I
Among the influences that have worked in contemporary philosophy towards disintegration of intellectualism of the epistemological type, and towards the substitution of a philosophy of experience, the work of Mr. Bradley must be seriously counted. One has, for example, only to compare his metaphysics with the two fundamental contentions of T. H. Green, namely, that reality is a single, eternal, and all-inclusive system of relations, and that this system of relations is one in kind with that process of relating which constitutes our thinking, to be instantly aware of a changed atmosphere. Much of Bradley’s writings is a sustained and deliberate polemic against intellectualism of the Neo-Kantian type. When, however, we find conjoined to this criticism an equally sustained contention that the philosophic conception of reality must be based on an exclusively intellectual criterion, a criterion belonging to and confined to theory, we have a situation that is thought-provoking. The situation grows in interest when it is remembered that there is a general and growing tendency among those who appeal in philosophy to a strictly intellectualistic method of defining “reality,” to insist that the reality reached by this method has a super-intellectual content: that intellectual, affectional, and volitional features are all joined and fused in “ultimate” reality. The curious character of the situation is that Reality is an “absolute experience” of which the intellectual is simply one partial and transmuted moment. Yet this reality is attained unto, in philosophic method, by exclusive emphasis upon the intellectual aspect of present experience and by systematic exclusion of exactly the emotional, volitional features which with respect to content are insisted upon! Under such circumstances the cynically-minded are moved to wonder whether this tremendous insistence upon one factor in present experience at the expense of others, is not because this is the only way to maintain the notion of “Absolute Experience,” and to prevent it from collapsing into ordinary everyday experience. This paradox is not peculiar to Mr. Bradley. Looking at the Neo-Kantian movement in the broad in its modern form, one might almost say that its prominent feature is its insistence upon reaching a “Reality” that includes extra-intellectual factors and phases, traits that are ideal in a moral and emotional sense, by an exclusive recognition of the function of knowledge in its isolation.
Such being the case, an examination of Mr. Bradley’s method and criterion may have far-reaching implications. First, let us set before ourselves the general points of Mr. Bradley’s indictment of intellectualism.[20] Knowledge or judgment works by means of thought; it is predication of idea (meaning) of existence as its subject. Its final aim is to effect a complete union or harmony of existence and meaning. But it is fore-doomed to failure, for in realizing its end it must employ means which contradict its own purpose. This inherent incapacity lurks in judgment with respect to subject, predicate, and copula. The predicate or meaning necessary to complete the reality presented in the subject can be referred to the latter and united with it only by being itself alienated from existence. It heals the wounds or deficiencies of its own subject (and in the end all deficiencies are to the modern idealist discrepancies) only on condition of inflicting another wound,—only by sundering meaning from a prior union with existence in some other phase. This latter existence, therefore, is always left out in the cold. It is as if we wanted to get all the cloth in the world into one garment and our only way of accomplishing this were to tear off a portion from one piece of goods in order to patch it on to another.
The subject of the judgment, moreover, as well as the predicate, stands in the way of judgment fulfilling its own task. It has “sensuous infinitude” and it has “immediacy,” but these two traits contradict each other. The details of the subject always go beyond itself, being indefinitely related to something beyond. “In its given content it has relations which do not terminate within that content” (ibid., p. 176), while in its immediacy it presents an undivided union of existence and meaning. No subject can be mere existence any more than it can be mere meaning. It is always existent or embodied meaning. As such it claims individuality or the character of a single subsistent whole. But this indispensable claim is inconsistent with its ragged-edged character, its indefinite external reference, which is indispensable to it as subject that it may require and receive further meaning from predication.
