Pragmatism and idealism

by William Caldwell

There is first of all the consideration that it is the fact of action that unites or brings together what we call “desire” and what we call “thought,” the world of our desires and emotions and the world of our thoughts and our knowledge. This is really a consideration of the utmost importance to us when we think of what we have allowed ourselves to call the characteristic dualism[177] of modern times, the discrepancy that seems to exist between the world of our desires and the impersonal world of science—which latter world educated people are apt to think of as the world before which everything else must bend and break, or at least bow. Our point here is not merely that of the humiliating truth of the wisdom of the wiseacres who used to tell us in our youth that we will anyhow have to act in spite of all our unanswered questions about things, but the plain statement of the fact that (say or think what we will) it is in conscious action that our desires and our thoughts do come together, and that it is there that they are both seen to be but partial expressions of the one reality—the life that is in things and in ourselves, and that engenders in us both emotions and thoughts, even if the latter do sometimes seem to lie “too deep for tears.” It is with this life and with the objects and aims and ends and realities that develop and sustain it that all our thoughts, as well as all our desires, are concerned. If action, therefore, could only be properly understood, if it can somehow be seen in its universal or its cosmic significance, there would be no discrepancy and no gap between the world of our ideals and the world of our thoughts. We would know what we want,[178] and we would want and desire what we know we can get—the complete development of our personality.

Again there is the evidence that exists in the sciences of biology and anthropology in support of the important role played in both animal and human evolution by effort and choice and volition and experimentation. “Already in the contractibility of protoplasm and in the activities of typical protozoons do we find ‘activities’ that imply[179] volition of some sort or degree, for there appears to be some selection of food and some spontaneity of movement: changes of direction, the taking of a circuitous course in avoidance of an obstruction, etc., indicate this.” Then again, “there are such things as the diversities in secondary sexual characters (the ‘after-thoughts of reproduction’ as they are called), the endless shift of parasites, the power of animals to alter their coloration to suit environment, and the complex ‘internal stimuli’ of the higher animals in their breeding periods and activities, which make us see only too clearly what the so-called struggle for life has been in the animal world.”...

Coming up to man let us think of what scientists point out as the effects of man’s disturbing influence in nature, and then pass from these on to the facts of anthropology in respect of the conquest of environment by what we call invention and inheritance and free initiative. “In placing invention,” says a writer of to-day in a recent brilliant book, “at the bottom of the scale of conditions [i.e. of the conditions of social development], I definitely break with the opinion that human evolution is throughout a purely natural process.... It is pre-eminently an artificial construction.”[180] Now it requires but the reflection of a moment or two upon considerations such as the foregoing, and upon the attested facts of history as to the breaking up of the tyranny of habit and custom by the force of reflection and free action and free initiative, to grasp how really great should be the significance to philosophy of the active and the volitional nature of man that is thus demonstrably at the root not only of our progress, but of civilization itself.

If it be objected that while there cannot, indeed, from the point of view of the general culture and civilization of mankind, be any question of the importance to philosophy of the active effort and of the active thought that underlie this stupendous achievement, the case is perhaps somewhat different when we try to think of the pragmatist glorification of our human action from the point of view of the (physical?) universe as a whole.[181] To this reflection it is possible here to say but one or two things. Firstly, there is apparently at present no warrant in science for seeking to separate off this human life of ours from the evolution of animal life in general.[182] Equally little is there any warrant for separating the evolution of living matter from the evolution of what we call inanimate matter, not to speak of the initial difficulty of accounting for things like energy and radio-active matter, and the evolution and the devolution that are calmly claimed by science to be involved in the various “systems” within the universe—apart from an ordering and intelligent mind and will. There is therefore, so far, no necessary presumption against the idea of regarding human evolution as at least in some sense a continuation or development of the life that seems to pervade the universe in general. And then, secondly, there is the familiar reflection that nearly all that we think we know about the universe as a whole is but an interpretation of it in terms of the life and the energy that we experience in ourselves and in terms of some of the apparent conditions of this life and this energy. For as Bergson reminds us, “As thinking beings we may apply the laws of our physics to our world, and extend them to each of the worlds taken separately, but nothing tells us that they apply to the entire universe nor even that such affirmation has any meaning; for the universe is not made but is being made continually. It is growing perhaps indefinitely by the addition of new worlds.”[183]

On the ground, then, both of science and of philosophy[184] may it be definitely said that this human action of ours, as apparently the highest outcome of the forces of nature, becomes only too naturally and only too inevitably the highest object of our reflective consideration. As Schopenhauer put it long ago, the human body is the only object in nature that we know “on the inside.” And do or think what we will, it is this human life of ours and this mind of ours that have peopled the world of science and the world of philosophy with all the categories and all the distinctions that obtain there, with concepts like the “(Platonic) Ideas,” “form,” “matter,” “energy,” “ether,” “atom,” “substance,” “the individual,” “the universal,” “empty space,” “eternity,” “the Absolute,” “value,” “final end,” and so on.

There is much doubtless in this action philosophy, and much too in the matter of the reasons that may be brought forward in its support, that can become credible and intelligible only as we proceed. But it must all count, it would seem, in support of the idea of the pragmatist rediscovery, for philosophy, of the importance of our creative action and of our creative thought. And then there are one or two additional general considerations of which we may well think in the same connexion.

Pragmatism boasts, as we know, of being a highly democratic[185] doctrine, of contending for the emancipation of the individual and his interests from the tyranny of all kinds of absolutism, and all kinds of dogmatism (whether philosophical, or scientific, or social). No system either of thought or of practice, no supposed “world-view” of things, no body of scientific laws or abstract truths shall, as long as it holds the field of our attention, entirely crush out of existence the concrete interests and the free self-development of the individual human being.

A tendency in this direction exists, it must be admitted, in the “determinism” both of natural science and of Hegelianism, and of the social philosophy that has emanated from the one or from the other. Pragmatism, on the contrary, in all matters of the supposed determination, or the attempted limitation, of the individual by what has been accomplished either in Nature or in human history, would incline to what we generally speak of to-day as a “modernistic,” or a “liberalistic,” or even a “revolutionary,” attitude. It would reinterpret and reconstruct, in the light of the present and its needs, not only the concepts and the methods of science and philosophy, but also the various institutions and the various social practices of mankind.[186]

Similarily Pragmatism would protest, as does the newer education and the newer sociology, against any merely doctrinaire (or “intellectualistic”) conception of education and culture, substituting in its place the “efficiency” or the “social service”[187] conception. And even if we must admit that this more or less practical ideal of education has been over-emphasized in our time, it is still true, as with Goethe, that it is only the “actively-free” man, the man who can work out in service and true accomplishment the ideal of human life, whose production should be regarded as the aim of a sound educational or social policy.

We shall later attempt to assign some definite reasons for the failure of Pragmatism to make the most of all this apparently justifiable insistence upon action and upon the creative activity of the individual, along with all this sympathy that it seems to evince for a progressive and a liberationist view of human policy.