Pragmatism and idealism

by William Caldwell

The reflection ought, moreover, to be inserted here that even if Pragmatism has been of some possible service in bringing forth from rationalists some of their many recent confessions of the limitations of an abstract intellectualism, it is not at all unlikely that Rationalism in its turn may succeed in convicting Pragmatism of an undue emphasis[142] upon volition and action and upon merely practical truth.

We shall now terminate the foregoing characterization of Pragmatism by a reference to two or three other specific things for which it may, with more or less justice, be supposed to stand in philosophy. These are (1) the repudiation of the “correspondence view”[143] of the relation of truth to reality, (2) the rejection of the idea of there being any ultimate or rigid distinction between “appearance” and “reality,” and (3) the reaffirmation of the “teleological” point of view as characteristic of philosophy in distinction from science.

As for (1) it has already been pointed out that this idea of the misleading character of the ordinary “correspondence notion” of truth is claimed by pragmatists as an important result of their proposal to test truth by the standard of the consequences involved in its acceptance.[144] The ordinary reader may not, to be sure, be aware of the many difficulties that are apt to arise in philosophy from an apparent acceptance of the common-sense notion of truth as somehow simply a duplicate or a “copy” of external reality. There is the difficulty, say, of our ever being able to prove such a correspondence without being (or “going”) somehow beyond both the truth and the reality in question, so as to be able to detect either coincidence or discrepancy. Or, we might again require some bridge between the ideas in our minds and the supposed reality outside them—“sensations” say, or “experiences,” something, in other words, that would be accepted as “given” and indubitable both by idealists and realists. And there would be the difficulty, too, of saying whether we have to begin for the purposes of all reflective study with what is within consciousness or with what is outside it—in matter say, or in things. And if the former, how we can ever get to the latter, and vice versa. And so on with the many kindred subtleties that have divided thinkers into idealists and realists and conceptualists, monists, dualists, parallelists, and so on.

Now Pragmatism certainly does well in proposing to steer clear of all such difficulties and pitfalls of the ordinary “correspondence notion.” And as we shall immediately refer to its own working philosophy in the matter, we shall meantime pass over this mere point of its rejection of the “correspondence notion” with one or two remarks of a critical nature, (1) Unfortunately for the pragmatists the rejection of the correspondence notion is just as important a feature of Idealism[145] as it is of Pragmatism. The latter system therefore can lay no claim to any uniqueness or superiority in this connexion. (2) Pragmatism, as we may perhaps see, cannot maintain its position that the distinction between “idea” and “object” is one “within experience itself” (rather than a distinction between experience and something supposedly outside it) without travelling further in the direction of Idealism[146] than it has hitherto been prepared to do. By such a travelling in the direction of Idealism we mean a far more thorough-going recognition of the part played in the making of reality by the “personal” factor, than it has as yet contemplated either in its “instrumentalism” or in its “radical empiricism.” (3) There is, after all, an element of truth in the correspondence notion to which Pragmatism fails to do justice. We shall refer to this failure in a subsequent chapter[147] when again looking into its theory of truth and reality.

Despite these objections there is, however, at least one particular respect in regard to which Pragmatism may legitimately claim some credit for its rejection of the correspondence notion. This is its insistence that the truth is not (as it must be on the correspondence theory) a “datum” or a “presentation,” not something given to us by the various objects and things without us, or by their supposed effects upon our senses and our memory and our understanding. It rather, on the contrary, maintains Pragmatism, a “construction” on the part of the mind, an attitude of our “expectant” (or “believing”) consciousness, into which our own reactions upon things enter at least as much as do their supposed effects and impressions upon us. Of course the many difficulties of this thorny subject are by no means cleared up by this mere indication of the attitude of Pragmatism, and we shall return in a later chapter[148] to this idea of truth as a construction of the mind instead of a datum, taking care at the same time, however, to refer to the failure of which we have spoken on the part of Pragmatism to recognize the element of truth that is still contained in the correspondence notion.

