Theoretical and Practical Knowledge

Abstract

THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE The action by which man achieves his ultimate goal is neither making, nor doing, but contemplating.1 T HIS sentence makes the most important point to be considered in any consideration of theoretical and practical knowledge. If it is true that man is ordered to contemplation as his ultimate end, and if contemplation consists in theoretical and not practical knowledge, then the distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge is a crucially important one. At the same tim~, it is of equal importance to appreciate the complementary relation also obtaining between these two kinds of knowledge and to grasp the consequences which follow from seeing one as ordered to the other. The distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge is a fundamental matter and, to a certain extent, a simple problem. Nevertheless, at the present time as well as in the past, this distinction has been ignored, confused or denied. The unhappy consequences which have followed have affected man's understanding of the nature of knowledge itself, the divisions of knowledge, and, by no means least important, the sort of education which human beings should have if they are to be developed in a truly liberal manner. It is of importance, then, to examine precisely what theoretical and practical knowledge mean and how they differ from each other. The point of emphasis which I should like to make in particular is that, although the two are differentiated from each other by the two ends of knowledge and action, nevertheless the distinction is not to be construed so absolutely that the two are viewed 1 The Saint. Xavier College Self Study. A Progress Report. (Chicago, 1958), p. 18. 146 THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE 147 as wholly in opposition. This opposition is sometimes carried to the extreme of denying one for the sake of the other. It is just such an extreme that tends to be revealed in the history of philosophical thought on the problem. As a result of spirited argument between strongly partisan advocates of one or the other kind, it is not easy to tell whether practical knowledge has more often been banished for the sake of theoretical knowledge , or whether concern for practical knowledge has been so overwhelming that theoretical knowledge is dismissed as ab~ struse, vain, and even meaningless. Rash attacks are often made against positions rashly taken. Exaggerated and exclusive claims for theoretical knowledge were made, in one form or another, from Descartes through Kant and Hegel to the present day. The primary aim of Descartes in his Discourse on Method 2 was to apply to all branches of knowledge a wholly a priori math{imatical method, starting from an intuition and proceeding exclusively by deduction . This conception of knowledge would obviously suppress all practical knowledge. Immanuel Kant can hardly be charged with seeking to eliminate practical knowledge from the domain of science. Indeed , there is some justice to the remark of Turner that " Kant, whose express purpose was to deliver philosophy from scepticism , might well look back at Hume, the sceptic, and exclaim, ' There, but for the categorical imperative, goes Immanuel Kant! ' " 3 But if Kant was aware to a great extent of the distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge, nevertheless his understanding of theoretical knowledge had the inevitable effect of severing its relation to the real order. Probably from Kant, as from no other single writer, arose the conception of theoretical knowledge as "speculation" in a pejorative sense of the term-a spinning of theories in the mind. Kant himself, of course, sought to place theoretical knowledge, • The full title of Descartes' work is DiscCYUrse on the. Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences. Cf. Descartes. Seleotions , edited by R. M. Eaton (New York, 1927), pp. 1-87. • W. Turner, History of Philosophy (Boston, 1929), p. 548. 148 JOHN A. OESTERLE particularly metaphysics, on an objective, critical basis, but the effect was otherwise for many of those who came after him. And they had some justification for their position in reading in Kant sentences like the following: " Theoretical cognition is speculative when it relates to an object or certain conceptions of an object which is not...