Modern Age - Summer 2014 - 38

MODERN AGE

abstractions, by definition, provide only a
partial look at the "durational flux" from
which they are abstracted. As Aron put
it, "The Spenglerian realist who asserts
that man is a beast of prey and urges him
to behave as such, ignores a whole side of
human nature."16 By insisting that concepts
are somehow "functionally united" in our
consciousness, or that profoundly different intellectual procedures are "bound in
existence," Aron and other classical realists
underscored the priority of living vitality
over conceptual abstraction and in so doing
transformed what naturalism had treated as
polar opposites-chance and necessity, for
example-into partial truths.
Prudence thus prefers dialectical methods
of reasoning to the linear causalities of scientific thought. The inner logic of practical
wisdom, Aron explained, "attempts not only
to consider each case in its concrete particularities, but also not to ignore any of the
arguments of principle and opportunity, to
forget neither the relation of forces nor the
wills of people."17 Morgenthau offered a similar assessment, but one with less of a moral
edge to it. "Wisdom," he declared, "is the
gift of intuition, and political wisdom is the
gift to grasp intuitively the quality of diverse
interests and power in the present and future
and the impact of different actions upon
them."18 In both statements, Aron and Morgenthau call for a more expansive method of
thinking, one that reckons with-and seeks
to reconcile-different modalities of experience. In fact, it was precisely because Polanyi
regarded the different modalities of experience as relative and not absolute (as Weber
did) that Aron was prompted to call him "a
man of reconciliation."
In recent years, philosophers have abandoned the search for a clear dividing line
between scientific and nonscientific knowledge. "Demarcation arguments," Martin
38

SUMMER 2014

Eger has declared, "have collapsed. Philosophers of science don't hold them anymore.
They may still enjoy acceptance in the popular world but that's a different world."19 Larry
Laudan offers a similar assessment. "If we
could stand on the side of reason," Laudan
writes, "we ought to drop terms like 'pseudoscience.' . . . They only do emotive work for
us."20 To many philosophers, the issue is not
whether a given theory or hypothesis is scientific but whether it is true. If that is indeed
the better question, then there may be more
room for "noumenal" knowledge in political
science than scientific naturalism currently
believes. And if Aron is correct on that score,
there may be more room for reconciliation
as well.

E

ven before social scientists had begun
to apply the experimental techniques of
the natural sciences to the study of human
behavior-a turn of mind that Morgenthau
and Niebuhr blamed squarely on Darwin-
advances in science and technology had
dramatically transformed the natural and
social worlds, and in Morgenthau's opinion, "radically changed man's experience
of himself."21 Science and technology have
developed many of the instruments vital to
totalitarian control and have thus contributed to the destruction of that inner realm
of human freedom whereby men and women
experience their autonomy and moral worth.
Under those conditions, Morgenthau wrote,
the individual becomes nothing more than
"the helpless object of these technological
developments and political possibilities. He
is reduced to shaking his fists in impotent
rage at those anonymous forces which control a goodly fraction of his life but which
he cannot control."22 Aron agreed. "We suffer from an excess of science," Aron wrote,
meaning that "men often appear to find
in the conquest of nature, not the satisfac-
Modern Age - Summer 2014

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