(2) The rejection of the idea of any rigid, or ultimate distinction between “appearance” and “reality.” This is a still broader rejection than the one to which we have just referred, and may, therefore, be thought of as another more or less fundamental reason for the rejection either of the copy or of the correspondence theory of truth. The reality of things, as Pragmatism conceives it, is not something already “fixed” and “determined,” but rather, something that is “plastic” and “modifiable,” something that is, in fact, undergoing a continuous process of modification, or development, of one kind or another. It must always, therefore, the pragmatist would hold, be defined in terms of the experiences and the activities through which it is known and revealed and through which it is, to some extent, even modified.[149]

Pragmatism, as we may remember, has been called by James “immediate” or “radical” empiricism, although in one of his last books he seeks to give an independent development to these two doctrines. The cardinal principle of this philosophy is that “things are what they are experienced as being, or that to give a just account of anything is to tell what that thing is experienced to be.”[150] And it is perhaps this aspect of the new philosophy of Pragmatism that is most amply and most attractively exhibited in the books of James. It is presented, too, with much freshness and skill in Professor Bawden’s[151] book upon Pragmatism, which is an attempt, he says, “to set forth the necessary assumptions of a philosophy in which experience becomes self-conscious as a method.”[152]

“The new philosophy,” proceeds Bawden,[153] “is a pragmatic idealism. Its method is at once intrinsic and immanent and organic or functional. By saying that its method is functional, we mean that its experience must be interpreted from within. We cannot jump out of our skins ... we cannot pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We find ourselves in mid-stream of the Niagara of experience, and may define what it is by working back and forth within the current.” “We do not know where we are going, but we are on the way” [the contradiction is surely apparent]. Then, like James, Bawden goes on to interpret Pragmatism by showing what things like self-consciousness, experience, science, social consciousness, space, time, and causation are by showing how they “appear,” and how they “function”—“experience” itself being simply, to him and to his friends, a “dynamic system,” “self-sustaining,” a “whole leaning on nothing.”

The extremes of this “immediate” or “radical” philosophy appear to non-pragmatists to be reached when we read words like those just quoted about the Niagara stream of our experience, and about our life as simply movement and acceleration, or about the celebrated “I think” of Descartes as equally well [!] set forth under the form “It thinks,” or “thinking is going on,” or about the “being” of the individual person as consisting simply in a “doing.” “All this we hold,” says Bawden, “to be not materialism but simply energism.” “There is no ‘truth,’ only ‘truths’—this is another way of putting it—and the only criterion of truth is the changing one of the image or the idea which comes out of our impulses or of the conflict of our habits.” The end of all this modern flowing philosophy is, of course, the “Pluralism” of James, the universe as a society of functioning selves in which reality “may exist in a distributive form, or in the shape, not of an All, but of a set of eaches.” “The essence of life,” as he puts it in his famous essay on Bergson,[154] “is its continually changing character,” and we only call it a “confusion” sometimes because we have grown accustomed in our sciences and philosophies to isolate “elements” and “differents” which in reality are “all dissolved in one another.”[155] “Relations of every sort, of time, space, difference, likeness, change, rate, cause, or what not, are just as integral members of the sensational flux as terms are.” “Pluralism lets things really exist in the each form, or distributively. Its type of union ... is different from the monistic type of all-einheit. It is what I call the strung-along type, the type of continuity, contiguity, or concatenation.” And so on.

(3) The reaffirmation of the teleological point of view. After the many illustrations and references that have already been given in respect of the tendencies of Pragmatism, it is perhaps hardly necessary to point out that an insistence upon the necessity to philosophy of the “teleological” point of view, of the consideration of both thoughts and things from the point of view of their purpose or utility, is a deeply-marked characteristic of Pragmatism. In itself this demand can hardly be thought of as altogether new, for the idea of considering the nature of anything in the light of its final purpose or end is really as old in our European thought as the philosophy of Aristotle or Anaxagoras. Almost equally familiar is the kindred idea upon which Pragmatism is inclined to felicitate itself, of finding the roots of metaphysic “in ethics,” in the facts of conduct, in the facts of the “ideal” or the “personal” order which we tend[156] in human civilization to impose upon what is otherwise thought of by science as the natural order. The form, however, of the teleological argument to which Pragmatism may legitimately be thought to have directed our attention is that of the possible place in the world of reality, and in the world of thought, of the effort and the free initiative of the individual. This place, unfortunately (the case is quite different with Bergson[157]), Pragmatism has been able, up to the present time, to define, in the main, only negatively—by means of its polemic against the completed and the self-completing “Absolute” of the Neo-Hegelian Rationalists. What this polemic is we can best indicate by quoting from Hegel himself a passage or a line of the reflection against which it is seeking to enter an emphatic and a reasoned protest, and then after this a passage or two from some of our Anglo-Hegelians in the same connexion.