Spencer Heath Archive

Item 643

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath.

December-January 1955-1956?

…Well, we do something empirically. We didn’t know there was any rationale there; we did it by habit or imita­tion or instinct or intuition. But we wake up some fine morning and say, “Why I see how that whole thing came about. I see the rationale in it now. I see the other different elements in it. It is quantitatively related in proportion. And now that I see that, I have a conscious sub­jectivity that enables me to conceive an end desired as a conception, and then proceed to build that conception into the objective world by a technology which grows out of the rationality that I discovered there.”

In no case is there any abyss between the subjective and the objective. As I said in that “Prefatory Note,” the physical and the material, the psychological and the physiological, are interfused. And for purposes of thought, we can draw lines here. But we can’t break up the relatedness and the authenticity of nature’s processes and, like a surgical operation, cut some part out from the rest. We can only in conception draw these lines. There are some places where we can draw lines very sharply. But that means that there is a new element introduced over to one side of the line that wasn’t on the other line. And I say introduced, I mean that we have conceived it, discovered it there; we have been heretofore disregarding that element, treating it as though it were not there, and not making any use of it. So we were at a lower level of existence, maybe at the creature level; We didn’t know there was a Golden Rule there. We didn’t know how to get born again. We didn’t know how to lift each other up by each other’s bootstraps. We found out that we couldn’t lift ourselves up, so we thought by pushing the other fellow down we would get ourselves up — and that didn’t work. There is another side to it, that by lifting him up by his bootstraps, he would lift us up by ours, and when we open into that, there is a new rationale. And now you have a sharp line of division. Not that that wasn’t there in the mind of God or of nature or in the nature of the cosmos. But we just haven’t awakened to it as yet. And that’s where the sharpness of the line is. Not that there was a sharpness of line outside ourselves. The Golden Rule was there just the same before we ever woke up to it, and the physical things wherewith to execute the Golden Rule were there. We haven’t waked up to it. Never­theless, the line is clean between awaking to that rule and putting it in practice, and knowing nothing about it.

“Can you draw a sharp line between the things that are the proper subject matter of one science and the things that are properly the subject matter of some other science?”

No. And that is being recognized now. Chemistry and physics are interfused. The wall has been taken down. Chemistry reaches over the wall into physics, and the physics reaches over the wall into chemistry. And chemistry reaches over the wall into biology, and biology pulls a lot of the stones of the things of chemistry into its own field, and can’t get along without them.

“But I wonder if some distinctions aren’t legitimately drawn. For instance, would you class the acts of production with the proper subject matter of socionomy, or only the acts of exchange?”

I’ll illustrate that by an analogy. Certain things are human. When we say that, we usually mean certain things that we have in common with the animals. Properly, when we say the human, to have some significance, we should mean that it includes something that is not included in the animal nature. Otherwise, the word has no significance. So we dis­cover, when we think about it, that the human nature hasn’t lost anything that the animal had at all; it has gained something that the animals didn’t have. And, that’s the dif­ference. Now then, a physical technology, although it could only be in a very limited and a very crude way carried out, except through social or associative relationships, neverthe­less, Robinson Crusoe could discover some better ways than others of digging a ditch or carrying on any technological process that he had, even if there weren’t any Friday there. And that would have no social significance. So man, not organized socially — and even with Friday there if they were not organized contractually — might practice a degree of technological excellence towards something that he wished to accomplish. Now take these two men (or two other men if you like) in a situation where they are practicing reciprocal relations to one another, and that organization of men has everything that old Robinson and Friday had, or that they themselves had in their former condition. But it has something else now. It has a new conception of a new relationship which did not subsist before. There is a sharp line between the condition and behavior of Robinson and Friday not organized, and Robinson and Friday or their successors organized in the practice of this reciprocal rule. There is no fuzziness about that. Even though you can’t say exactly where a physical technology leaves off and the social tech­nology begins, even so, still the line is clear between animal Robinson and animal Friday and the human or social Robinson and the social Friday.