Pragmatism and idealism

by William Caldwell

Now it requires but the reflection of a moment to see that the various facts and considerations upon which the two last quotations, and the general devotion of Pragmatism to “belief,” both repose, are all distinctly in favour of the acceptability of Pragmatism at the present time. There is nothing in which people in general are more interested at the beginning of this twentieth century than in belief. It is this, for example, that explains such a thing as the great success to-day in our English-speaking world of such an enterprise as the Hibbert Journal of Philosophy and Religion, or the still greater phenomenon of the world-wide interest of the hour in the subject of comparative religion. Most modern men, the writer is inclined to think, believe[121] a great deal more than they know, the chief difficulty about this fact being that there is no recognized way of expressing it in our science or in our philosophy, or of acting upon it in our behaviour in society. It is, however, only the undue prominence of mathematical and physical science since the time of Descartes[122] that has made evidence and demonstration the main consideration of philosophy instead of belief, man’s true and fundamental estimate of reality.

We have already[123] pointed out that one of the main results of Pragmatism is the acceptance on the part of its leading upholders of our fundamental beliefs about the ultimately real and about the realization of our most deeply cherished purposes. In fact, reality in general is for them, we may say—in the absence from their writings of any better description,—simply that which we can “will,” or “believe in,” as the basis for action and for conscious “creative” effort, or constructive effort. As James himself puts it in his book on The Meaning of Truth: “Since the only realities we can talk about are objects believed in, the pragmatist, whenever he says ‘reality,’ means in the first instance what may count for the man himself as a reality, what he believes at the moment to be such. Sometimes the reality is a concrete sensible presence.... Or his idea may be that of an abstract relation, say of that between the sides and the hypotenuse of a triangle.... Each reality verifies and validates its own idea exclusively; and in each case the verification consists in the satisfactorily-ending consequences, mental or physical, which the idea was to set up.”

We shall later have to refer to the absence from Pragmatism of a criterion for achievement and for “consequences.” And, as far as philosophical theories are concerned, these are all, to the pragmatists, true or false simply in so far as they are practically credible or not. James is quite explicit, for example, about Pragmatism itself in this regard. “No pragmatist,” he holds, “can warrant the objective truth of what he says about the universe; he can only believe it.”[124] There is faith, in short, for the pragmatist, in every act, in every phase of thought, the faith that is implied in the realization of the purposes that underlie our attempted acts and thoughts. They eagerly accept, for example, the important doctrine of the modern logician, and the modern psychologist, as to the presence of volition in all “affirmation” and “judgment,” seeing that in every case of affirmation there is a more or less active readjustment of our minds (or our bodies) to what either stimulates or impedes our activity.

A third outstanding characteristic of Pragmatism is the “deeper” view of human nature upon which, in contrast to Rationalism, it supposes itself to rest, and which it seeks to vindicate. It is this supposedly deeper view of human nature for which it is confessedly pleading when it insists, as it is fond of doing, upon the connexion of philosophy with the various theoretical and practical pursuits of mankind, with sciences like biology and psychology, and with social reform,[125] and so on. We have, it may be remembered, already intimated that even in practical America men have had their doubts about the depth of a philosophy that looks upon man as made in the main for action and achievement instead of, let us say, the realization of his higher nature. Still, few of the readers of James can have altogether failed to appreciate the significance of some of the many eloquent and suggestive paragraphs he has written upon the limitations of the rationalistic “temperament” and of its unblushing sacrifice of the entire wealth of human nature and of the various pulsating interests of men to the imaginary exigencies of abstract logic and “system.”[126] To him and to his colleagues (as to Socrates, for that part of it) man is firstly a being who has habits and purposes, and who can, to some extent, control the various forces of his nature through true knowledge, and in this very discrepancy between the real and the ideal does there lie for the pragmatists the entire problem of philosophy—the problem of Plato, that of the attainment of true virtue through true knowledge.

Deferring, however, the question of the success of the pragmatists in this matter of the unfolding of the true relation between philosophy and human nature, let us think of a few of the teachings of experience upon this truly important and inevitable relation, which no philosophy indeed can for one moment afford to neglect. Insistence upon these facts or teachings and upon the reflections and criticisms to which they naturally give rise is certainly a deeply marked characteristic of Pragmatism.

Man, as has often been pointed out, is endowed with the power of reflection, not so much to enable him to understand the world either as a whole or in its detailed workings as to assist him in the further evolution of his life. His beliefs and choices and his spiritual culture are all, as it were, forces and influences in this direction. Indeed, it is always the soul or the life principle that is the important thing in any individual or any people, so far as a place in the world (or in “history”) is concerned.

Philosophers, as well as other men, often exchange (in the words of Lecky) the “love of truth” as such for the love of “the truth,” that is to say, for the love of the system and the social arrangements that best suit their interests as thinkers. And they too are just as eager as other men for discipleship and influence and honour. Knowledge with them, in other words, means, as Bacon put it, “control”; and even with them it does not, and cannot, remain at the stage of mere cognition. It becomes in the end a conviction or a belief. And thus the philosopher with his system (even a Plato, or a Hegel) is after all but a part of the universe, to be judged as such, along with other lives and other systems—a circumstance hit off early in the nineteenth century by German students when they used to talk of one’s being able (in Berlin) to see the Welt-Geist (Hegel) “taking a walk” in the Thiergarten.

Reality again, so far as either life or science is concerned, means for every man that in which he is most fundamentally interested—ions and radium to the physicist of the hour, life to the biologist, God to the theologian, progress to the philanthropist, and so on.

Further, mankind in general is not likely to abandon its habit of estimating all systems of thought and philosophy from the point of view of their value as keys, or aids, to the problem of the meaning and the development of life as a whole. There is no abstract “truth” or “good” or “beauty” apart from the lives of beings who contemplate, and who seek to create, such things as truth and goodness and beauty.

To understand knowledge and intellect, again, we must indeed look at them in their actual development in connexion with the total vital or personal activity either of the average or even of the exceptional individual. And instead of regarding the affections and the emotions as inimical to knowledge, or as secondary and inferior to it, we ought to remember that they rest in general upon a broader and deeper attitude to reality than does either the perception of the senses[127] or the critical analysis of the understanding. In both of these cases is the knowledge that we attain to limited in the main either to what is before us under the conditions of time and space, or to particular aspects of things that we mark off, or separate, from the totality of things. As Bergson reminds us, we “desire” and “will” with the “whole” of our past, but “think” only with “part” of it. Small wonder then that James seeks to connect such a broad phenomenon as religion with many of the unconscious factors (they are not all merely “biological”) in the depth of our personality. Some of the instincts and the phenomena that we encounter there are things that transcend altogether the world that is within the scope of our senses or the reasoning faculties.