THE COLLECTED WORKS OF THORSTEIN VEBLEN: Business Theories, Economic Articles & Essays. Thorstein Veblen
facts of observation are conceived as facts of workmanship, and the logic of workmanship becomes the logic of events. Their apprehension in these terms is easy, since it draws into action the faculties of apperception and reflection that are already alert and facile through habitual use, and it assimilates the facts in an apperceptive system of relationships that is likewise ready and satisfactory, convincing through habitual service and by native proclivity to this line of systematisation. By instinct and habit observed phenomena are apprehended from this (teleological) point of view, and they are construed, by way of systematisation, in terms of such an instinctive pursuit of some workmanlike end. In latterday psychological jargon, human knowledge is of a “pragmatic” character.
As all men habitually act under the guidance of instincts, and therefore by force of sentiment instinctively look to some end in all activity, so the objects with which the primitive workman has to do are also conceived as acting under impulse of an instinctive kind, and a bent, a teleological or pragmatic nature, is in some degree imputed to them and comes as a matter of course to be accepted as a constituent element in their apprehended make-up. A putative pragmatic bent innate in external things comes in this way to pass current as observed matter of fact. By force of the sense of workmanship external objects are in great part apperceived in respect of what they will do; and their most substantial charac-teristic therefore, their intimate individual nature, in so far as they are conceived as individual entities, is that they will do things.
In the workmanlike apprehension of them the nature of things is twofold: (a) what can be done with them as raw material for use under the creative hand of the workman who makes things, and (b) what they will do as entities acting in their own right and working out their own ends. The former is matter of fact, the latter matter of imputation; but both alike, and in the naive apprehension of uncritical men both equally, are facts of observation and elements of objective knowledge. The two are, of course, of very unequal value for the purposes of workmanship. It should seem, at least on first contact with the distinction, that the former category alone can have effectually conduced or contributed to workmanlike efficiency, and so it should be the only substantial factor in the growth of technological insight and proficiency: while the latter category of knowledge should presumably have always been an unmitigated hindrance to effective work and to technological advance. But such does not appear on closer scrutiny to have been the case in the past: whether such sheer discrimination against the technological serviceability of all these putative facts would hold good in latterday civilisation is a question which may perhaps best be left to the parties in interest in “pragmatic” and theological controversy.
These two categories of knowledge, or of cognoscenda, are incongruous, of course, and they seem incompatible when applied to the same phenomena, the same external objects. But such incongruity does not disturb anyone who is at all content to take facts at their face value, - for both ways of apprehending the facts are equally given in the face value of the facts apprehended. And on the known lower levels of culture it appears that in the workman’s apprehension of the facts with which he has to do there is no evident strain due to this twofold nature and twofold interpretation of the objects of knowledge.
So, for instance, the Pueblo potter (woman) may (putatively) be aware of certain inherent, quasi-spiritual, pragmatic qualities, claims and proclivities personal to the day beds from which her raw material is drawn: different clay beds have, no doubt, a somewhat different quasi-personality, which has, among other things, to do with the goodness of the raw material they afford. Even the clay in hand will have its pragmatic peculiarities and idiosyncracies which are duly to be respected; and, notably, the finished pot is an entity with a life-history of its own and with temperament, fortunes and fatalities that make up the substance of good and evil in its world.28 But all that does not perceptibly affect the technology of the Pueblo potter’s art, beyond carrying a sequence of ceremonial observance that may run along by the side of the technological process; nor does it manifestly affect the workmanlike use of the pot during its lifetime, except that the pragmatic nature of the given pot will decide, on grounds of ceremonial competency, to what use it may be put.29 Matter of fact and matter of imputation run along side by side in inextricable contact but with slight apparent mutual interference across the line. The potter digs her clay as best she has learned how, and it is a matter of workmanlike efficiency, in which empirical knowledge of the mechanical qualities of the material is very efficiently combined with the potter’s trained proficiency in the discretionary use of her tools; the tools, of course, also have their (putative) temperamental idiosyncracies, but they are employed in her hands in uncritical conformity with such matter-of-fact laws of physics as she has learned. The clay is washed, kneaded and tempered with the same circumspect regard to the opaque facts known about clay through long handling of it. What and how much tempering material may best be used, and how it is to be worked in, may all have a recondite explanation in the subtler imputed traits of the clay; a certain clay may have a putative quasi-spiritual affinity for certain tempering material; but the work of selection and mixing is carried out with a watchful regard to the mechanical character of the materials and without doubt that the given materials will respond in definite, empirically ascertained ways to the pressure brought on them by the potter’s hands, and without questioning the matter of fact that such and so much of manipulation will mix such and so much of tempering material with the given lot of clay. The clay is “as wax in her hands;” what comes of it is the product of her insight and proficiency. Still the pragmatic nature of all these materials viewed as distinct entities is never to be denied, and in those respects in which she does not creatively design, manipulate and construct the work of her hands, its putative self-sufficiency of existence, meaning and propensity goes on its own recognisances unshorn and inalienable.
Technological efficiency rests on matter-of-fact knowledge, as contrasted with knowledge of the traits imputed to external objects in making acquaintance with them. Therefore every substantial advance in technological mastery necessarily adds something to this body of opaque fact, and with every such advance proportionably less of the behaviour of inanimate things will come to be construed in terms of an imputed workmanlike or teleological bent. At the same time the imputation of a teleological meaning or workmanlike bent to the external facts that are made use of is likely to take a more circumspect, ingenious and idealised form. Under the circumstances that condition an increasing technological mastery there is an ever-growing necessity to avoid conflict between the imputed traits of external objects and those facts of their behaviour that are constantly in evidence in their technological use. In so far, therefore, as a simple and immediate imputation of workmanlike self-direction is seen manifestly to traverse the facts of daily use its place will be supplied by more shadowy anthropomorphic agencies that are assumed to carry on their life and work in some degree of detachment from the material objects in question, and to these anthropomorphic agencies which so lie obscurely in the background of the observed facts will be assigned a larger and larger share of the required initiative and self-direction. For so alien to mankind, with its instinctive sense of workmanship, is the mutilation of brute creation into mere opaque matter-of-fact, and so indefeasibly does the “consciousness of kind” assert itself, that each successive renunciation of such an imputed bias of workmanship in concrete objects is sought to be redeemed by pushing the imputation farther into the background of observed phenomena and running their putative workmanlike bias in more consummately anthropomorphic terms. So an animistic conception30 of things comes presently to supplement, and in part supplant, the more naive and immediate imputation of workmanship, leading up to farther and more elaborate myth-making; until in the course of elaboration and refinement there may emerge a monotheistic and providential Creator seated in an infinitely remote but ubiquitous space of four dimensions.
This imputation of bias and initiative has doubtless lost ground among civilised communities, as contrasted with the matter-of-fact apprehension of things, so that where it once was the main body of knowledge it now is believed to live and move only within that margin of things not yet overtaken by matter-of-fact information, - at least so it is held in the vainglorious scepticism of the Western culture. Meantime it is to be noted that the proclivity to impute a workmanlike bias to external facts has not been lost, nor has it become inoperative even among the adepts of Occidental scepticism. On the one hand it still enables the modern scientist to generalise his observations in terms of causation,31 and on the other hand it has preserved the life of God the Father unto