Pragmatism and idealism

by William Caldwell

PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY

Pragmatism has by this time received so much attention in the reflective literature of the day that any writer upon the subject may now fairly presume upon a general acquaintance with its main principles and contentions. Indeed, it is probable that most thinking people may be credited with the ability to have formed some sort of judgment of their own about a philosophy whose main contention is that true ideas are working ideas, and that truth itself, like a creed or a belief, is simply a working valuation of reality. There are still, however, some things to be said, at least in English, upon the place and the meaning of Pragmatism in the philosophical reconstruction that is generally felt to be so necessary to-day.

As far as the external signs of any such vital relation between Pragmatism and our recent academic philosophy are concerned, the reader may be aware, to begin with, that there have been many important concessions[1] made to pragmatists by such representative rationalists as Mr. Bradley and Professor Taylor, not to speak of others,[2] and Pragmatism has certainly had a very powerful effect upon the professional philosophy of both England and Germany, judging at least from the extent to which many of the more prominent representatives of philosophy in these countries have apparently been compelled to accord to it at least an official recognition.[3]

Pragmatism, again, in consequence of the different receptions that it has met with at the hands of its friends and its foes, has undergone various phases of exposition and of modification, although it has not yet, nor is it on the whole likely to have, a philosophical output comparable to that of Idealism. It has become more and more conscious of its own affiliations and relations to older, and to broader doctrines, declaring itself, in the hands of Professor James and his friends, to be but a new name for older ways of thinking. And it has succeeded, in a measure, in clearing itself from liability to the superficial interpretation that it met with a few years ago, when it was scoffed at for teaching that you may believe “what you like,” for speaking, for example, as if the “theoretical” consequences of truth were not to be considered as well as the “practical.” Although still resting in the main upon an outspoken declaration of war against Rationalism, it is no longer blind to the place and the value of thought or the “concept,” in the matter of the interpretation of our experience.

Pragmatism, as the theory is generally understood, rests in the main upon the work of three men, Professors James and Dewey of America, and Dr. Schiller of Oxford. The fact, along doubtless with other things, that these men have ere now been spoken of as occupying a right, a left, and a centre in the new movement, is presumably an indication that it has already received its highest theoretical expression—presumably in the California pamphlet of Professor James, or in the famous Popular Science Monthly article of Peirce, canonized as the patron saint of the movement by James.

Whether this be so or not, it has been in the main the work of James to set forth the meaning of Pragmatism as a philosophy of everyday life, as the theory of the attitude of man as man to the world in which he finds himself. Dr. Schiller, again, it is claimed, has done much to set forth Pragmatism to the world as an essentially humanistic philosophy, recognizing and providing for the rights of faith and of feeling in determining our beliefs and our theories about things. This philosophy has “much in common with what in other quarters is called Personalism.” It cannot, however, be differentiated so sharply as Dr. Schiller apparently would have us believe from the many manifestations of this philosophy that abound in modern times, from Fichte, and from Lotze, down to men who are still living—Eucken and others. The ingenious Professor Dewey, moreover, is the champion of the scientific, or the empirical, or the “instrumental” method in philosophy, and has worked hard and successfully at the reform which he thinks must take place in logical and philosophical conceptions when interpreted as simply tools or devices for the economy of our thought.

When, in pragmatist fashion, we seek to judge of Pragmatism by this last-mentioned matter of its results, by the things it has enabled its advocates to accomplish, we find that we may, to begin with, speak in the following terms of the work of Professor James. He has certainly indicated how the pragmatist method may be applied to the solution of some of the ordinary difficulties of reflective thought; about, for example, the nature of matter or the nature of the soul, or about the old opposition between the “one” and the “many,” about such concepts as “thing,” “kinds,” “time,” “space,” the “fancied,” the “real,” and so on. In all such cases an answer, he holds, is obtained by putting, say, the initial difficulty in the following form: “What practical difference can it make now that the world should be run by matter or by spirit?”

A fair illustration of his meaning here would be his own characteristic attitude, so far as the philosophy of religion is concerned, to the so-called “theistic” proofs that have been part of the stock in trade of rational theology. A “necessary being” and a “whole of truth” and the “Absolute”[4] are not, he would hold, what the average man understands by God; they have hardly any perceptible effect upon life and conduct—the all-important matter in the thought of God as he conceives it. Only those notions, he would have it, which can be interpreted by the thought of the “difference” they make to our practical conduct are real notions at all—“Providence,” say, or “God” as the guarantor of the reality and the permanence of the moral order, and so on. The “soul,” again, he would hold, “is good for just so much and no more.” And a similar thing, too, would be true about Berkeley’s “matter,” or about the “matter” of the materialists.[5] This latter, for instance, cannot possibly do all it is claimed to be able to do in the way of an explanation of the order of the world and the phenomena of life.