With respect to the copula the following quotation from the “Principles” of Logic (p. 10) may serve: “Judgment proper is the act which refers the ideal content (recognized as such) to the reality beyond the act.” In other words, judgment as act (and it is the act which is expressed in the copula) must always fall outside of the content of knowledge as such; yet since this act certainly falls within reality, it would have to be recognized and stated by any knowledge pretending to competency with respect to reality as a whole. These considerations, stated in this way, are highly technical and presuppose a knowledge not merely of Mr. Bradley’s own logic, but also of the logical analysis of knowledge initiated by Kant and carried on by Herbart, Lotze, and others. Their main import may, however, be stated in comparatively non-technical form. Human experience is full of discrepancies. Were experience purely a matter of brute existence (such as we sometimes imagine the animals’ experience to be) it would be totally lacking in meaning and there would be no problems, no thinking, no occasion for thinking, and hence no philosophy. On the other hand, if experience were a complete, tight-jointed union of existence and meaning, there would be no dissatisfaction, no problems, no cause for efforts to patch up defects and contradictions. Existences, things, would embody all the meanings that they suggest; while abstract meanings, values that are merely ideal, that are projected or thought of but not fulfilled, would be totally unheard of. But our experience stands in marked contrast to both these types of experience. It is neither an affair of meaningless existence nor of existence self-luminous with fulfilled meaning. All things that we experience have some meaning, but that meaning is always so partially embodied in things that we cannot rest in them. They point beyond themselves; they indicate meanings which they do not fulfil; they suggest values which they fail to embody, and when we go to other things for the fruition of what is denied, we either find the same situation of division over again, or we find even more positive disappointment and frustration—we find contrary meanings set up. Now all thinking grows out of this discrepancy between existence and the meaning which it partially embodies and partially refuses, which it suggests but declines to express. Yet thinking, the mode of bringing existence and meaning into harmony with each other, always works by selection, by abstraction; it sets up and projects meanings which are ideal only, footless, in the air, matters of thought only, not of sentiency or immediate existence. It emphasizes the ideal of a completed union of existence and meaning, but is helpless to effect it. And this helplessness (according to Mr. Bradley) is not due to external pressure but to the very structure of thought itself.
From every point of view knowledge operates under conditions, (and these not externally imposed but inherent in its own nature as judgment,) that render it incapable of realizing its aim of complete union of existence and meaning. Granted the argument, and it is difficult to imagine a more serious indictment against the pretensions of philosophy to reach “Reality” via the exclusive path of knowledge.
The presence of contradiction is Mr. Bradley’s criterion for “appearance,” just as its absence is his criterion for “reality.” It thus goes without saying that knowledge and truth which we can attain are matters of appearance. Contradiction between existence and meaning is its last word. This is not merely a logical deduction from Mr. Bradley’s position, but is expressly stated by him. “Thus the truth belongs to existence, but it does not as such exist.... Truth shows a dissection but never an actual life” (“Appearance and Reality,” p. 167). Again, “every truth is appearance since in it we have divorce of quality from being” (ibid., p. 187). “Even absolute truth seems in the end to turn out erroneous.... Internal discrepancy belongs irremovably to truth’s proper character.... Truth is one aspect of experience and is therefore made imperfect and limited by what it fails to include” (ibid., pp. 544–545). Nothing could be more explicit as to the inherently contradictory character of truth, both as an ideal and as an accomplished fact; nothing more positive as to the unreality or appearance-character of truth. We cannot, on Mr. Bradley’s method, stop here. Not only is knowledge—working as it does through thought which is always partial, selective, abstractive—doomed to failure in accomplishing its task, but the existence of the contradiction between the suggestion of meanings by existence and this realization in existence is itself due to thought.
Speaking of thought he says: “The relational form is a compromise on which thought stands and which it develops.” And all the particular antinomies which he discusses are interpreted as having their basis in the category of relation (ibid., p. 180). In his section on Appearance he goes through various aspects and distinctions of the world, such as primary and secondary qualities, substance and its properties, relation and qualitative elements, space and time, motion and change, causation, etc., pointing out irreconcilable discrepancies in them. He does not, in a generalized way, expressly refer them to any common source or root. But it seems a fair inference that the relational character of thought is at the bottom of the whole trouble: so that we have in the cases mentioned precisely the same situation in concreto which is set forth in abstracto in the discussion of thought. The contradictions brought up are in every case resolved into the fundamental discrepancy supposed to exist between relations and elements related. In each case there is the ideal of a final unity in which relations and elements as such disappear, while in every case the nature of relation is such as to prevent the desired consummation. In at least one place, it is expressly declared that it is the knowledge function which is responsible for the degradation of reality to appearance. “We do not suggest that the thing always itself is an appearance. We mean its character is such that it becomes one as soon as we judge it. And this character we have seen throughout our work, is ideality. Appearance consists in the looseness of content from existence.... And we have found that everywhere throughout the world such ideality prevails” (ibid., p. 486, italics not in the original). It is not then strictly true that the divorce of meaning and existence instigates thought; rather thought is the unruly member that creates the divorce and then engages in the task (in which it is self-condemned to failure) of trying to establish the unity which it has gratuitously destroyed. Thinking, self-consciousness, is disease of the naïve unity of thoughtless experience.
