Six Major Prophets

by Edwin E. Slosson

Dewey, who dislikes to wear even one tag—and that a nice new clean one—naturally resents having these five old ones tied to him, so he says:

It may be that pragmatism will turn out to be all of this formidable array, but even should it the one who thus defines it has hardly come within earshot of it. For whatever else pragmatism is or is not, the pragmatic spirit is primarily a revolt against that habit of mind which disposes of anything whatever—even so humble an affair as a new method in philosophy—by tucking it away, after this fashion, in the pigeon-holes of a filing cabinet....

It is better to view pragmatism quite vaguely as part and parcel of a general movement of intellectual reconstruction. For otherwise we seem to have no recourse save to define pragmatism—as does our German author—in terms of the very past systems against which it is a reaction; or, in escaping that alternative, to regard it as a fixed rival system making like claim to completeness and finality. And if, as I believe, one of the marked traits of the pragmatic movement is just the surrender of every such claim, how have we furthered our understanding of pragmatism?

In one of his Socratic dialogues[10] Dewey brings in at the close Chesterton's flip refutation of pragmatism:

Pupil. What you say calls to mind something of Chesterton's that I read recently: "I agree with the pragmatists that apparent objective truth is not the whole matter; that there is an authoritative need to believe the things that are necessary to the human mind. But I say that one of those necessities precisely is a belief in objective truth. Pragmatism is a matter of human needs and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist."

You would say, if I understand you aright, that to fall back upon the necessity of the "human mind" to believe in certain absolute truths, is to evade a proper demand for testing the human mind and all its works.

Teacher. My son, I am glad to leave the last word with you. This enfant terrible of intellectualism has revealed that the chief objection of absolutists to the pragmatic doctrine of the personal (or "subjective") factor in belief is that the pragmatist has spilled the personal milk in the absolutist's coconut.

It is curious to see how many different classes are now holding up Germany as a horrible example of the dangers of the theories they oppose. The Anglican Catholics blame Luther for the war and look upon the prospective triumph of the Allies as the final destruction of Protestantism in the world. The orthodox believe that Germany got into trouble through higher criticism. The classicists say that she is suffering from an overdose of science. The Absolute Idealists ascribe the bad conduct of Germany to her desertion of Kant, Hegel, and Fichte to follow after the new gods—or no gods—of Haeckel and Nietzsche. But Dewey, on the contrary, holds Kant, Hegel, and Fichte responsible for it all. "That philosophical absolutism may be practically as dangerous as matter-of-fact political absolutism history testifies." This is no new notion cooked up for the occasion, like so many of them, but one which Dewey plainly stated six years before the outbreak of the war in his address on Ethics at Columbia University. In speaking of Kant's denudation of Pure Reason of all concrete attributes he said:

Reason became a mere voice, which having nothing particular to say, said Law, Duty, in general, leaving to the existing social order of the Prussia of Frederick the Great the congenial task of declaring just what was obligatory in the concrete. The marriage of freedom and authority was thus celebrated with the understanding that sentimental primacy went to the former and practical control to the latter.—"Influence of Darwin", p. 65.

After the war began he expanded this idea in his McNair lectures at the University of North Carolina.[11] Because Germany has developed continuously without any decided break with its past like the French Revolution or the transplanting of Europeans to America, German thinkers have come to declare all progress as the unfolding of national life and to declare impossible the construction of constitutions such as we have in the New World. Dewey traces the intellectual process by which the German people have reached the very startling opinions they now hold as to their mission in the world as follows:

The premises of the historic syllogism are plain. First, the German Luther who saved for mankind the principle of spiritual freedom against Latin externalism; then Kant and Fichte, who wrought out the principle into a final philosophy of science, morals and the State; as conclusion, the German nation organized in order to win the world to a recognition of the principle, and thereby to establish the rule of freedom and science in humanity as a whole.... In the grosser sense of the words, Germany has not held that might makes right. But it has been instructed by a long line of philosophers that it is the business of ideal right to gather might to itself in order that it may cease to be merely ideal. The State represents exactly this incarnation of ideal law and right in effective might.

A hundred years ago Fichte in his "Addresses to the German Nation" roused his countrymen to make a stand against Napoleon and fulfill their mission to "elevate the German name to that of the most glorious of all peoples, making this Nation the regenerator and restorer of the world." "There is no middle ground: If you sink, so sinks humanity entire with you, without hope of future restoration."

This sounds very much like what we hear in Germany to-day, although the present German Empire differs markedly in some respects from the ideal State that Fichte foresaw. It is also the same sort of language as is being used in England and the other allied countries. In fact every nation has the same sense of its historic divine mission and unique importance to the world's civilization. Certainly we cannot deny the existence of that feeling among Americans. To quote again from Fichte: "While cosmopolitanism is the dominant will that the purpose of the existence of humanity be actually realized in humanity, patriotism is the will that this end be first realized in the particular nation to which we ourselves belong, and that this achievement thence spread over the entire race."

This might seem a harmless and indeed inspiring conception of patriotism, but when the Fichtean idea of a particular State as the incarnation of the divine will is combined with the Hegelian idea of progress through conflict, it makes a fatal mixture, as Dewey shows:

Philosophical justification of war follows inevitably from a philosophy of history composed in nationalistic terms. History is the movement, the march of God on earth through time. Only one nation at a time can be the latest and hence the fullest realization of God. The movement of God in history is thus particularly manifest in those changes by which unique place passes from one nation to another. War is the signally visible occurrence of such a flight of the divine spirit in its onward movement.