Why life is so hard and that

Introduction

Schumacher’s Guide for the Perplexed (1977) diagnoses, and offers a solution to, the age old question: ‘What am I supposed to do with my life?’ Schumacher offers a novel and complex worldview that has been influential in the formation of ‘systems thinking’. In this book, he attempts to carve out a place for the wisdom of faith in our ‘philosophical map’ of the world. Whilst the question of how to live a good life goes back at least to Aristotle, Schumacher, writing in 1977, felt that cultural developments peculiar to the modern age threatened to render it unsolvable. Schumacher believed that the industrial revolution, and the consequent march of modernity, had lent almost unilateral authority to the institution of science. He also believed that the methodology of science, with its insistence on counting only the clearly visible, measurable things in its ‘maps of meaning’, was threatening to destroy the wisdom of faith by gaining a monopoly on credible paths to knowledge. Wisdom - the ability to use one’s faculties to judiciously weigh values against one another - has long been thought to play a role in answering the question of the good life, but that the totalising impulse of the scientific method threatened to push it out. Schumacher felt that this was problematic because it made humans blind to key elements of their experience. Humans, unable to properly cultivate all of their faculties, would find certain elements of their experience ‘invisible’ and thus unintelligible. This would stop us from bringing all our faculties into ratio, and thus prevent us from realising the ‘higher mind’ supposed to facilitate ‘true’ humanity. If those last two paragraphs made your head spin, you’re not alone. Schumacher’s goal in this book is to argue for the necessity of faith within a science-dominated worldview, and without a proper understanding of the principles his argument is based on, this easily threatens to collapse back into mysticism. So, if you’re interested in knowing how to live, and want to know why Schumacher thought science was such a barrier to solving this question, then read on. In what follows, I attempt to explain as simply as possible (and as far as I understand it) Schumacher’s diagnosis of, and solution to, the problem of how to live, and then to lay out the system of thinking supporting it. Some time in the future, we’ll do a critical analysis, but for now, let’s begin.

S1.1 Diagnosis: The Specific Problem

Let’s look first at Schumacher’s diagnosis of the problem. He thinks this is a problem we’ve always faced, but which modern conditions pose in a new and particularly harsh form. Schumacher argues that there is one fundamental problem for man, which the peculiar conditions of the modern age render us ill-equipped to solve. This is the question: ‘What am I supposed to do with my life?’ Traditionally, we have turned to religion and spirituality in order to answer that question. With its emphasis on faith, Schumacher thought that religion enabled us to believe in the reality of things we couldn’t quite see, but which we no less felt were there. What sorts of things are these? One key category offered by Schumacher is abstract values: things like justice, obligation and fraternity, purpose or holiness. It was on the grounds of religious faith that we established the reality of these values in a society that increasingly sought explanations to back up our beliefs in things. As science rose to power throughout the latter half of the last millennium, it began to cast more and more doubt on the validity of religious truths. It did this by insisting on the supremacy of its own ‘rationalist’ methodology. Schumacher thinks this is a problem because the scientific methodology can only ‘see’ a very small part of the world - the external, visible world. However, as the institution of science has grown in power, it has begun to insist that its methodology reveals all that there is, to claim that anything not visible to the scientific method is not real at all. This is a big problem for Schumacher because he believes that we rely on ‘invisible truths’ in order to know how to live the good life; so if science infects all of our thought with its methodology, then we’ll lose our ability to see these truths. As Scumacher is keen to point out, this infection is based on a trick: science denies the validity of faith whilst simultaneously demanding total faith in its ‘invisible’ methods. By simultaneously demanding and denying faith in its methods, the scientific method loses the ability to admit entities which it can’t easily measure. For Schumacher, this means that science loses the ability to talk in the ‘vertical dimension’: to compare values and properties in terms of their being ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ than each other, rather than in terms of quantity. How does this take place? In order to see this, we’ll have to understand the scientific commitment to the rationalist method, and its attendant insistence on admitting the existence of only those entities that can be demonstrated to correlate with clear and distinct, externally perceptible phenomena.