On the one hand there is a systematic discrediting of the ultimate claims of the knowledge function, and this not from external physiological or psychological reasons such as are sometimes alleged against its capacity, but on the basis of its own interior logic. But on the other hand, a strictly logical criterion is deliberately adopted and employed as the fundamental and final criterion for the philosophic conception of reality. Long familiarity has not dulled my astonishment at finding exactly the same set of considerations which in the earlier portion of the book are employed to condemn things as experienced by us to the region of Appearance, employed in the latter portion of the book to afford a triumphant demonstration of the existence and character of Absolute Reality. The argument I take up first on its formal side, and then with reference to material considerations.[21]
The positive conception of Reality is reached by the conception that “ultimate reality must be such that it does not contradict itself; here is an absolute criterion. And it is proved absolute by the fact that either in endeavoring to deny it or even in attempting to doubt it, we tacitly assume its validity” (ibid., pp. 136–137). That is to say, when one sets out to think one must avoid self-contradiction; this avoidance, or, put positively, the attainment of consistency, harmony, is the basic law of all thinking. Since in thinking we set out to attain reality, it follows that reality itself must be self-consistent, and that its self-consistency determines the law of thought. Or, as Mr. Bradley again puts the matter, “In order to think at all you must subject yourself to the standard, a standard which implies an absolute knowledge of reality; and while you doubt this, you accept it, and obey, while you rebel” (ibid., p. 153). The absolute knowledge referred to is, of course, the knowledge of the thoroughly self-consistent, non-contradictory character of reality. Every reader of Mr. Bradley’s book knows how he goes on from this point to supply positive content to reality; to give an outline sketch of the characters it must possess and the way in which it must possess them in order to maintain its thoroughly self-consistent character. It is, however, only the strictly formal aspect of the matter that I am here concerned with.
On this side we reach, I think, the heart of the matter by asking, in reference to the first quotation: Absolute for what? Surely absolute for the process under consideration, that is absolute for thought. But the significance of this absolute for thought is, one may say, “absolutely” (since we are here confessedly in the realm just of thought) determined by the nature of thought itself. Now this nature has been already referred by considerations “belonging irremovably to truth’s proper character,” to the world of appearance and of internal discrepancy. Yes, one may say (speaking formally), the criterion of thought is absolute—that is to say absolute or final for thought; but how can one imagine that this in any way alters the essential nature and value of thought? If knowledge works by thought, and thought institutes appearance over against reality, any further fact about thought—such as a statement of its criterion—falls wholly within the limits of this situation. It is comical to suppose that a special trait of thought can be employed to alter the fundamental and essential nature of thought. The criterion of thought must be infected by the nature of thought, instead of being a redeeming angel which at a critical juncture transforms the fragile creature, thought, into an ambassador with power plenipotentiary to the court of the Absolute.
There really seems to be ground for supposing that the whole argument turns on an ambiguity in the use of the word “absolute.” Keeping strictly within the limits of the argument, it means nothing more than that thinking has a certain principle, a law of its own; that it has an appropriate mode of procedure which must not be violated. It means, in short, whatever is finally controlling for the thought-function. But Mr. Bradley immediately takes the word to mean absolute in the sense of describing a reality which by its very nature is totally contradistinguished from appearance—that is to say, from the realm of thought. Upon the ambiguity of a word, the systematic indictment of intellectualism becomes the cornerstone of a systematically intellectualistic method of conceiving reality!