Then again, James has written a great many pages upon the so-called deeper view of human nature (as inclusive of will and “emotion” in addition to mere thought) taken by Pragmatism in comparison with that entertained by Rationalism. We shall have occasion to return to this point.

He has made it clear, too, that it was an unfair interpretation of Pragmatism to take it as a plea for believing what you like, as was said above. Our experience, he puts it, must be consistent, the “parts with the parts,” and the “parts with the whole.” Beliefs must not clash with other beliefs, the mind being wedged tightly between the coercion of the sensible order and that of the ideal order. By “consequences,” too, he contends we may mean intellectual or theoretical consequences as well as practical consequences.

He has also, along with his brother-pragmatists, raised the question of the nature of Truth, attaining to such important results as the following: (1) there is no such thing as pure truth, or ready-made truth; (2) the “copy-theory” of truth is unintelligible.[6] We shall later be obliged to examine the more controversial positions that (3) truth is not an end in itself, but a means towards vital satisfaction; (4) truth is the “expedient” in the way of thinking, as the right is the expedient[7] in the way of acting, and so on.

Further, Professor James finds that Pragmatism leaves us with the main body of our common-sense beliefs [Peirce holds practically the same thing], such as the belief in “freedom”—as a “promise and a relief,” he adds; and the belief in the religious outlook upon life, in so far as it “works.” This is the attitude and the tenor of the well-known books on The Will to Believe and The Varieties of Religious Experience.[8] “Our acts, our turning-places, where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves and grow, are the parts of the world to which we are closest, the parts of which our knowledge is the most intimate and complete. Why should we not take them at their face-value?” And yet, as against this attitude, Professor James elsewhere finds himself unable to believe “that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe.” It is the emergence of many such incoherences in his writings that gives to his pragmatist philosophy of religion a subjective and temperamental character, and makes it seem to be lacking in any objective basis. “If radically tough, the hurly-burly of the sensible facts of nature will be enough for you, and you will need no religion at all. If radically tender, you will take up with the more monistic form of religion: the pluralistic form—that is, reliance on possibilities that are not necessities—will not seem to offer you security enough.”[9] He “inclines,” on the whole, to “Meliorism,” treating satisfaction as neither necessary nor impossible; the pragmatist lives in “the world of possibilities.”

These words show clearly how difficult it is to pin down Professor James to any single intelligible philosophy of belief, if belief be interpreted as in any sense a “commerce” of the soul with objective realities, as something more than a merely generous faith in the gradual perfection or betterment of human society.

“Religious experience,” as he puts it in his Pluralistic Universe, “peculiarly so called, needs, in my opinion, to be carefully considered and interpreted by every one who aspires to reason out a more complete philosophy.” In this same book, it is declared, however, on the one hand, that “we have outgrown the old theistic orthodoxy, the God of our popular Christianity being simply one member of a pluralistic system”; and yet, on the other hand, and with equal emphasis, that “we finite minds may simultaneously be conscious with one another in a supernatural intelligence.”[10]

The book on The Meaning of Truth seems to return, in the main, to the American doctrine of the strenuous life as the only courageous, and therefore true, attitude to beliefs, as the life that contains, in the plenitude of its energizing, the answer to all questions. “Pluralism affords us,” it openly confesses, “no moral holidays, and it is unable to let loose quietistic raptures, and this is a serious deficiency in the pluralistic philosophy which we have professed.” Professor James here again attacks Absolutism in the old familiar manner, as somehow unequal to the complexity of things, or the pulsating process of the world, casting himself upon the philosophy of experience, and upon the evident reality of the “many” and of the endless variety of the relations of things, in opposition to the abstract simplicity of the “one,” and the limited range of a merely logical, or mathematical, manner of conceiving of reality. “The essential service of Humanism, as I conceive the situation, is to have seen that, though one part of experience may lean upon another part to make it what it is in any one of several aspects in which it may be considered, experience as a whole is self-sustaining and leans on nothing.... “It gets rid of the standing problems of Monism and of other metaphysical systems and paradoxes.”[11]

