Pragmatism and idealism

by William Caldwell

NOTE

It is necessary for me to append a few words as to the possible connexion between the foregoing criticism of the first volume of Dr. Bosanquet’s Gifford Lectures and the subject-matter of the second volume, which appeared while I was preparing the manuscript of this book for the press. I have been able only to inspect its contents and to inform myself about the ways in which it has impressed some of its representative critics. What I have thus learned does not, in my opinion, make it necessary for me to unsay or to rewrite what I have said in this chapter. My desire was to indicate the kind of criticism that the pragmatists and the humanists, as far as I understand them, would be inclined to make of Absolutism as represented in the Principle of Individuality and Value as the last significant Anglo-Hegelian output. This, I think, I have done, and the reader may be desirably left to himself to settle the question of the relation of the first of Dr. Bosanquet’s books to its companion volume that appeared in the following calendar year. I cannot, however, be so wilfully blind to the existence of this second great “Gifford” book of his as to appear to ignore the fact, that on its very face and surface it seems to do many of the things that I have allowed myself to signalize as things that Absolutism and Anglo-Hegelianism have not done, or have done but imperfectly. Its very title, The Value and Destiny of the Individual, and the titles of many of its chapters, and the reception accorded to it in such instructive reviews as those of Professor Sir Henry Jones and Professor Muirhead (in the July numbers of the Hibbert Journal and Mind respectively), are to my mind convincing proof that it is by far the most serious Anglo-Hegelian attempt of the passing generation to deal with many of the objections that have been brought against Rationalistic Idealism by the pragmatists and the voluntarists, by the defenders of faith and feeling and experience, and (before all these recent people) by many independent idealist writers of our time in England and elsewhere. In the interest of truth and of the thinking public generally, I append the mere titles of some of the chapters and divisions of Dr. Bosanquet’s second volume: “The Value of Personal Feeling, and the Grounds of the Distinctness of Persons,” “The Moulding of Souls,” “The Miracle of Will,” the “Hazards and Hardships of Finite Selfhood,” the “Stability and Security of Finite Selfhood,” “The Religious Consciousness,” “The Destiny of the Finite Self,” “The Gates of the Future.” There is in all the rich content that is thus indicated, and in all the high and deep discussion of “the ideas of a lifetime” that it includes, a veritable mine of philosophical reflection for the reader who desires to think in a connected, or Hegelian, manner about things—a mine, too, that is at least indicative of the wide territory both of fact and of principle upon which pragmatist philosophy must enter before it can become a true philosophy. I cannot find, however—this was surely not to be expected in a thinker of Dr. Bosanquet’s power—that the principles of argumentation that determined the nature and contents of the earlier volume have undergone any modification in its success or successor; indeed, what is here offered, and discovered by the reader and the critics, is but a continuation and application of the same dialectic principles to “finite beings, that is, in effect to human souls.” If any one will take upon himself the task of estimating the success or the non-success of the enterprise he will travel through a piece of philosophical writing that is as comprehensive and as coherent, and as elevating in its tone, as anything that has appeared from the Neo-Hegelian camp. The things that I chiefly feel and believe about it are, firstly, that its account of the facts of life and thought are, again, all determined by certain presuppositions about conceivability and about the principles of contradiction and negation; secondly, that it is still the same “whole” of logic that is to it the test of all reality and individuality; and, thirdly, that it is, again, a great pity that Dr. Bosanquet should not have acted upon some sort of recognition of the relation of his own dialectical principles to those of his master Hegel, or to those of some of his Neo-Hegelian predecessors in England and America. Although it is almost an impertinence on the part of one who has just made the acquaintance of this outstanding volume to speak in any detail of its contents, I can indicate part of my meaning by pointing out that it is throughout such things as “finite mind,” the “finite mind” that is “best understood by approaching it from the side of the continuum” [the “whole”], the “finite mind” that is “shaped by the universe,” that is “torn between existence and self-transcendence,” “appearance,” an “externality which is the object of mind,” the “positive principle of totality or individuality manifesting itself in a number of forms,” “good” and “evil as attitudes concerning a creature’s whole being,” “volition” in terms of the “principle that there is for every situation a larger and more effective point of view than the given”—that are discussed, and not the real persons who have what they call “minds” and “volitions” and “attitudes,” and who invent all these principles and distinctions to describe the world of their experience and the world of their thoughts. As against him Pragmatism and Humanism would, I think, both insist that the first reality for all thought and speculation is not the “logical whole” that underlies, in the mind of the thinker, the greater number of all his categories and distinctions, but the life and the lives of the persons in a world of inter-subjective intercourse, wherein these points of view are used for different purposes. And I cannot see how Dr. Bosanquet is entitled to scorn all those who hold to the idea of the reality of the lives of the persons who are agents and thinkers in this personal realm, which is for us the highest reality of the universe, as believers in the “exclusiveness of personality,” although I would certainly agree with him that our experience, when properly interpreted, carries us beyond the subjectivism and the individualism of some forms of Pragmatism or Pluralism. The reader who is anxious to know about the real value of the Hegelianism upon which Dr. Bosanquet’s philosophy reposes should consult the work of Croce upon the “living” and the “dead” elements in Hegel’s System. It has recently been translated into English. Dr. Bosanquet, like many Hegelians, seems to me to overlook almost entirely the important elements in the philosophy of Kant—of some of which I speak of in the next chapter as developed in the spiritualistic philosophy of Bergson.

