A Guide For The Perplexed is a short book by E.F. Schumacher, published in 1977. While better known for his 1974 environmental economics bestseller Small is Beautiful , which made him a leading figure within the ecology movement, Schumacher himself considered A Guide for the Perplexed to be his most important achievement. His daughter wrote that her father handed her the book on his deathbed, five days before he died and he told her "this is what my life has been leading to"'. As the Chicago Tribune wrote "A Guide for the Perplexed is really a statement of the philosophical underpinnings that inform Small is Beautiful."
Schumacher describes his book as being concerned with how man lives in the world. It is also a treatise on the nature and organisation of knowledge and is something of an attack on what Schumacher calls materialistic scientism. Schumacher argues that the current philosophical 'maps' that dominate western thought and science are both overly narrow and based on some false premises.
However, this book is only in small part a critique, Schumacher spends the greater part of it putting forward and explaining what he considers to be the four great truths of philosophical map making:
This work is not to be confused with Moses Maimonides' similiarly titled 12th-century tract.
Critique of materialistic scientism
Schumacher was very much in favour of the scientific spirit; but felt that the dominant methodology within science, which he called materialistic scientism was flawed; and stood in the way of achieving knowledge in any other arena than inanimate nature. Schumacher believed that this flaw originated in the writings of Descartes and Francis Bacon, when modern science was first established.
Schumacher makes a distinction between the descriptive and instructional sciences. According to Schumacher the descriptive sciences are primarily concerned with what can be seen or otherwise experienced, e.g. botany and sociology. While the instructional sciences are concerned with how certain systems work and can be manipulated to produce certain results, e.g. biology and chemistry. Instructional science is primarily based on evidence gained from experimentation
Materialistic scientism is based on the methodology of the instructional sciences, which developed to study and experiment with inanimate matter. According to Schumacher many philosophers of science fail to recognise the difference between descriptive and instructional science; or ascribe this difference to stages in the evolution of a specific science; which for these philosophers means that the instructional sciences are seen as being the most advanced variety of science.
Schumacher is particularly offended by the view that instructional science is the most advanced form of science; because, for Schumacher, it is the study of the low hanging fruit of inanimate matter, or less metaphorically the study of the lowest and least complex level of being. As Schumacher sees it knowledge gained about the higher levels of being, while far harder to get and far less certain, is all the more valuable. Schumacher quotes St Thomas Aquinas approvingly "the slenderest knowledge that may be obtained from higher things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained from lesser things."The Education of E.F. Schumacher, Joseph Pearce
- ^ A Guide For The Perplexed, E. F. Schumacher, p. 13.
- ^ Ibid, p. 15.
- ^ Ibid, p. 30.
- ^ Ibid, p. 125.
- ^ Ibid, p. 31.
- ^ Ibid, p. 32.
- ^ Ibid, p. 31.
- ^ Ibid, p. 22.
- ^ Ibid, p. 49.
- ^ Ibid, p. 52.
- ^ Ibid, p. 52.
- ^ Ibid, p. 54.
- ^ Ibid, p. 55.
- ^ Ibid, p. 68.
- ^ Ibid, p. 81.
- ^ Ibid, p. 95.
- ^ Ibid, p. 98.
- ^ Ibid, p. 146.
References
Last updated: 06-26-2005 19:26:18