S1.2 Faith in the scientific method: Descartes’ Clear and Distinct Perceptions

The scientific method really kicked off with Descartes(1632-1704). Descartes wanted to get rid of as much error as possible in his ‘philosophical map’ of the world. In order to do this, he decided that only those perceptions that could be known ‘clearly and distinctly’ could be admitted. Limiting our ontology to ‘clear and distinct perceptions’ has empowered our manipulative science (the sort of science that allows us to carry out ‘technological fixes’), but it has also created a problem because it has denied us the tools to admit essential, but nonetheless unclear-and-indistinct, perceptions into our theories. As rationalism became popular doctrine, it became harder to affirm the reality of values that couldn’t be measured. Even if we could measure loyalty, without the ‘vertical dimension’ we lose the ability to compare values according to some abstract standard. The scientific method can only measure good in terms of pleasure or utility. Hence it reduces goodness to its ‘base’ (either its animal or its mechanistic) elements. Even when we can ‘measure’ loyalty and faith, we can only compare them in terms of the pleasure or utility they brought about. Schumacher thinks this is a problem because it reduces these values to their base elements and so stops us from properly appreciating them. The highest goal for man, he thinks, is to appreciate ends in themselves, but the scientific method only allows us to see values like loyalty or faith as means to utilitarian ends. It is for this reason, he thinks, that the totalising impulse of science has rendered us ill-equipped to solve the problem of how to live. The force of Schumacher’s claim is hard to see from within the scientific mind. Doesn’t science tell us, after all, that everything can be reduced to the physical? If that was the case, why should it matter that we choose to operate at that level, rather than at any ‘higher’ one? For Schumacher, it matters because reductionism is false. Schumacher believes that the world and mind are split into hierarchical levels, each of which has power over and above the levels below it. It is in the context of this metaphysical system that the problematic nature of science can be seen. Hence, we need to understand it.

S2.1 The Abstract Problem

Schumacher thinks that we need to believe in the reality of certain invisible things, or invisibilia, in order to solve the problem of how to live in the world. According to his worldview, there are four distinct fields of knowledge available to humans, and it is only by cultivating knowledge in each of these that we can properly ‘rationalise’ our minds and attain to ‘higher mind’. Unpacking this last claim will require diving deeper into Schumacher’s ontology, which we’ll do in a bit, so for now let’s just focus on the idea that we need to believe in invisible things if we want to know how to live in the world. Why? For Schumacher, solving the problem of how to live requires gaining knowledge in four key areas:

1. the world;

2. man;

3. his means of learning about or ‘grasping’ the world;

4. what it means to ‘live’ in this world.

This we do by means of our faculties. Some of these faculties are ‘higher’ and some are ‘lower’. By ‘higher’, Schumacher means ‘more inner’: the ‘more inner’ the faculty is, the more control the organism has over his environment. Our external senses allow us to grasp the world, and are in this sense ‘low’. Our other ‘inner’ senses, variously, allow us to grasp the other four aspects of the world: ourselves, how we relate to the world, and the pursuits to which we are supposed to devote our time. In order to do this, we must cultivate our inner senses, in order to gain understanding in the four fields of knowledge. Schumacher thinks that the human organism is made up of four bodies: the material, the astral, the etheric and the ego. Each of these, we will see later, correlates with the four rungs of hierarchy in the chain of being. The ‘four fields’ are as follows:

1. My inner self

2. Myself as viewed by other people

3. The inner worlds of other people

4. The world of external objects.

Fields 1 and 4 are visible, and they are probably the ones you are most familiar with. They are your inner self and the external world. Fields 2 and 3 are invisible, however, and so special attention has to be given to the cultivation of knowledge thereof. We have to learn how others view us and how to view the insides of other people, and this involves learning to understand ourselves and the relations we stand in to others. Now the problem should be apparent: science admits of no methods for learning about the inner worlds of other people or how other people view you. Consequently, in a world that cannot admit the reality of values such as loyalty and trust (except by means of a proxy external measure), owing to its preoccupation with ‘scientific’ thinking, there is no credible source to which we can look for a guide on how to live. Only by unseating the predominance of science in our own minds can we cultivate an internal rationality, based on a proper appreciation of all four fields of knowledge, and so learn to live effectively in the world. For Schumacher, failing to develop all of our faculties prevents us from allowing our minds to rationalise, and hence prevents us from realising ‘higher mind’. This is important for him because he believes it is ‘higher mind’ which allows an organism to fulfil its function.