Professor James exhibits, however, at the same time a very imperfect conception of philosophy, holding that it gives us, in general, “no new range of practical power,” ignoring, as it were, the difference between philosophy and poetry and religion and mere personal enthusiasm. And he leaves the whole question of the first principles of both knowledge and conduct practically unsettled. These things are to him but conceptual tools,[12] and “working” points of departure for our efforts, and there seems in his books to be no way of reducing them to any kind of system. And he makes, lastly, a most unsuccessful attempt at a theory of reality. Reality is to him sometimes simply a moving equilibrium of experience, the “flux” we have already referred to; sometimes the fleeting generations of men who have thought out for us all our philosophies and sciences and cults and varied experiences, and sometimes the “common-sense world in which we find things partly joined and partly disjoined.” It is sometimes, too, other things even than these. In a chapter of the book upon Pragmatism[13] it is stated in italics that “reality is, in general, what truths have to take account of,” and that it has three parts: (1) “the flux of our sensations,” and (2) the “relations that obtain between our sensations, or between their copies in our minds,” and (3) “the previous truths of which every new inquiry takes account.” Then again, in A Pluralistic Universe,[14] it is declared that “there may ultimately never be an All-form at all, that the substance of reality may never get totally collected ... and that a distributive form of reality, the Each-form, is logically as acceptable and empirical and probable as the All-form.” This is the theory of the outspoken “radical empiricism”[15] which is the contention of the volume upon The Meaning of Truth, the main effort of which seems to be to show again that the world is still in the process of making. It has the additional drawback of bringing Pragmatism down not only to the level of radical empiricism, but to that of common-sense realism or dualism [the belief in the two independent realities of matter and mind], and to that of the “copy-theory”[16] of truth, from which both Pragmatism and Radical Empiricism are especially supposed to deliver us. “I will say here again, for the sake of emphasis, that the existence of the object ... is the only reason, in innumerable cases, why the idea does work successfully.... Both Dewey and I hold firmly ... to objects independent of our own judgments.”[17] Much of all this is, no doubt, like surrendering philosophy altogether.

In the case of Dr. Schiller, we may notice first his frequent and successful exhibition of the extent to which human activity enters into the constitution not only of “truth,” but of “reality,” of what we mean by reality. This is interwoven in his books with his whole philosophy of truth as something merely human, as “dependent upon human purposes,” as a “valuation” expressive of the satisfactory, or the unsatisfactory, nature of the contents of “primary reality.” It is interwoven, too, with his doctrine that reality is essentially a ὕλη, something that is still in the making, something that human beings can somehow re-make and make perfect. Then this position about truth and reality is used by him, as by James, as a ground of attack against Absolutism, with its notion of a “pre-existing ideal” of knowledge and reality, as already existing in a super-sensible world, that descends magically into the passively recipient soul of man. There is no such thing, he claims, as absolute truth, and the conception of an “absolute reality” is both futile and pernicious. Absolutism, too, has an affinity to Solipsism,[18] the difficulties of which it can escape only by self-elimination.

Then Absolutism is, Schiller continues, “essentially irreligious,”[19] although it was fostered at first in England for essentially religious purposes.[20] It has developed there now at last, he reminds us, a powerful left[21] wing which, as formerly in Germany, has opened a quarrel with theology. In Absolutism, the two phases of Deity—God as moral principle, and God as an intellectual principle—“fall apart,” and absolutist metaphysic has really no connexion with genuine religion. Humanism can “renew Hegelianism” by treating the making of truth as also the making of reality. Freedom is real, and may possibly “pervade the universe.”[22] All truth implies belief, and it is obviously one of the merits of Pragmatism to bring truth and reason together. Beliefs and ideas and wishes are really essential and integral features in real knowing, and if knowing, as above, really transforms our experience, they must be treated as “real forces,” which cannot be ignored by philosophy.[23]

Against all this would-be positive, or constructive, philosophy we must, however, record the fact that the pragmatism of Dr. Schiller breaks down altogether in the matter of the recognition of a distinction between the “discovering” of reality and the “making” of reality. And despite the ingenuity of his essay in the first edition of Humanism upon “Activity and Substance,”[24] there is not in his writings, any more than in those of James, any coherent or adequate theory of reality. And this is the case whether we think of the “primary reality” upon which we human beings are said to “react,” in our knowledge and in our action, or of the supreme reality of God’s existence, of which such an interesting speculative account is given in the essay referred to. Nor is there in Dr. Schiller, any more than in James, any adequate conception, either of philosophy as a whole, or of the theory of knowledge, or of the relation of Pragmatism as a “method” (it is modestly claimed to be only such, but the position is not adhered to) to philosophy as such.[25] “For the pragmatic theory of knowledge initial principles are literally ἀρχαί, mere starting-points variously, arbitrarily, casually selected, from which we hope to try to advance to something better. Little we care what their credentials may be.... And as far as the future is concerned, systems of philosophy will abound as before, and will be as various as ever, but they will probably be more brilliant in colouring and more attractive in their form, for they will certainly have to be put forward and acknowledged as works of art that bear the impress of a unique and individual soul.”[26]

The main result of pragmatist considerations in the case of Professor Dewey is perhaps that reconsideration of the problems of logic and knowledge in the light of the facts of genetic and functional psychology which has now become fairly general on the part of English and American students of philosophy. It is through his influence generally that pragmatists seem always to be talking about the way in which we “arrive at” our beliefs, about ideas as “instruments” for the interpretation and arrangement of our experience, about the “passage” from cognitive expectation to “fulfilment,” about ideas as “plans of action” and mental habits, about the growth and the utility of the truth, about the “instrumental” character of all our thinking, about beliefs as more fundamental than knowledge, and so on.

