Abstract
I am a typical late middle-aged professor of business. I ask whether or not I have taken people seriously in my work as a researcher and teacher. I discover I have not. I explain how—by following the canons of administrative science in my research and by following the norms of instruction in my teaching—I have been encouraged to ignore the spiritual being of people that is their essence and better part. I conclude with ideas about how I (and others like me) can mend my ways.
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Notes
While scientific causality superficially resembles Aristotle’s efficient causality, it is the brainchild of Scottish philosopher David Hume and is actually quite different. Whereas efficient causality for Aristotle was the “how” by which a potency of form is actualized, efficient causality for Hume was a conjunction of events that we experience and call cause and effect but that we cannot rationally justify.
We, alone in creation, are a composite of matter, life, and spirit. We are not pure spirit as Gnosticism would have it and we are not pure materiality as scientific materialism would have it. The danger in Gnosticism, as recognized by the Catholic Church, is that posed today by so-called New Age spirituality. This is to view matter as inimical to spirit and to view the universe as a depravation of God. And this is to view God and our own spirit as being out of this world, beyond it. In this view we are not God incarnate and our body is not essential to our being. The danger in scientific materialism is that it cannot recognize what makes us human. Yes there is a biological continuity between animal and man that can be explained reasonably by evolution, but there is also a metaphysical gulf between animal and man that cannot be explained reasonably by evolution. As novelist Walker Percy puts it; between us and the chimpanzee is a difference greater than between the chimpanzee and the planet Saturn.
As philosopher Feser observes in The Last Superstition (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press 2008), the scientific materialism that prevails today does so, not as a partiality accepted for the sake of scientific progress, but as an ideology embraced to avoid the moral truths that follow from formal and final causes. If there be a final human good, then we must answer it. We must accept that whatever promotes that final good is also good and that whatever retards that final good is an evil. But to do this would condemn a great many of today’s secular values and practices as positive evils.
In beholding we are reminded that every being is at least somewhat beyond our ken. We cannot fully or finally know any being because we cannot fully or finally become that being. With psychologist Barfield, we are reminded to “save the appearances” of things by remembering that they are before and beyond our ideas about them [see Saving the Appearances, 2e (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press 1988)]. This is more than a negative lesson to be humble about what we claim to know (to remember that our perceptions are just that, our perceptions); it is more importantly a positive lesson to be open to possibility. It is to know of all things that they have potentials not yet realized, being not yet become, and truth not yet manifest.
This familiar saying, however, is misleading. While science is not about what ought to be, it is also not about what is. The latter is the subject of metaphysics, the subject upon which science depends for its being.
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Acknowledgments
I thank JBE editor Alejo Sison, two anonymous JBE reviewers, Jane Dutton, Bob Quinn, Gretchen Spreitzer, John Paul Stephens, and Jim Walsh for their contributions to this article.
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Sandelands, L.E. On Taking People Seriously: An Apology, to My Students Especially. J Bus Ethics 126, 603–611 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-013-1976-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-013-1976-8