S2.2. Schumacher’s Map

We can only understand how science prevents full realisation by relating this picture of the world to Schumacher’s natural hierarchy. Schumacher thinks that we are humans on top of animals on top of plants on top of minerals, and as such believes that we have faculties appropriate to each of these levels of being. Only by cultivating our ‘highest’ faculties can we become fully human, but science, when it totalises, prevents us from cultivating these faculties by simplifying the problem and doing the work for us. Schumacher sees the world as being comprised of four levels - mineral, vegetable, animal, human. He argues that each level is distinguished from the one below it by its possessing a faculty not possessed by that other. This faculty makes it sensitive to some plane of existence ‘higher’ than itself. Schumacher defines the world as follows:

• mineral = m

• plant = m + x

• animal = m + x + y

• human = m + x + y + z

At each step on the hierarchy a new property is introduced. Roughly, (x) is life, (y) is consciousness and (z) is self-awareness. Minerals, as far as we know, have no faculties. Plants are minerals with life, and this allows them to respond to light, wind and rain. Animals are plants that can respond more widely to the world because they can direct their movement, and humans are a special kind of animal because they can direct their directions. Plants respond to the world, animals respond to intentions about the world, and humans respond to intentions about intentions about the world. This puts Schumacher firmly in the ‘splitter’ camp concerning the differences between humans and other animals: in fact, he goes as far as to say that it is precisely because of our differences to animals that we are able to realise our true humanity. It is easy to see the intuitive logic of this: sand gets blown in the wind, a plant bends and strengthens its roots, an ape seeks shelter, a human goes kite-surfing. But by failing to exercise these higher faculties - particularly the uniquely human faculty of self-awareness- we slip back down to the level of animals. This poses the scientific problem in a particularly harsh form. Schumacher says that science works by reducing things to levels at which they can predict and control their behaviour. This reduction has the effect of rendering inert or killing the levels above the one it is reduced to. Physics and chemistry deal with the mineral level. Biology deals with life, psychology with consciousness, but the science of self-awareness has until very recently not been forthcoming. This would all be fine if it wasn’t for the side effect: that when we treat an mxy as an m, we actually reduce it to that level. So when we treat an mxyz as an mxy, which our current control paradigm systematically does, we cut them off from their consciousness and render them ‘lower’, that is, place their locus of control further outside themselves. Science does a disservice to us, then, by pretending that the simplifying assumptions it makes about the world, which make technological or manipulative science possible, are factual claims about the world, since this misrepresentation prevents us from seeing ourselves as we truly are - as more than mineral, vegetable, or even animal things.

The crucial aspect of this ontology is as follows: that at any level mxyz, it is precisely by aiming at the level above it that it best fulfils its function. I’m not sure what sense it makes to say that a mineral is aimed at life. But the idea that a vegetable is aimed at consciousness is intelligible: it is a nascent form of the ability to go about the world in pursuit of stimuli, if only you could uproot yourself. And the idea that an animal is aimed at self-consciousness is equally sensible: going around the world having its behaviour directed effectively, willing in a restricted sense. It is equally unclear what’s going on at the top of the hierarchy: does Schumacher think we start off as lower than animals, or as animals? Either way, the level above human mind is that inscribed by ‘the way’: the essential spiritual truth embodied across all religion and time. We might think that spirituality is an old fad, and that perfecting our inner selves is unimportant now that the juggernaut of science is up and running. Schumacher, however, thinks that the failure to cultivate personal wisdom manifests in failures of collective decision making and problem solving. To make sense of this, he introduces a distinction. He says that the world is made up of ‘convergent’ and ‘divergent’ problems. Science, he says, encourages us to treat divergent problems as convergent, thus multiplying our difficulties and threatening our future survival.

