"Our capacity to take risks and learn from then depends heavily on whether we understand action as instrumental or expressive. The instrumental image, which dominates Western culture, portrays action as a means to predetermined ends, as an instrument or tool of our intentions. The only possible measure of such action is whether it achieves the ends at which it is aimed. Instrumental action is governed by the logic of success and failure; it discourages us from risk-taking because it values success over learning, and it abhors failure whether we learn from it or not.

Instrumental action always wants to win,but win or lose, it inhibits our learning. If we win we think we know it all and have nothing more to learn. If we lose we feel so defeated that learning is a hollow consolation. Instrumenal action traps us in a system or praise or blame, credit or shame, a system that gives primacy to goals and external evaluations, devalues the gift of self-knowledge and diminishes our capacity to take the risks that may yeild growth.

I find it facinating that the most 'successful' of all modern activites-- science-- is one that rejects success and failure as the primary norms for its acts. For the pure scientist, a failed experiement is no failure at all, but a vital step towared learning the truth. Such 'failure' narroes the range or relevant hypotheses to be tested and may contriubut some posiive findings as well. Science, seen by many as our most powerful instrumentality, has achieved its eminence in part by freeing itself from the stangelhold of instrumentalism.

Of course, scientific knowledge is often used by technology in action of the most instrumental sorts. Such action, action that links means to ends, will always be a part of our lives, will always play a central role in a world with finite resources and infinte needs. Aslong as we live embodied lives, the demands of instrumental action will always be with us.

But when the standards of instrumentalism dominate, our action is impoverished and our lives are dminished. Only when we act expressively do we move toward full aliveness and authentic power. An expressive act is one that I take not to acheive a goal outside myself but to express a conviction, a leading, a truth that is within me. An expressie act is one taken because if I did not take it I would be denying my own insight, gift, nature. By taking an expressive act, and act not obsessed with outcomes, I become closer to making the contribution that is mine to make in the scheme of things.

The doing of pure science is an expressive act, an act that simply manifests the scientis's own desire to know the truth. Paradoxically, as science demonstrates, and expressie act is more likely to achieve real ends than is an instrumental act calculated to reach such ends but not rooted in the actor's own reality. When an act is true to one's nature it is more likely to have outcomes that are true to the field of action. I do not mean that we will always find the outcomes of expressive action to be acceptable, pleasing, or 'good.' I mean simply that whatever the outcomes may be, they will be convergent with a larger sustaining truth. They will not be temporary illusions imposed on reality by our false and frail images of how things ought to be."

-- Parker Palmer, "The Active Life," 23-24