THE COLLECTED WORKS OF THORSTEIN VEBLEN: Business Theories, Economic Articles & Essays. Thorstein Veblen

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СКАЧАТЬ selection and mixing is carried out with a watchful regard to the mechanical character of the materials and without doubt that the given materials will respond in definite, empirically ascertained ways to the pressure brought on them by the potter’s hands, and without questioning the matter of fact that such and so much of manipulation will mix such and so much of tempering material with the given lot of clay. The clay is “as wax in her hands;” what comes of it is the product of her insight and proficiency. Still the pragmatic nature of all these materials viewed as distinct entities is never to be denied, and in those respects in which she does not creatively design, manipulate and construct the work of her hands, its putative self-sufficiency of existence, meaning and propensity goes on its own recognisances unshorn and inalienable.

      Technological efficiency rests on matter-of-fact knowledge, as contrasted with knowledge of the traits imputed to external objects in making acquaintance with them. Therefore every substantial advance in technological mastery necessarily adds something to this body of opaque fact, and with every such advance proportionably less of the behaviour of inanimate things will come to be construed in terms of an imputed workmanlike or teleological bent. At the same time the imputation of a teleological meaning or workmanlike bent to the external facts that are made use of is likely to take a more circumspect, ingenious and idealised form. Under the circumstances that condition an increasing technological mastery there is an ever-growing necessity to avoid conflict between the imputed traits of external objects and those facts of their behaviour that are constantly in evidence in their technological use. In so far, therefore, as a simple and immediate imputation of workmanlike self-direction is seen manifestly to traverse the facts of daily use its place will be supplied by more shadowy anthropomorphic agencies that are assumed to carry on their life and work in some degree of detachment from the material objects in question, and to these anthropomorphic agencies which so lie obscurely in the background of the observed facts will be assigned a larger and larger share of the required initiative and self-direction. For so alien to mankind, with its instinctive sense of workmanship, is the mutilation of brute creation into mere opaque matter-of-fact, and so indefeasibly does the “consciousness of kind” assert itself, that each successive renunciation of such an imputed bias of workmanship in concrete objects is sought to be redeemed by pushing the imputation farther into the background of observed phenomena and running their putative workmanlike bias in more consummately anthropomorphic terms. So an animistic conception³⁰ of things comes presently to supplement, and in part supplant, the more naive and immediate imputation of workmanship, leading up to farther and more elaborate myth-making; until in the course of elaboration and refinement there may emerge a monotheistic and providential Creator seated in an infinitely remote but ubiquitous space of four dimensions.

      This imputation of bias and initiative has doubtless lost ground among civilised communities, as contrasted with the matter-of-fact apprehension of things, so that where it once was the main body of knowledge it now is believed to live and move only within that margin of things not yet overtaken by matter-of-fact information, - at least so it is held in the vainglorious scepticism of the Western culture. Meantime it is to be noted that the proclivity to impute a workmanlike bias to external facts has not been lost, nor has it become inoperative even among the adepts of Occidental scepticism. On the one hand it still enables the modern scientist to generalise his observations in terms of causation,³¹ and on the other hand it has preserved the life of God the Father unto this day.

      It is as the creative workman, the Great Artificer, that he has taken his last stand against the powers of spiritual twilight.

      Out of the simpler workday familiarity with the raw materials and processes employed in industry, in the lower cultures, there emerges no system of knowledge avowed as such; although in all known instances of such lower cultures the industrial arts have taken on a systematic character, such as often to give rise to definite, extensive and elaborate technological processes as well as to manual and other technological training; both of which will necessarily involve something like an elementary theory of mechanics systematised on grounds of matter-of-fact, as well as a practical routine of empirical ways and means. In the lower cultures the growth of this body of opaque facts and of its systematic coherence is simply the habitual growth of technological procedure. Considered as a knowledge of things it is prosy and unattractive; it does not greatly appeal to men’s curiosity, being scarcely interesting in itself, but only for the use to be made of it. Its facts are not lighted up with that spiritual fire of pragmatic initiative and propensity which animates the same phenomena when seen in the light of an imputed workmanlike behaviour and so construed in terms of conduct. On the other hand, when the phenomena are interpreted anthropomorphically they are indued with a “human interest,” such as will draw the attention of all men in all ages, as witness the worldwide penchant for myth-making.

      Such animistic imputation of end and endeavour to the facts of observation will in no case cover the whole of men’s apprehension of the facts. It is a matter of imputation, not of direct observation; and there is always a fringe of opaque matter-of-fact bound up with even the most animistically conceived object. Such is unavoidably the case. The animistic conception imputes to its subject a workmanlike propensity to do things, and such an imputation necessarily implies that, as agent, the object in question engages in something like a technological process, a workmanlike manipulation wherein he has his will with the raw materials upon which his workmanlike force and proficiency spends itself. Workmanship involves raw material, and in the respect in which this raw material is passively shaped to his purposes by the workman’s manipulation it is not conceived to be actively seeking its own ends on its own initiative. So that by force of the logic of workmanship the imputation of a workmanlike (animistic) propensity to brute facts, itself involves the assumption of crude inanimate matter as a correlate of the putative workmanlike agent. The anthropomorphic fancy of the primitive workman, therefore, can never carry the teleological interpretation of phenomena to such a finality but that there will always in his apprehension be an inert residue of matter-of-fact left over. The material facts never cease to be, within reasonable limits, raw material; though the limits may be somewhat vague and shifting. And this residue of crude matter-of-fact grows and gathers consistency with experience and always remains ready to the hand of the workman for what it is worth, unmagnified and unbeautified by anthropomorphic interpretation.

      The animistic, or better the anthropomorphic, elements so comprised by imputation in the common-sense apprehension of things will pass in the main for facts of observation. With the current of time and experience this may under favourable conditions grow into a developed animistic system and come to the dignity of myth, and ultimately of theology. But as it plays its part in the cruder uses of technology its common and most obstructive form is the inchoate animism or anthropomorphic bias spoken of above. In its bearing on technological efficiency, it commonly vitiates the available facts in a greater or less degree. Matter-of-fact knowledge alone will serve the uses of workmanship, since workmanship is effective only in so far as its outcome is matter-of-fact work. Any higher and more subtle potencies found in or imputed to the facts about which the artificer is engaged can only serve to divert and defeat his efforts, in that they lead him into methods and expedients that have only a putative effect.

      This obstructive force of the anthropomorphic interpretation of phenomena is by no means the same in all lines of activity. The difficulty, at least in the earlier days, seems to be greatest along those lines of craft where the workman has to do with the mechanical, inanimate forces - the simplest in point of brute concreteness and the least amenable to a consistent interpretation in animistic terms. While man is conventionally distinguished from brute creation as a “tool-using animal,” his early progress in the devising and use of efficient tools, taking the word in its native sense, seems to have gone forward very slowly, both absolutely and as contrasted with those lines of workmanship in which he could carry his point by manual dexterity unaided by cunningly devised implements and mechanical contrivances;³² and still more striking is the contrast between the incredibly slow and blindfold advance of the savage culture shown in the sequence of those typical stone implements which serve conventionally as land-marks of the early technology, on the one hand, and the concomitant achievements of the same stone-age peoples in the domestication and use of plants and animals СКАЧАТЬ