CHAPTER IX
PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON[386]

The pragmatist elements in the philosophy of Bergson of which it is, perhaps, legitimate for us to speak here are (1) his “Anti-Intellectualism,” and (2) his “Activism” or “Actionism.” The latter culminates in his freedom-philosophy and his spiritualism. I shall comment shortly upon these two things, and then suggest one or two general criticisms of his philosophy as a whole.

Bergson’s anti-intellectualism rests ultimately upon his contention that the human intellect is related in the main to the needs of action, that the brain is an organ of action rather than an organ of thought, that our intelligence is at home only in the realm of the physical and the mathematical sciences,[387] that contrivance and invention and the practical comprehension of the “material” are its proper activities, and that for these latter purposes it splits up the world of the senses and the understanding into a discontinuous aggregate of physical units, which it then proceeds to reconstruct in a spatial and temporal order. We perceive in Nature, he holds, what interests[388] us in the way of our vital needs; our intellect is adapted, not for the understanding or the purely rational (“abstract”) comprehension of “causality” and the “life of things,” but for the maintenance and furtherance of our own lives, and for the creation of the instruments and agencies (signs, language, tools, imagined sequences and laws, essences, causes, the “descriptions” of science, the special senses, the convolutions of the brain, etc.) that minister to this. Science is to-day still penetrated through and through with primitive metaphysics, with the metaphysics of animism, with a belief in separate things like forces, atoms, elements, or what not—indicative all of them of its attempt to “divide up” the real that it may command it for theoretical and practical purposes. We can see this in the “structural psychology”[389] of the day and its analysis of our mental life into “elements,” in respect of the number and character of which there are lasting differences of opinion among the masters of the science—into “impressions,” and “affections,” and sensations, images, memories, ideas, and so on. And we can see it, too, in the erroneous attempts sometimes made by psychologists to treat these entities as if they had clearly defined temporal and spatial characteristics or qualities.

The supreme mistake of philosophy, according to Bergson, has been to import into the domain of speculation a method of thinking that was originally destined for action. It has forgotten that nearly all the leading conceptions of common sense and of science and of “analysis” have been invented, not for final and general, but for relative and particular purposes. And it has fallen too readily under the influence of a certain traditional view of the relations between metaphysics and science—the view, namely, that philosophy should just take the findings of science and of common-sense about the world as its initial material, subjecting them, of course, to a certain preliminary reinterpretation, but finally reconstructing them, almost as they were, into a system.[390] The one thing, in short, that philosophy has failed to understand is the life and the movement and the process of the world, as an infinitely more important fact than the endless terms and conceptions and entities (“will,” “reason,” “Ideas,” etc.) into which it has been analysed. We might sum up the whole by saying that Bergson’s anti-intellectualism is simply a protest, not against the use, but only against the “systematic misuse”[391] of general conceptions that have been current in science and philosophy “since the time of Socrates,” a protest, however, that in his case is not merely general and negative, but particularised and positive.[392]

Like any and all anti-intellectualism, Bergson’s anti-intellectualism is liable to serious misinterpretation, and it is currently misinterpreted and misrepresented as “irrationalism.” His intention, however, is not to destroy and to condemn philosophy and reasoning, and to exalt mere intuition and faith, but rather to “liberate”[393] our human consciousness of ourselves and of the world from the dogmatism of what he regards to be the utilitarian intellect, from the many hopeless contradictions and antinomies and puzzles of the mere analytic understanding. Philosophy, in particular, he would free from the last traces and symptoms of scientific rationalism, although fully aware of the fact that our modern philosophy had its very departure from the rationalism of the great founders of modern science like Kepler and Galileo and the rest.