Mr. Bradley has himself recognized the seeming contradiction between his indictment of thought and his use of the criterion of thought as the exclusive path to a philosophic notion of the real. In dealing with it, he (to my mind) comes within an ace of stating a truer doctrine, and also exhibits even more clearly the weakness of his own position. He goes so far as to put the following words into the mouth of an objector, and to accept their general import: “All axioms, as a matter of fact, are practical ... for none of them in the end can amount to more than the impulse to behave in a certain way. And they cannot express more than this impulse, together with the impossibility of satisfaction unless it is complied with” (p. 151). After accepting this (p. 152) he goes on to say: “Take for example the law of avoiding contradiction. When two elements will not remain quietly together, but collide and struggle, we cannot rest satisfied with that state. Our impulse is to alter it and, on the theoretical side, to bring the content to such shape that the variety remains peaceably in one. And this inability to rest otherwise and this tendency to alter in a certain way and direction is, when reflected upon and made explicit, our axiom and our intellectual standard” (p. 152; italics mine).
The retort is obvious: if the intellectual criterion, the principle of non-contradiction on which his whole Absolute Reality rests, is itself a practical principle, then surely the ultimate criterion for regulating intellectual undertakings is practical. To this obvious answer Mr. Bradley makes reply as follows: “You may call the intellect, if you like, a mere tendency to a movement, but you must remember that it is a movement of a very special kind.... Thinking is the attempt to satisfy a special impulse, and the attempt implies an assumption about reality.... But why, it may be objected, is this assumption better than what holds for practice? Why is the theoretical to be superior to the practical end? I have never said that this is so, only here, that is, in metaphysics, I must be allowed to reply, we are acting theoretically.... The theoretical standard within theory must surely be absolute” (p. 153. The italics again are mine; compare with the quotation this, from p. 485: “Our attitude, however, in metaphysics must be theoretical.” So, also, p. 154, “Since metaphysics is mere theory and since theory from its nature must be made by the intellect, it is here the intellect alone which is to be satisfied”).
Grant that intellect is a special movement or mode of practice; grant that we are not merely acting (are we ever merely acting?) but are “specially occupied and therefore subject to special conditions,” and the problem remains what special kind of activity is thinking? what is its experienced differentia from other kinds? what is its commerce with them? When the problem is what special kind of an activity is thinking and of what nature is the consistency which is its criterion, somehow we do not get forward by being told that thinking is a special mode of practice and that its criterion is consistency. The unquestioned presupposition of Mr. Bradley is that thinking is such a wholly separate activity (the “intellect alone” which has to be satisfied), that to give it autonomy is to say that it, and its criterion, have nothing to do with other activities; that it is “independent” as to criterion, in a way which excludes interdependence in function and outcome. Unless the term “special” be interpreted to mean isolated, to say that thinking is a special mode of activity no more nullifies the proposition that it arises in a practical contest and operates for practical ends, than to say that blacksmithing is a special activity, negates its being one connected mode of industrial activity.
His underlying presupposition of the separate character of thought comes out in the passage last quoted. “Our impulse,” he says, “is to alter the conflicting situation and, on the theoretical side, to bring its contents into peaceable unity.” If one substitutes for the word “on” the word “through,” one gets a conception of theory and of thinking that does justice to the autonomy of the operation and yet so connects it with other activities as to give it a serious business, real purpose, and concrete responsibility and hence testibility. From this point of view the theoretical activity is simply the form that certain practical activities take after colliding, as the most effective and fruitful way of securing their own harmonization. The collision is not theoretical; the issue in “peaceable unity” is not theoretical. But theory names the type of activity by which the transformation from war to peace is most amply and securely effected.[22]
Admit, however, the force of Mr. Bradley’s contention on its own terms and see how futile is the result. It is quite true, as Mr. Bradley says (p. 153), that if a man sits down to play the metaphysical game, he must abide by the rules of thinking; but if thinking be already, with respect to reality, an idle and futile game, simply abiding by the rules does not give additional value to its stakes. Grant the premises as to the character of thought, and the assertion of the final character of the theoretical standard within metaphysics—since metaphysics is a form of theory—is a warning against metaphysics. If the intellect involves self-contradiction, it is either impossible that it should be satisfied, or else self-contradiction is its satisfaction.