that they are the best methods we have available today to uncover these particular kinds of data).
It is in this sense at least that I would maintain that science in the broadest sense can and does discover what human values are, what the human being needs in order to live a good and a happy life, what he needs in order to avoid illness, what is good for him and what is bad for him. Apparent discoveries of this sort seem already to exist in great number in all the medical and biological sciences, for instance. But here we have to be careful to distinguish. On the one hand, what the healthy human being chooses, prefers, and values out of his own deepest inner nature, is also most often good for him. On the other hand, physicians may have learned that aspirin is good for headaches, but we have no inborn yearning for aspirin, as we do have for love or for respect.
In an interview Ralph Ellison said of his work: "I feel that with my decision to devote myself to the novel I took on one of the responsibilities inherited by those who practice the craft in the U. S.: that of describing for all, that fragment of the huge diverse American experience which I know best, and which offers me the possibility of contributing not only to the growth of the literature but to the shaping of the culture as I should like it to be. The American novel is in this sense a conquest of the frontier; as it describes our experience, it creates it". [12-2]
This passage well expresses the motivational situation confronting thoughtful scientists as well as novelists. Certainly a main task, even a sine qua non for the scientist, is describing a portion of the world for all and contributing to the growth of the scientific literature. Up to this point one just does not ask "why". The scientist does it because he likes doing it, because it is "interesting", because it is fun or exciting, or because he can make an easier and more pleasant living this way than by driving a truck. So far, in effect, he is enjoying himself because he is enjoying himself, and since he supports himself and his family, people raise no objection even if they do not understand what he is doing or why he is doing it.
But observe that if we stop at this point, we cannot yet differentiate him from any other kind of worker who likes doing what he is doing because he likes doing it. For instance, a professional bridge player or a stamp collector or a television announcer or a model also may be doing what he wants to do and is earning a living.
The scientist normally tries to justify his calling not only to the society that supports and protects him but to himself as well, to his friends, to his family. He himself is ordinarily not satisfied with an explanation simply in terms of self-indulgence. He feels and he tries to show, however inarticulately, that his work is valuable beyond his personal pleasures. It has value in itself, for others, for the society, for mankind. And a fair proportion of scientists will tell you that they, too, are "shaping the culture as they would like it to be", i.e., they are Utopians. They have goals in mind that they consider intrinsically good, toward which their work moves. (Of course, this is true for some but not for all.) That is, they are enlisted in the service of a cause. They are not merely selfish.
There is another sense in which science and scientists are not value-free. They do see a difference between being a scientist and doing television commercials. They do feel virtuous, valuable, and superior. They do regard themselves as living a better life than, let us say, models. Science is good for something, and also it is valuable in itself. It is good in itself because it creates more truth, beauty, order, lawfulness, goodness, perfection, unity, etc., and it is certainly an honor to help build so awe-inspiring a structure. It is (or can be) good for something because it lengthens life and reduces disease and pain, makes life richer and fuller, reduces back-breaking labor, and could (in principle) make better human beings.
The justification that is used depends on the particular audience that is being persuaded, and the "level" of the justification certainly must be equivalent to the height of development to which the listener has attained. But some justification there usually is and has to be. Science as a human enterprise and as a social institution has goals, ends, ethics, morals, purposes - in a word, values - as Bronowski (9, 10, 11) has so conclusively and brilliantly demonstrated.