He would strike at the roots of all this confident rationalism or scientific philosophy by opening up a broader and a deeper view of truth than that afforded to the merely piece-meal and utilitarian view.

As for the Actionism and the action philosophy of Bergson, this is perhaps more in line than any other tendency of the day with the new life and the new thought of the twentieth century, although (like Pragmatism) it stands in need of correction or revision by the principles of a sound ethical philosophy, by the Idealism that is not, and cannot be, the mere creation of to-day or yesterday. In essence it is, to begin with, but an extension to the mind as a whole and to all its so-called special faculties (“sensation,” “perception,” “memory,” “ideation,” “judgment,” “thinking,” “emotion,” and the rest) of the “dynamic,”[394] instead of the older, static point of view that the recent science of our time has applied to matter and to life, and that Pragmatism and the “hypothetical method” have sought to apply to all the ordinary conceptions and constructions that exist in the different domains of the different sciences.[395] It is also, from our point of view, as we may see, an attempt at the expression, in the terms of a comparatively simple philosophy, of many of the considerations in respect of knowledge and conduct that have been brought forward in the preceding pages of this book. We have already dwelt in different ways, for example, upon the fact that there is no perception or sensation without an organic reaction on the part of the percipient or the sentient being, that an idea is in a sense a motor attitude (a way of comprehending particulars or particular facts in relation to our purposes and our ends), that a logical judgment represents a “division” of the real, or of the processes of Nature, for some purpose or other, that our whole mental life is purposive, that there is no “pure” cognition without attendant emotion and[396] volition, that it is in action that desire and thought come together, that our whole knowledge of the world is necessarily a knowledge of it in terms of our purposes and our highest attitudes, and so on. All of this is, as it were, an indication of the psychological and the logical considerations upon which Bergson bases his positive,[397] activistic, philosophy of mind.

It is to be remembered in Bergson’s interest that when we speak of his Actionism[398] we do not mean a narrowing down[399] on his part of the activities of the soul to physical labour and to mere utilitarian effort, but its capacity, also, for that creative activity which he takes to be the very keynote of personal life and the evolutionary process.

As for the freedom-philosophy with which Bergson’s Actionism is to be associated, this is worked out by him, firstly, in the most perfect correspondence with what he believes to be the facts of life and mind; and, secondly, in terms of that anti-rationalism (or hostility to the merely scientific intellect) which is his working theory of knowledge. His views upon this subject have also been depreciated and misunderstood by some of his opponents who attack what they call his “intuitional” treatment of the freedom-question—his insistence upon the direct intuition of our life that we have when we act consciously, and when we are “most ourselves”—when we act out “freely” our own nature. To him the primary fact for any human being is the life-impulse that is both instinctive and reflective, that is certainly far more of a fundamental reality than any of those entities or concepts (“cells,” “atoms,” “forces,” “laws,” or what not) which, with Kant, he clearly sees to be the creation of the intellect for its descriptive and practical purposes. This life is “free” in the sense that we are not “determined” by any or all of those forces and laws to which our intellect subjects everything else, but which it cannot apply to the life that is more than mere matter, that is a real becoming and a real process, a real creation and development.

The “spiritualism,” again, of his interpretation of this life and activity rests, to begin with, upon his opinion that the very inception of the activity, and the adjustment, and the selection in which the simplest life-effort, and the simplest perception of a living being consist, indicate the presence and the operation of a controlling agency,[400] or mind, or principle of spiritual “choice” that is not, and cannot be, explained on the principles of a mechanical science or philosophy. This principle is, in a word, the life-force, or the creative activity, the élan vital of which we read so much in his books, that has “seized upon matter,” vitalizing it into force and energy, into the “play” upon each other of all the varied activities and grades and forms of the will to live, and into the various forms of socialized and co-operative living on the part of animals and men. We shall immediately remark upon the matter of the apparent limitations of this spiritual philosophy of life, or reality, that is here but indicated or stated.

