The search for the core.

Unpacking the idea of philanthropy uncovers a set of assumptions based on more fundamental fields of knowledge and society and humanity: society, nation, state, government, law, property, morality -- essentially contested concepts, every one. Even alluding to such concepts is an intimidating reminder that we routinely take for granted vast areas of knowledge about which we know very little -- and what we know, we know imperfectly. Most of us do not walk around with a developed philosophy of human nature which we would be prepared to defend before an academic committee.

We work with fragments and tacit knowledge: "we can know more than we can tell," as Michael Polanyi put it in his Terry Lectures at Yale in 1962 (published in 1966 under the title The Tacit Dimension). At times, however, we know a good deal less than we claim to know, when our thought is frozen ideologically. Polanyi describes a meeting with Mikhail Bukharin, the Communist Party theoretician, in Moscow in 1935:

When I asked him.... about the pursuit of pure science in Soviet Russia, he said that pure science was a morbid symptom of a class society; under socialism the conception of science pursued for its own sake would disappear, for the interests of scientists would spontaneously turn to problems of the current Five Year Plan.

I was struck by the fact that this denial of the very existence of independent scientific thought came from a socialist theory which derived its tremendous persuasive power from is claim to scientific certainty. (3)

Polanyi thought he had found in tacit knowledge an alternative to the false science of Bukharin and to the reductionist denials of positivism, "ideologies," if you will, that are still brought to bear against philanthropy. (The Marxist says that philanthropy isn't necessary politically because the state will provide what each of us needs, and the positivist says that philanthropy isn't necessary epistemologically because self-interest is sufficient to explain our behavior.) Polanyi believed that tacit knowledge is the knowledge that helps us sense an undiscovered, emergent problem -- the knowledge process involved in the exercise of the moral imagination.

Polanyi envisioned a "society of explorers":

I have spoken to the principle of mutual control through which each scientist independently plays his part in maintaining scientific traditions over an immense domain of inquiry of which he knows virtually nothing. A society of explorers is controlled throughout by such mutually imposed authority....

In our society, ideas about morality are also actively cultivated by different circles of mutual appreciation, which are deeply divided against each other; and in politics these circles are deliberately organized as rivals....

[These professional associations] are feared more than are scientific associations, because the truth of literature and poetry, of history and political thought, of philosophy, morality, and legal principles, is more vital than the truth of science. This is why the independent cultivation of such truth has proved an intolerable menace to modern tyranny.

Philanthropy and Human Nature.

To talk about the study of philanthropy means to deal with a subject almost as grand in scope as politics or economics, two subjects that seductively imply that the principles they contain will order most of the knowledge required to be current with human life and behavior in the world. Of course, each rests on a foundation of human psychology, which rests in turn on general psychology, which rests in turn on biological sciences of great complexity. The extent to which human psychology is understood in biological or even biochemical terms does not exclude the claims of those who speak of the spiritual forces at work in the relations between parent and child or between or among siblings. There is also the unsteady intellectual bridge called "social psychology," persuaded that analysis of human behavior in small groups gives different knowledge from that gained by psychologists studying the individual in isolation and by sociologists who study society in its larger aggregations.

It is not surprising, then, that there have been countless efforts to summarize and synthesize this knowledge into theories of human nature and human society. If we are to understand philanthropy, we need some sense of what people are like in general. The following passage from J.R. Lucas's The Principles of Politics suggest how difficult that is, and why:

Human beings, as we know them, are often selfish, but sometimes unselfish; their judgement is fallible, but sometimes in the course of argument people come to hold the same view, which is, as far as we can see, reasonable and right; they are infinite in their complexity and aspirations, but finite in their capacities and achievements; they occupy the same public external world, but are each the center of a private perspective, not necessarily shareable with others; they have values, which are neither necessarily the same for all, nor actually different for each; they can help one another, and need to, but can hurt one another, and often do. (1) The Federalist comes immediately to mind: "What greater reflection on human nature than government itself?"

There are other ways of thinking about the common characteristics of humanity. The British philosopher Leslie Stephenson wrote an introductory text in 1974 in which he offered Seven Theories of Human Nature. He asked a series of philosophical questions about each of them, including this one:

Another central question of philosophy is that of the nature of moral values. Plato asserted their objectivity, in his theory of Forms. [B.F.] Skinner finds no basis for them at all, except in terms of the survival of the species. Christianity asserts that moral values are ultimately given by God; Marx, Freud, and [Konrad] Lorenz attribute them to the various pressures of society, and Sartre says we choose them for ourselves. These disagreements are fundamental, and the problems they raise are mainly philosophical. They are the special concern of moral philosophy.

Perhaps this is the place to draw attention to the understanding of man offered by the great moral philosophers. In Aristotle's Nichoachean Ethics, Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, and in their modern successors, we find ethical views based on a general view of human nature.... And although the philosophical bases of these ethical systems differ in many ways, we can perhaps discern some features in common. They can be seen as basing their prescriptions for the good life on certain general and uncontroversial facts about human nature -- that men wish to avoid pain, they need food, shelter, and the society of other men, they want to find a purpose in life, and to exercise their manifold abilities free from interference.... (123-24)

A similar approach has been taken by Tom Campbell in his more recent Seven Theories of Human Society. (Campbell teaches at Glasgow; Stephenson taught at St. Andrews.) Parallel to Stephenson's Plato, Aristotle, Christianity, Marx, Freud, Skinner, and Lorenz, Campbell proposes that we study Aristotle, Hobbes, Adam Smith, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Alfred Schutz. Campbell identifies three "perennial philosophical issues" that remain after considering the seven "competing approaches": freewill versus determinism, the nature of explanation, and the objectivity of value judgments remain to plague each approach. To single out the third of these:

There is, however, no more open question in philosophy than that of the epistemology or truth-value of moral judgements. On the one had it is argued that moral discourse has many features similar to the forms of speech which we use to make factual statements (for instance conflicting moral judgements are assumed to contradict each other), and it remains the unshakable conviction of most people that at least some types of conduct must be accepted as good or evil by every rational human being....

On the other hand the ineradicable nature of moral disagreement between equally informed persons, the evidence of diversity of moral beliefs in different societies, classes and historical periods, and the intellectual difficulty of making clear what sort of objective reality values could have, all these combine to produce skepticism about the very idea of moral truth and falsehood. (239)

The process of inquiry has led us from consideration of whether philanthropy is an essentially contested concept, a slippery idea which none of us can seize firmly and claim exclusive rights to. Thinking about philanthropy as a definable permeating quality analogous to intelligence suggests, at least, that we might progress further if we were able to speak of multiple philanthropies the way Howard Gardner and others speak of multiple intelligences. The ability to question our underlying assumptions becomes important when we look at the characteristics of ideology (another essentially contested concept).

We are in search of a core of ideas essential to our understanding of philanthropy, but our search is inhibited by our ignorance and by the scope of our ambition. There is hope that we might find what we are looking for in the exploratory discourse of the tacit dimension, looking for problems that we are not absolutely sure exist, and for answers that may not be possible. In order to work at all we lean on assumptions about human nature and human society, ideas which present still further obstacles when we reflect on them. My own eclectic habits of mind tend to select among such sources for the things that are consistent with life in a free and open and democratic society. That is my starting point; that is also my destination.