Professor Dewey has also written many more or less popular, but none the less highly valuable, short studies upon the application of an instrumentalist conception of philosophy to education and to social questions. One of his last pieces of service in this connection is a volume in which he associates Pragmatism with the general revolution effected in the entire range of the mental and moral sciences by Darwinism, with the present tendency in philosophy to turn away from ultimate questions to specific problems, and with the reform which, in his opinion, is necessary in our educational ideals[27] generally.

These three leading exponents of Pragmatism may be regarded as meeting the objections to philosophy urged respectively by the “man of affairs,” by the “mystical, religious” man, and by the “man of science.”[28] By this it is meant that the man of affairs will find in James an exposition of philosophy as the study of different ways of looking at the world; the mystical, religious man will find in Schiller a treatment of philosophy as the justification of an essentially spiritual philosophy of life; and that the scientific man will find in the writings of Dewey and his associates a treatment of philosophy as nothing else than an extension into the higher regions of thought of the same experimental and hypothetical method with which he is already familiar in the physical sciences.

In this version of the work of the three leading pragmatists it is assumed, of course, that the pragmatist philosophy is the only philosophy that can show to the average man that philosophy can really do something useful—can “bake bread,” if you will, can give to a man the food of a man. It is assumed, too, that it is the only philosophy which proceeds scientifically, that is to say, by means of observation and of hypotheses that “work,” and by subsequent deduction and by “verification.” And again, that it is the only philosophy that gives to man the realities upon which he can base his aspirations or his faith in distinction, that is to say, from the mere abstractions of Rationalism in any form.

By way of a few quotations illustrative of the fundamental contentions of the pragmatists, we may select the following: “Ideas become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience, to summarise them and get about among them by conceptional short-cuts instead of following the interminable succession of particular phenomena. Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labour—is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally.”[29] “The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good for definite and assignable reasons.”[30] From Professor Dewey: “Thinking is a kind of activity which we perform at specific need, just as at other times we engage in other sorts of activity, as converse with a friend, draw a plan for a house, take a walk, eat a dinner, purchase a suit of clothes, etc. etc. The measure of its success, the standard of its validity is precisely the degree in which thinking disposes of the difficulty and allows us to proceed with the more direct modes of experiencing, that are henceforth possessed of more assured and deepened value.”[31] From Dr. Schiller’s book, Studies in Humanism: “Pragmatism is the doctrine that when an assertion claims truth, its consequences are always used to test its claims; that (2) the truth of an assertion depends on its application; that (3) the meaning of a rule lies in its application; that (4) all meaning depends on purpose; that (5) all mental life is purposive. It [Pragmatism] must constitute itself into (6) a systematic protest against all ignoring of the purposiveness of actual knowing, alike whether it is abstracted from for the sake of the imaginary, pure, or absolute reason of the rationalists, or eliminated for the sake of an equally imaginary or pure mechanism of the naturalists. So conceived, we may describe it as (7) a conscious application to logic of a teleological psychology which implies ultimately a voluntaristic metaphysics.”

From these citations, and from the descriptive remarks of the preceding two paragraphs, we may perhaps be enabled to infer that our Anglo-American Pragmatism has progressed from the stage of (1) a mere method of discussing truth and thinking in relation to the problem of philosophy as a whole, (2) that of a more or less definite and detailed criticism of the rationalism that overlooks the practical, or purposive, character of most of our knowledge, to that of (3) a humanistic or “voluntaristic” or “personalistic” philosophy, with its many different associations and affiliations.[32] One of the last developments, for example, of this pragmatist humanism is Dr. Schiller’s association of philosophy with the metaphysics of evolution, with the attempt to find the goal of the world-process and of human history in a changeless society of perfected individuals.

We shall immediately see, however, that this summary description of the growth of Pragmatism has to be supplemented by a recognition of (1) some of the different phases Pragmatism has assumed on the continent of Europe, (2) the different phases that may be detected in the reception or criticism accorded to it in different countries, and (3) some of the results of the pragmatist movement upon contemporary philosophy. All these things have to do with the making of the complex thing that we think of as Pragmatism and the pragmatist movement.