Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2995

Typed letter to Heath from Brand Blanshard on Swarthmore, Pennsylvania letterhead but with typed return address Peacham, Vermont, dated August 22, 1942. This followed by penciled notes by Heath for a reply on 13 note-pad pages, not completed. Third, random taping by Spencer MacCallum of Heath’s critique of parts of Blanshard’s letter. Lastly, carbon of letter from Heath to Blanshard, prompted by MacCallum and dated 13 years later, September 17, 1955.

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

I brought your manuscript with me when I came to Vermont two weeks ago, and I have now given it a fuller inspection than I was able to do in the thick of things at Swarthmore. I am returning it to you under separate cover by express.

On the positive side, the things I liked most about your work are its public spirit, the resoluteness with which you have tried to think your position through, and the earnestness of your attempt to combine scientific method with justice to man’s experience of value. There are many other favorable things I might say; but perhaps the points where I have difficulty will prove more helpful. I shall try to set out some of these in order.

1. I am still troubled by the difficulty I gave to you orally some weeks ago. The reader gets the impression at the beginning of the work that man is a creature that can be adequately dealt with in terms of energy units. This impression is modified as the book goes on; but there is no point at which the necessary supplementary factors, and their relation to the scheme first outlined are set forth. The reader therefore forms an expectation of more ‘sociometry’ than is actually fulfilled. Of course I think you are right in not trying to carry the preliminary scheme through in detail, for, as I said in our conversation, human nature and society cannot, I think, be dealt with illuminatingly in any physical terms; consciousness has once for all escaped the meshes of physical law. You too, I take it, would accept this, though perhaps in a somewhat different sense. The initial program and the final result, however, do not fit together in a single theory whose relations are to me quite clear.

2. May not the early argument to the effect that the extension of the average individual life span (the quantity D) involves a proportionately more vigorous and constructive reaction upon the environment require some modification? You are careful to exclude from your account the years of childhood as not fully productive; must not the same be done with the years of extreme age? If our capacity for maintaining life increases as it has in the past century, is it not likely that most men will live into years of seriously declining usefulness? If this is to be expected, individual productiveness would vary, not with D, but independently of it.

3. There are various references throughout the volume (e.g. ‘creative synthesis’ p.229) which show that you take creative evolution seriously, and consider that in an organic whole the whole is more than the sum of the parts, and unpredictable from a knowledge of those parts. In this I think you are right. But unless I am much mistaken, mathematical and physical science know nothing of such a conception; the admission of it would mean that mathematical analysis would so far be inapplicable. The transition from the first kind of analysis to the second seems to be made without full awareness of the degree of difference between the two; at least I found myself puzzled when I asked myself how the transition had been made.

4. I wish I were enough of an economist to appraise properly your careful defense of property in land. I have read some of the writers you refer to, e.g. Mill and Henry George; and I think my views of your defense would have been somewhat clearer if you had set out your theory in explicit contrast to theirs. A great many people are familiar with Henry George’s main proposal to impose a single tax, equal to the socially created value of land; it would be interesting to see how you would meet his proposal and his arguments. Tying up your argument to such landmarks might help readers to grasp its bearings, through comparison and contrast with what is familiar.

5. Your division of the discussion into small sections is a great help. Hence the one notable exception tends to stand out unfavorably in the reader’s mind. Section 27 is nearly 40 pages long. Could this be subdivided after the fashion of the rest of the text?

6. It is hard to resist the conviction that your book of applications is, in all essentials, quite independent of the scientific scheme laid down at the outset. You say that in these applications ‘the Energy Concept is implicitly employed’ (177), but it seemed to me that the economic analysis stood throughout upon its own feet. I was reminded of the attempt of Hobbes to deduce his psychology from his physics. The result was a physics and a psychology that were both impressive; but each of them was entirely self-dependent.

7. I am inclined to place a higher value than you do on governmental interference. Of course I admit the danger. Your view of freedom seems to me essentially J.S. Mill’s; my own view is more nearly akin to that of Green and Bosanquet, who conceive that the state has a duty to restrict one kind of freedom (i.e. the freedom to do what one pleases) in the interest of another freedom (the freedom to be what one ought to be). It is interesting to note that Mill himself was moving at the end away from individualism in the direction of a qualified socialism. My own tendency is in the same direction.

     Well, I wish all this were more helpful. My feeling is that the most valuable part of your work is the economic part; and unfortunately that is just the part where I am least competent to give criticism. But I hope you are receiving that from better critics and advisors. Let me send you, along with the MSS, my good wishes for the success of the work, and my regards to you personally.