2.2. Convergent vs divergent problems

According to Schumacher, our failures in the world are readily explainable. We have cultivated science for manipulation (SFM) at the expense of science for understanding (SFU). SFM requires reducing entities to their most inert level; SFU requires understanding them in their totality (make more precise). Because of our preoccupation with SFM, we have created lots of specialist knowledge and solved lots of convergent problems. However, this is a problem because the world is actually mainly comprised of divergent problems, for which we need fully-connected-up higher mind to solve. So what is the difference between convergent and divergent problems? The difference, for Schumacher, resides in the relation between the minds working on the problem and the possible solution. A convergent problem is one in which all minds over time converge on the same solution. He gives as a paradigm example the bicycle: the bicycle simply is the most efficient solution to the problem of transport and many different minds separately invented it. However, the bicycle is just a smaller instance of a divergent problem: the problem of how to optimally solve the transport problem for human beings. A divergent problem, then, is one in which great minds working on the same problem come up with different and often opposing solutions. Schumacher gives education as a paradigm divergent problem. Asked to solve the problem of how best to educate, experts will disagree: some will see education as the task of passing information from knowledgeable to ignorant, and so see authority as the guiding principle ensuring smooth passage. Others, seeing education as the cultivation of various talents within children, sees the facilitation of a supportive environment as the order of the day, and so see freedom as their primary value. Because the scientific method has no way of choosing between these values - of deciding which is best - (although we should think about whether this is still true today) a higher faculty of self-conscious discrimination is required to solve the problem. Wisdom is required of us as it was King Solomon, to ascertain how best to balance the competing and apparently equivalent demands. It requires wisdom to see that true freedom requires some degree of authority and that authority creates internal barriers to learning if exercised injudiciously. However, this balancing of values has no easy analogue in the scientific method: it seems more an act of personal reason or internal intuition, which we cannot reduce to the scientific because we cannot render it visible or inert. If we put all our trust in science, then, we fail to cultivate our wisdom, and so deprive ourselves of the ability to solve divergent problems. In order to do that, we have to develop valid methods to independently investigate the internal worlds of other people. Doing that will enable us to understand the reality which our divergent problems are trying to rationalise, but it requires engaging all four faculties and thus bringing online the ‘higher mind’, which is ‘the Way’, and which exists at a level above our perfect comprehension. The scientific method only solves convergent problems and so multiplies our difficulties. Our exclusive focus on science for manipulation has had 3 distinct consequences: it has led us to turn away from philosophical questions; it reduces the world to the undoubtable I and the undoubtable external world, making it seem empty, meaningless and dead; and as a result, the higher powers of man, slipping into disuse, atrophy and disappear. So, if we want to live well in the world, both individually and socially, we have to cultivate knowledge practices adequate to understanding our real place in the world. Such cultivation, Schumacher argues, is impossible without the admission of invisibilia into our philosophical map of meaning.

Conclusion

The best evidence of the problematicity of faith in science comes from our cultural preoccupation with technological fixes. We hold out hope for new technologies to solve moral problems (‘don’t worry about the suffering of animals, we’ll be able to 3D print meat soon!’), but this means that we live unsustainable and unrewarding lives. So the main takeaway is that science is great, but we shouldn’t think it can fix all our problems, especially as we watch the world burn. Fortunately, we don’t have to start from scratch: many knowledge practices already exist, and there is a fairly wide consensus on the goal. Schumacher says that if we want to realise our higher minds, there are a few things we need to do:

• Cultivate empathy for others. By introspection, we can see ourselves as a process, rather than an object, and thus be kinder to ourselves. This allows us to be kinder to others. Avoid criticising yourself or setting standards.

• Inherit, individuate, die. Schumacher says that life for man is simple: inherit the ‘truths’ of authority, enjoy believing them, then challenge them, then allow your concept of self to ‘die’ so that you can become truly part of the world.

• Meditate and do yoga. Meditation facilitates introspection. Yoga, similarly, has been called the ‘applied psychology of religion’.

• Learn the difference between directed and captured attention, and learn how to direct it.

• Learn to see yourself how others see you, in order to keep your ego in check (and learn to identify with all four of your bodies, not just the ego).

• Cultivate wisdom so that you can learn how to weigh values against each other and so solve divergent problems, rather than multiplying convergent ones.

Lots to take in here. What do you think about any of this? Do you share Schumacher’s skepticism as to the total power of science? Have new developments undermined his idea that science is blind to fields beyond the external world? And when living like an animal is so easy, is a book like this ever going to make people want to change?

Let me know what you think and i’ll see you in a bit. Happy 4/20!