The Inner Aim

Science is corrupting the religion and philosophy of modern man by giving him means without ends. So Theologian Paul Tillich told the centennial celebration of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last week.

As his gauge for measuring the influence of science, Tillich took the Greek word telos: "the inner aim of a life process." To the classical Greeks, said Tillich, man's inner aim--his telos--was "the actualization of his potentialities and the conquest of those distortions of his nature which are caused by his bondage to error and passions." This idea, common to Heraclitus, Socrates, the Stoics and the Epicureans, is still alive in the modern world in the "humanist" tradition.

Technique for Itself. To the early Christian, man's telos, according to Tillich was the drive to rise from "the universe of finitude and guilt" to reunion with God--the "ultimate reality, the transcendent ground" of all existence. Christianity was suspicious of science--especially physics--"not because of its critical power but because it ties the mind to the material world."

The Renaissance and Reformation gave man a new telos--"the active subjugation and transformation of nature and man." This was the combination of Renaissance humanism, oriented politically and technically, with the Calvinistic and Evangelical aim to subject the "world and mankind to the kingdom of God."

On this new ground, science took root and flowered. "The two older definitions of man's telos, classical humanism and religious transcendentalism, were pushed aside." Reason became a "means-ends relation," losing its "larger meaning which included the moral and esthetic function." Technique has become not merely a means to an end, but an end in itself. Asks Tillich: "Is this not surrender of a telos altogether?"

Subject or Object. Tillich cites as proof of his analysis the modern world's outcry against the lack of inner aim, "the so-called existentialist art, literature and philosophy . . . expressions of emptiness, meaninglessness and life-anxiety . . . split-consciousness, indifference and disintegration."

Darwin's discovery of evolution, Freud's of the unconscious, and the manipulation of conditioned reflexes by social and psychological "engineering," he believes, have all tended to reduce man to the status of object rather than subject. "Yet the most pertinent question--who controls psychological conditioning and social engineering--has not been answered except by the horrifying shadow of Big Brother in Orwell's 1984. This question is the decisive one. It shows that there is at least one point in which subjectivity cannot be annihilated: namely in those who annihilate. Science cannot reduce into mere objects the bearers of science and its application."

Tillich concludes with the hope that "the ever-increasing protest against the dehumanization of man . . . may become soon more than a protest, namely a support for a view of man which takes into consideration all dimensions of the multidimensional unity he is."

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