One of its essential features, so far as we are at present concerned, is his claim that his introduction of a spiritual principle into the life-force, or the creative activity that has expressed itself in the various grades and forms of life, both animal and human, is not a phase of the old philosophy[401] or theology of “final causes” or of a predetermined[402] “teleology.” To this old finalism or teleology[403] the life of organic nature (the “organs” and “cells,” the “instinctive” actions, and the “adjustments” of animals, and so on) were all due to the work of a pre-existing, calculating intelligence operating upon matter; whereas to him they are but different expressions or creations of the life-force that is as little predetermined in organic evolution, as it is in the realm of the activities interpreted for us (in part) by the newer physics and the newer chemistry—in the processes, for example, that are exemplified in the generation of a star out of a nebula. This entire treatment, however, of the notion of purpose in nature is a matter of great difficulty in the philosophy of Bergson, and his own thought (as I shall presently state) is apt to strike us as just as hypothetical as some of the views he attempts to combat. It raises, too, the question of the valuation of his philosophy as a whole, and of its relation to the great thinker who still stands in the very centre of the entire modern movement from Copernicus to Comte and Darwin—Immanuel Kant.[404]

We shall best get at the matter of the fuller developments of the philosophy of Bergson that are of interest to us at present, by indicating some of the results that would accrue from it to the constructive philosophy in which we are interested as the outcome of Pragmatism and Idealism. Among these would be, firstly, a new and a fresh, and yet a perfectly rational apprehension of the fact of the necessarily abstract and hypothetical[405] character of the analyses to which our world is subjected by the science and by the technic and the supposed “economy” of our present culture.[406] Then an equally new and equally rational (or “rationally grounded”) conviction of the inadequacy of the physical and the scientific categories to the comprehension and the explanation of life and of the life of the spirit. Thirdly, a confirmation of many of the tendencies to which the Pragmatism and the Voluntarism and the Humanism of the last century have given a more or less one-sided and imperfect formulation. Among such confirmed tendencies are (α) the attempt they have all made to attain to a deeper[407] view of human nature than the view hitherto taken by rationalism and intellectualism, (β) their emphasis upon the freedom and the initiative[408] of the individual and upon the necessity, on the part of philosophy, of a “dynamic” or “motive-awakening”[409] theory of reality, (γ) their insistence[410] similarly upon the necessity to our thought of a direct contact with reality, and upon the impossibility of our beginning in philosophy without assumptions of one kind or another, (δ) their refusal to make any ultimate separation[411] between the intellect and the will, between the highest thought and the highest emotion, (ε) their tendency to regard belief[412] rather than knowledge as our fundamental estimate of truth and reality.

A fourth constructive result, however, of the philosophy of Bergson would be not the mere confirmation of any number of pragmatist and humanist tendencies, but their integration, and their transformation into the evidences and the manifestation of a new spiritual philosophy of life and of the universe generally. It is this possible quasi integration and transformation of so many of the tendencies of Pragmatism and Voluntarism and of the Philosophy of Science of the day, that makes Bergson the greatest of all the pragmatists—although the term hardly occurs in his main writings, and although he breathes from first to last the air of an idealism[413] and a spiritualism that is above and beyond all the mere instrumentalism, and the mere empiricism and the ethical opportunism of Pragmatism.

* * * * *

The following are some of the difficulties and counter-considerations that stand in the way of the intelligibility and the supposed novelty of the philosophy of Bergson. (1) It is in some respects but a biological philosophy after all, a would-be philosophical interpretation of the “evolutionary process” which takes many things for granted and ignores many difficulties. Some of these things are the life-force itself, the élan de vie, the vital aspects that he sees in the forces of nature, the “eternal movement” of which he is always speaking as the only reality and as the very life of the universe, the whole “adaptation” philosophy that characterises his own teleology despite his attacks on “mechanism” and on “finalism,” and so on. One is tempted, indeed, to think that in much of all this he forgets his own doctrine of the hypothetical character of science and philosophy, and that, in his very anxiety to escape from mechanism and from rationalism, and Paleyism, he credits Nature with a contingency and a “freedom”[414] that corresponds in their way to the chaos, of which the Greeks thought as a necessary background to the cosmos. He seems, in other words, to deify into a kind of eternal “becoming” and a quasi free and creative “duration,” his own (necessary) inability to grasp the system of things.

Then, secondly, there is a veritable crop of difficulties that arise out of his contention that our intellect is adapted “only to matter.” What, for example, of the various non-utilitarian[415] intuitions of art and morality and religion, that are as undoubtedly facts of our conscious experience as is our comprehension and utilisation of “matter” for the various purposes of civilisation?[416] If it be literally true that our understanding is “incapacitated” for the comprehension of life and of the creative activities of the soul, a new set of categories and a higher form of intelligence (than the merely material) must be elaborated for this special purpose. And if this higher form of intelligence be the “intuition” of which Bergson undoubtedly makes so much, then he must be more careful than he often is in suggesting that intuition and a philosophy of our intuitions “must go counter to the intellect.”[417] His theory of art reduces itself, for example, in the main to the negative contention that spiritual perception is always simply “anti-mechanical,”[418] simply the power of seeing things in another way than that of the engineer or the craftsman, the homo faber.