Yours sincerely,

(Signed) Brand Blanshard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

/Pencil draft by Heath, never used,for    reply to Blanshard’s 1942 letter./

 

Dear Dr. Blanshard:

I deeply appreciated the long and thoughtful criticisms contained in your letter of August 22nd. I wish to thank you most heartily for it and for your kindness in returning my manuscript to me by express. I feel highly complimented by your thorough consideration of my efforts to bring a degree of intellectual illumination and simplification into the field of social relationships; I trust a reciprocal reaction to the contents of your letter may be of interest and not unpleasing to you.

You will recall that in all matters I am most disposed to evaluate things in terms of the qualities they possess rather than in terms of those that are absent from them. Moreover, this refers (let us hope) to qualities that can be utilized in the satisfaction of needs and realizations of aspirations and ideals and thereby alone have any human values or significance. It is from this (unique?) point of view that I have tried, with some ____________, to bring to light those positive qualities and processes in the existing social organization to which we owe any social growth and gains and on the further development and extension of which our future values rest and thus individual attainments depend.

I believe this is a (if not the) valid, not to say reverent way to seek consciousness of God and emulation of His work through understanding of His positive and creative and hence divine manifestations in the processes of His worlds and of His individual creatures and of Society, His organized God-Kind.

In a right and similar justice I have wished to seek out, cherish and make avail of the positive and creative ideas in which you would manifest the divine — wherein all values reside — in your responses to mine. So I must confess some dismay that “on the positive side” you limit yourself to only one brief paragraph against the seven paragraphs that you place in the contrasting category. Nor am I assuaged to find that even so briefly your critique on the positive side is of my spirit and motivation alone without any attempt at appraisement of ideas at all. From things written and spoken by you I had conceived your intellectual reactions and mine as reflecting the same kind of light, resting on the same positive foundations, and with many points of contact and integration into wider patterns than either, perhaps, had beheld before. I cannot seem to reconcile what seems the preponderant negativism of your direct communications with the obvious virility and vitality of your thinking as previously revealed. However, I will not attempt to quote you against yourself but give some attention to the seven negative paragraphs pursuant to your surmise that “perhaps the points where I have difficulty will prove more helpful” than favorable things.

I am afraid that I must at the outset question the validity of “difficulty” as a basis of criticism or appraisement. Surely you have ____________ both experienced and observed that points of view are always different in proportion as they are unaccustomed or new and those who are most “troubled by the difficulty” of a conception newly presented or unusual to them are, certainly at that point, not in the best condition either to appraise or disparage it.

1. The impression that man, as population, can be adequately dealt with in terms of energy units is correct, the appropriate units being average life-years. This is not to say that a population can be measured in all respects by its life-years but only that its potentiality for other things depends on its life-years. Nor does it describe more than the basic potentiality of the individual man. If the mass is more highly structured and its motion more complex in the life-years, then the mass and motion involved in the horse-power or the dyne, this does not take it out of the basic category of energy units. Complexity does not require supplementary factors. A chronometer is not any less in the category of energy than is the hour-glass. A ________ is not expanded by any supplementary factors. Evolution, creation, is organization, not supplementarization. The life-year is not a physical energy unit; it is a vital energy unit — but still an energy unit. It (with its consciousness) does not escape; through its higher evolution, organization, it transcends physical law without transgressing it — just as a power transcends its _____. The initial and the final do fit together in a single (basic) theory; all nature is one.

 

2. Yes, all fundamental formulae require in practice more or less modification. The period of integration (childhood) up to maturity is only conventionally twenty years. And the period of disintegration (senescence) is sometimes long, though usually absent or negligible and becoming less. Correction for these minor variables does not involve the fundamental formulae. Intellectual energy is probably its highest and most creative form. The world’s great work, qualitatively considered, has been done by men well past their quantitative vital prime, much of it within the shadow of the unknown. The immanence of death has never deterred creative intellect at any age.

 

Moreover, all statistical and other data show that the enormous lengthening of the average span in the last hundred years took place almost entirely with persons in early and middle life and not at all at the extremes of old age. It is the conservation of the energy lost by infant and premature mortality and the lengthening of the productive years. That gives the adult years (D-20) their significance in the potential social efficiency.

