Page 29 - Contribution To Phenomenology

22 LESTER EMBREE

Finally, it may bear brief repetition that a scientific discipline aims at
and culminates not in valuing or doing but in knowing. All else is sub-
ordinate, extra-disciplinary consequences and conditions as well as other
component cultural practices included.

b. Cultural Disciplines that are Practical.

A practical discipline is one in which people of advanced preparation and
in the relevant disciplinary attitude strive to affect courses of events in
some pertinent part of the world or other. Striving or willing characterizes
a concrete practice in which the praxic component predominates (but
there are pathic and doxic strata and positional characteristics as well as
awareness and objects as awared also essentially involved). Their objects
are the ends and means for their actions. Willing can be positive or
negative and, depending on whether the objects that are willed already
exist or not, willing can be destructive or preservative, creative or
preventative, or it can seek to foster, impede, or merely alter them. On
some occasions, the action consists in an abstaining from intervening, so
that one simply lets happen what will. Besides striving to affect, in the
broad signification, the course of events, which is different from both the
believing in and the valuing of objects, practical practices differ from the
cognitive and axiotic in focusing only on the future. In other words, one
can know and also value the present and the past as well as the future
(and even ideal or atemporal matters), but one cannot will objects other
than in the future.
Without the effort being made adequately to subclassify the disciplines
of the practical sort, it can be said that education, law, medicine, nursing,
politics, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and social work are practical disciplines
since they culminate in less ignorant students, enforced laws, preserved
or improved political systems, and physically and/or mentally healthier
people. Engineering, furthermore, is above all a practical cultural
discipline with many subspecies. One can even argue that business is
practical in seeking profits as goals and then consider whether it is
sometimes disciplinary. To be sure, action is founded upon evaluation as
well as cognition in all these cases, but what predominates in the
culmination of the cultural practice is success or failure (which have
degrees) with respect to affecting a course of events.
Also, that the use to which the results are ultimately put does not
pertain especially to the designers, makers, performers, or sellers, but