Emil Lederer, The Search for Truth (1937)

Emil Lederer’s published address, an individually titled contribution to a journal symposium, presents the defense of intellectual freedom as a responsibility inseparable from scientific inquiry and human dignity. Speaking for the Graduate Faculty at the conclusion of a scientific meeting, Lederer thanks its American and European supporters and especially Thomas Mann. The address moves from this ceremonial acknowledgment to a critique of detached scientific objectivity, an account of dictatorship’s appeal, and a declaration of the scholar’s vocation. Its central argument is that freedom of thought is neither a professional privilege nor an optional political preference: it sustains science, protects personal liberty, and enables humanity’s continuing interpretation of its purposes.

Lederer reads the preamble to Mann’s Joseph and His Brethren as a representation of the human spirit across historical epochs. The remote past remains ours because recurring questions demand answers newly formulated under changing conditions. His theological language makes spiritual development an unfinished task rather than the possession of an established doctrine:

This unending reformulation of our purpose in the world is the task of the spirit, however conditioned it may be; and therefore it appears in ideas.

Tyranny interrupts this unfolding by imposing answers where renewed interpretation is required. Yet ideas alone cannot meet the contemporary threat. Mann’s emergence as a man of action exemplifies the need to defend inherited spiritual achievements while preparing their future. Lederer places the faculty’s scholarly work alongside this activity: its different means serve the same struggle for peace and freedom. The opening thus establishes solidarity between literature and scholarship without making their work interchangeable.

The address next enlarges academic independence into a condition of social liberty. Dictatorial control proceeds from restrictions on public opinion, schools, and universities to interference with economic and intimate life. The sequence matters: intellectual repression is not an isolated injury that leaves other freedoms secure. Modern government possesses potentially unlimited capacities for intervention unless citizens can control it.

Inasmuch as a modern government’s potentialities for interference are infinite unless controlled by the citizens, no guarantee of personal liberty is thinkable without intellectual freedom.

Freedom nevertheless requires direction. Without a goal organizing scholarly activity, it can deteriorate into arbitrariness and restless wandering. Lederer therefore joins independence to responsibility: intellectuals must continually reconsider their purposes, and they must also confront mistakes made during science’s emancipation from dogmatism. This introduces the address’s central methodological distinction between disciplined analysis and an untenable ideal of indifference.

Lederer accepts objectivity insofar as it requires findings independent of a scholar’s personal preferences and fidelity to facts that cannot honestly be disregarded. His objection concerns the elevation of analysis into a complete account of inquiry:

But trust in mere analysis caused the intellectual to forget that every question he asks involves a decision.

Especially in the social sciences, the world presents multiple aspects, and choosing which questions matter is already a responsible act. Scientific honesty requires investigators to ask consequential questions and weigh relevant evidence regardless of the risks. Research therefore depends on character and courage as well as intellectual capacity. Lederer does not substitute conviction for analytical rigor; he argues that rigor cannot relieve scholars of responsibility for the direction of their work.

The same distinction shapes his response to the claim that science cannot establish values. He concedes that the desirability of intellectual freedom cannot itself be scientifically proved. But this concession does not justify neutrality toward its destruction:

But we can prove scientifically that there can be no science if there is no intellectual freedom, that is, no freedom to choose the working hypothesis.

Freedom is a practical condition of inquiry even where its moral worth exceeds scientific demonstration. Anyone undertaking responsible research must be able to consider the questions a situation presents and employ analytical tools rather than surrender to emotion. Defending that possibility belongs to the practice of science itself. Scholarship becomes mere play if its practitioners decline to claim and maintain the liberty their work requires.

Lederer then reaches beyond professional obligation to human dignity. Modern dictatorship replaces free inquiry with dogmatism founded on blind emotions, violence, national superiority, and compulsory conformity. Its mass appeal arises partly from the burden of freedom: people facing difficulty and social disintegration seek escape from decisions and responsibilities. Their refuge, however, is a drill ground rather than peace. The resulting political order exploits the very emotions it claims to liberate:

These new emotional movements, strangely enough, lead to a condition in which even emotions are standardized and utilized as fuel in the most highly organized state that man has ever designed.

Against the charge that thinking is lifeless, Lederer describes spirit as an active force rooted in the depths of human experience. Its pursuit of truth opposes the false certainty of passion; its restlessness can undo its own creations to permit further development. The conclusion returns to the faculty’s pledge to follow truth wherever it leads. The address’s enduring force lies in connecting methodological freedom, political liberty, and self-consciousness: the search for truth requires both disciplined inquiry and the courage to defend its conditions.