Thirdly, there are many dualisms or oppositions in his doctrine or expressed teaching, reducible all of them to the one great Cartesian dualism between the mind and the matter that are said by him to intersect in memory, and in perception, and in the life of the spirit generally—the opposition, for example, between instinct and intelligence, that between intelligence and intuition,[419] between the “mechanical” and the “organic,” between the “upward” and the “downward” movements that he attributes to the life-force. And there is a striking inconsistency between his apparent acceptance of the teaching of Kant in respect of the limitations of the physical and the temporal way of looking at things (ourselves included and our actions) and his belief in an eternal “duration,”[420] or movement, or process of which he is always speaking as the very life and texture of everything. This “real” or “pure” “duration” is a thing that troubles all students of his philosophy; it seems to make Bergson believe in what James talked of as a “strung-along” universe. And there is an inconsistency between the supremacy that he seems willing to accord to mind and spirit in the case of the new individuals who are always being born into the world, and the absence of a similar supremacy (or determining rôle) in the case of the mind or spirit without whose existence and operation the universe is unthinkable.[421]

As for the latter contradiction, we may note in his favour that he talks, at least once or twice, of “God” as “unceasing life”[422] and “active freedom,” and I am inclined to take this master thought as possibly a kind of foundation for his rich and suggestive philosophy of life and reality. But there is in his writings nothing like the thorough-going attempt that we find in the philosophy of Aristotle[423] to ground the motion and the life of the world in God as its final cause and its ultimate explanation. Equally little is there in Bergson a thorough-going attempt to work out the Idealism[424] upon which his whole system reposes—his initial conception of objects as “images,” or “ideas” for a consciousness, or for the life-force, or for the different “centres of activity” with which he peoples the worlds.

Fourthly, there is the drawback from the point of view of social philosophy about the thought of Bergson to which we have already made reference—that it lacks somehow the ethical and the social idealism that would warrant us in thinking of it as a worthy rival or substitute for the philosophy of history of the great idealists of the past and the present. It is necessary to speak here with the utmost caution if we would avoid doing injustice[425] to Bergson. We cannot mean, for example, that he does not do justice[426] to the social factor in human development of which we have heard so much, perhaps too much, from the sociologists.[427] We might mean, however, and we do in a sense mean that he has not made as much as he might have done of this factor, by developing for the thought of to-day the reality of that world of “spiritual communion” and “inter-subjective intercourse” of which we have spoken more than once.

Then we might also contend that Bergson has not as yet, in his philosophy of human life, taken much cognizance of the deeper[428] experiences of life, of the specifically ethical and religious feelings and thoughts of men. With the pragmatists he is unduly optimistic about the free expansive development of the individual. Against this objection it may be replied, that he has so thoroughly assimilated into the very texture of his thought and feeling some of the finest things in the spiritualism and the idealism of the reflective thought of France[429] that we would not, if we could, wish the germinal or fructifying elements in his system to be different from what they are. His “social” message is perhaps after all the best thing that it can be—the need of the inward spiritualization of the life and thought of the individual.

Lastly, in addition to the fine traditional spiritualism and libertarianism of French philosophy, we may think of the voluntarism of Kant and Schopenhauer as also militating somewhat against the idea of Bergson’s originality[430] in philosophy. Despite this it is still possible to regard him as one of important, modern, exponents of just that development of the Kantian philosophy that became imperative after Darwinism. He has indeed inaugurated for us that reading of the “theory of knowledge” in terms of the “theory of life”[431] which is his true and real continuation of the critical work of Kant. Hypothetical although it may be in many respects, it moves (owing to his thorough absorption in the many facts and theories of the biology of recent years) in an atmosphere that is altogether above the confines of the physical and the mathematical[432] sciences with which alone Kant was (in the main) directly acquainted. It is time that, with the help he affords in his free handling of the facts of life and of the supposed facts and theories of science, we should transform the exiguous “epistemology”[433] of the past generation into the more perfect hold upon “criticism” and upon the life of things that is represented in his thought.