 

3. I am happy that we see eye to eye on creative evolution. But I have never thought of it as any departure but rather a development from mathematical and physical science. And I have thought of the organized whole as having properties not predicted from those of its unorganized parts and even unpredictable by present knowledge and means, but never as being essentially unpredictable in terms of its elements and total environment. I know of no warrant, either rational or empirical, for this. I think chemistry was long without means of predicting the properties of so simple a compound as water from the properties of its unorganized ingredients but I believe atomic physics now has or is in a fair way of doing so. I am not disposed to limit the unity and integrity of infinite nature or Deity to any finite apprehension of it. I do not know precisely how hydrogen and oxygen combine but I know they give off a great deal of heat in the process, the same as animals and trees do in their growing (?)

 

4. What I have written about property in land is not meant for a defense but as an exposition. Discovery and exposition is intellectual, defense chiefly emotional, and the more energetic the less illuminating. I have kept purposely aloof from the confusions of controversy.

 

Intellect, science, illuminate abiding Reality. It describes the continuities that abide, uniformities that can be formulated and made _____. Science invents no demons to explain nature or men, imputes no pathology to any institution it lacks the ___ to explain. Henry George, for all his great heart and deep sympathies for suffering mankind, his aversion to violence and sincere pretensions to a “philosophy of freedom,” was nonetheless an advocate of war and an apostle of force. He urged that right thinking, illumination of the mind, was the only guarantee of right action, that Liberty must be fully trusted or she would not stay

                   /Breaks off/

 

 

_________________________ 

Carbon of letter from Heath to Brand Blanshard, Department of Philosophy, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Penna.

September 17,1955

Dear Dr. Blanshard:

My conscience is suggesting to me that I possibly did not answer, or at least adequately answer, your very kind letter of August 22, 1942 — thirteen years ago.

The MS. to which you refer has undergone considerable improvement since that time and is now at the point of coming into print in hard covers within the next few months. In looking over the names of persons to whom I wish to send a complimentary copy, I found your very thoughtful and generous letter.

 

I would like very much to discuss the things which you bring up with you personally, because I have very happy recollections of the little contact that I did have with you. I note your suggestion that I should treat the land socialist position in a more controversial manner than I did in the MS., and I have done that in some later publications. For the present, however, I am sending you one or two little items that I think might interest you and stimulate your thought in the direction of contractual relationships with respect to land as contrasted with the probable evils of its political administration.

I feel that I am under a considerable debt of gratitude to you for the painstaking letter in which you so generously discussed my MS. so long ago. Hoping that this belated acknowledgment will be pleasing to you, I am,

Sincerely yours,

 

SH/m

ENC: “Trojan Horse’

     “Shorter Criticism”

“Private Property in Land Explained”

 

_____________________________

 

/Random recording by Spencer MacCallum of Heath’s remarks to him regarding statements in Blanshard’s letter./

“A great many people are familiar with Henry George’s main proposal to impose a single tax, equal to the socially created value of land”

See how he begs the question? “socially created value of land.” It is socially created, too, because the landlord performs his societal act when he distributes it by contractual engagements. But he didn’t mean that.

“Tying up your argument to such landmarks might help readers to grasp its bearings, through comparison and contrast with what is familiar.”

You should teach the rotundity of the earth by comparison and contrast with the idea that the earth is flat — attack the idea that it is flat.

“It is hard to resist the conviction that your book of applications is, in all essentials, quite independent of the scientific scheme laid down at the outset.”

He means to say, is not supported by .. The scheme doesn’t support the applications.

“.. it seemed to me that the economic analysis stood throughout upon its own feet ..”

If you accept the proposition that freedom of contract is the one essential thing to economic functioning, then on that foot it can stand. But that preceding business, shows how the spontaneous, natural way of things arranging, organizing themselves, leads to permanent structures and so on, more enduring structures, so that this spontaneous and natural way of making contracts with one another leads to an evolving society. Any critic, of course, who has different conceptions will treat the new ones, will agree with them so far as they agree with his, including myself — as a critic. So he takes everything I say and tries to put it alongside what he has already had. I had to work my way out of that to see these things as in themselves as they are, apart from previous errors or previous narrower, less general, more partial views.

“the freedom to be what one ought to be”

Whenever the imperative is external to the organism, there is no freedom. There is no freedom where the imperative is external to the organism. So far as that imperative is operative, the organism is enslaved, and we are enslaved to our environment. That’s why society learns to dominate — men can take possession of the earth and rule over it by transforming it to their needs. Socialized man is the only animal that can do that. This “ought” business, wherever it is spoken of favorably, means that we should submit to some form of enslavement. Do you remember anything of my reading of The Prophet? Gibran? I don’t think the word “ought” appears, or anything like that ..