Severing it from enduring truths risks disaster.

The famous philosophical maxim inscribed on the Temple of Apollo in the sacred Greek precinct of Delphi is “Know thyself,” an imperative at the heart of the Western tradition of liberal education. It includes both the Greek tradition of political philosophy inaugurated by Socrates and the rich and ample resources proffered to Western men and women by biblical revelation. A corollary to that imperative is the Platonic/Aristotelian call for thoughtful and conscientious human beings to “care for the soul” as the one thing most needful, a call that also powerfully resonates in the Christian tradition.

Yet for all its formidable achievements, the contemporary Western world has lost touch with both indispensable imperatives, not least because our dominant currents of thought have attempted to explain away the soul. These currents are determined to reduce the human being to a sophisticated animal bereft of meaningful self-consciousness, moral agency, mutual accountability, and the rich interiority that is nothing less than the “image of God.”

Even as modern man rejects a noble and humanizing appreciation of “sacred limits and restraints,” as Leo Strauss called them, and any real appreciation of the “greatness and misery of man” (in Pascal’s inimitable words) that defines the human condition, we proudly proclaim ourselves lords and masters of nature. At the same time, we jettison the true grounds of liberty and human dignity and increasingly deny that there is any soul or self for us to know or care for.

Moreover, as Alexis de Tocqueville and Walker Percy pointed out, modern intellectuals, philosophers, scientists, and scribblers of all sorts delight in affirming that man is nothing but a brute, a preprogrammed automaton, a soulless product of subhuman determinants, a plaything of the historical process—anything but a human being with consciousness, free will, and moral responsibility. Both Tocqueville and Percy pungently observed the damning paradox that our “demi-savants” proudly delight in: proclaiming themselves to be beyond freedom and dignity, thus revealing themselves to have souls, even if profoundly distorted ones. Human beings can never completely escape the “grandeur and misery” that defines our condition. Today’s ideological perversions unintentionally confirm this point, and abundantly so.

In an unusually thoughtful and suggestive essay in the Spring 2026 issue of Comment magazine, the distinguished sociologist Christian Smith (recently retired from the University of Notre Dame) discusses the prominent role of the social sciences in this “flattening of the human person” and the systematic reduction of the “irreducible” into something other than itself. As Smith ably argues, the human sciences do not begin by “considering seriously the actual nature of human persons, as best that can be understood through combined personal, social, and historical experience.” Instead, obsessed with the allure of being “scientific”—an empiricism that neglects truths, motives, goods, and experience that are unquantifiable—they construct abstractions that have little to do with human beings and societies.

Smith has nothing against authentic science and respect for the empirical. But scientism distorts reality by confusing human beings with the “theories” of their own making. Smith argues that this can be seen in the “rationally calculating utility maximizers” of modern economics; the imperial utilitarianism of rational choice theory; the “behaviorism” of so much psychology and sociology; the undue obsession with race, class, and gender of so much ideologically minded social science; and the reductive determinism that explains away human moral agency in favor of determinants that are in reality merely influences on what Aristotle called the human capacity for “reflective choice.” The examples of such deformations of the human person are legion. Smith provides the reader with an appreciation of just how widespread these pseudo-scientific distortions are and how they warp human self-understanding.

Smith wisely remarks that these deformations almost always presuppose an understanding of the human person that is rarely, if ever, subject to critical examination. This leads to oscillations between fanciful utopianism (“credulously optimistic humanism”) and “descents into dark pessimism, misanthropy, and nihilism.” These theories are never simply false but instead take limited or partial insights and then insist, in the name of a spurious scientism, that “humans are really essentially nothing but [some reductionist X].” Smith astutely observes that the human scientists who promote these theoretical systems exempt themselves from their own inexorable logic:

Was Skinner a conditioned pigeon? Were structural-functionalists cultural dopes? Was Foucault just another power relativist? If so, why should we take any of them seriously? If not, what explains their magic trick of transcending their own humanity?

How then are we to escape from these distortions in the human sciences that “tend to fragment and flatten, sometimes even dehumanize humanity”? To begin with, we need to return to Aristotle’s simple but profound observation that “every science…must attune its methods to fit its particular subjects of study.”

As I argued in the Spring 2026 issue of the Claremont Review of Books, the search for precision has its limits, and the study of human things is as much art as “science,” in the modern sense of the term. As Aristotle observed early on in his Nicomachean Ethics, we must “not look for the same degree of exactness in all our studies.” In studying human beings, we must also render visible “invisible” the goods of the soul—including our beliefs about the true, the good, and the beautiful—through a careful, sympathetic dialectical study of human things, a point that Smith quite thoughtfully develops. The scientist must recognize his own humanity, interiority, and moral responsibility. He must not exempt himself from his own humanity. He must do justice to both “the brilliantly light and the dreadfully dark sides of humanity” if he wishes to be truly scientific, as Smith points out with the help of the theologian and social ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr. This is the beginning of wisdom.

The social sciences must draw from and build upon old-fashioned liberal education, with insights to be discerned from literature, history, philosophy, and theology. Without these crucial foundations, social science succumbs to abstractions and chimerical constructions that distort more than they illuminate. Who understands man better than Aristotle, Shakespeare, Dante, Pascal, Kierkegaard, or Niebuhr, whatever their differences? We must restore the human to the human sciences so that they will cease trying to explain away the precious ensouled person that is the human being.

Smith’s vitally important insights can contribute to the restoration of a social science with soul, and thus to a civilization that does not try to bury the vital reality of the human being in his “grandeur and misery.” The twin imperatives of “knowing thyself” and “caring for the soul” lie at the heart of civilized liberty.

The American Mind presents a range of perspectives. Views are writers’ own and do not necessarily represent those of The Claremont Institute.

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