Pragmatism and idealism

by William Caldwell

We are reminded, of course, by all such considerations of the philosophy of Bergson, and of its brilliant attempt to make a synthesis of intuition or instinct with reflection or thought, and indeed it may well be that the past difficulties of philosophy with intuition and instinct are due to the fact of its error in unduly separating the intellect from the “will to live,” and from the “creative” evolution that have been such integral factors in the evolution of the life of humanity.

This entire matter, however, of the comparison of pragmatist doctrines to typical tendencies in the thought of the past and the present must be treated by us as subordinate to our main purpose, that of the estimation of the place of Pragmatism in the constructive thought of the present time. With a view to this it will be necessary to revert to the criticism of Pragmatism.

The criticism that has already been made is that in the main Pragmatism is unsystematic and complex and confusing, that it has no adequate theory of “reality,” and no unified theory of philosophy, that it has no satisfactory criterion of the “consequences” by which it proposes to test truth, and that it has not worked out its philosophy of the contribution of the individual with his “activity” and his “purposes” to “reality” generally, and that it is in danger of being a failure in the realm of ethics.[233]

To all this we shall now seek to add a few words more upon (1) the pragmatist criterion of truth, (2) the weakness of Pragmatism in the realms of logic and theory of knowledge, (3) its failure to give consistent account of the nature of reality, and (4) its unsatisfactoriness in the realm of ethics.

(1) We have already expressed our agreement with the finding of Professor Pratt[234] that the pragmatist theory of truth amounts to no more than the harmless doctrine that the meaning of any conception expresses itself in the past, present, or future conduct or experiences of actual, or possible, sentient creatures. Taken literally, however, the doctrine that truth should be tested by consequences is not only harmless but also useless, seeing that Omniscience alone could bring together in thought or in imagination all the consequences of an assertion. Again, it is literally false for the reason that the proof of truth is not in the first instance any kind of “consequences,” not even the “verification” of which pragmatists are so fond. If the truth of which we may happen to be thinking is truth of “fact,” its proof lies in its correspondence (despite the difficulties[235] of the idea) with the results of observation or perception.[236] And if it be inferential truth, its proof is that of its deduction from previously established truths, or facts, upon a certain plane of knowledge or experience. In short, Pragmatists forget altogether the logical doctrine of the existence (in the world of our human experience, of course) of different established planes of reality, or planes of ascertained knowledge in which all propositions that are not nonsensical or trivial, are, from their very inception, regarded as necessarily true or false. The existence of these various planes of experience or of thought is in fact implied in the pragmatist doctrine of the fundamental character of belief.[237] According to this perfectly correct doctrine, the objectivity of truth (i.e. its reality or non-reality in the world of fact or in the world of rational discourse) is the essential thing about it, while the idea of its “consequences” is not. A truth is a proposition whose validity has already been established by evidence or by demonstration. It has then afterwards the immediate “utility” of expressing in an intelligible and convenient manner the fact of certain connexions among things or events. And its ultimate utility to mankind is also at the same time assured, humanity being by its very nature a society of persons who must act, and who act, upon what they believe to be the truth or the reality of things. But a proposition is by no means true because it is useful. Constantine believed eminently in the concord-producing utility of certain confessions enunciated at the Council of Nice, but his belief in this does not prove their truth or reality outside the convictions of the faithful. Nor does the pragmatist or utilitarian character of certain portions of the writings of the Old Testament or of the Koran prove the matter of their literal and factual truth in the ordinary sense of these terms. As Hume said, “When any opinion leads us into absurdities ’tis certainly false, but ’tis not certain that an opinion is false because it has dangerous consequences.”

And then, apart from this conspicuous absence of logic in the views of pragmatists upon “truth,” the expression of their doctrine is so confusing that it is almost impossible to extract any consistent meaning out of it. They are continually confounding conceptions and ideas and propositions, forgetful of the fact that truth resides not in concepts and ideas but only in propositions. While it may be indeed true, as against Rationalism, that all human conceptions whatsoever [and it is only in connexion with “conceptions” that Pragmatism is defined even in such an official place as Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy[238]] have, and must have, reference to actual or possible human experience or consequences, it is by no means true that the test of a proposition is anything other than the evidence of which we have already spoken.

Then the pragmatists have never adequately defined terms that are so essential to their purposes as “practical,” “truth,” “fact,” “reality,” “consequences,” and they confound, too, “theories” with “truths” and “concepts” just as they confound concepts and propositions.

(2) That logic and the theory of proof is thus one of the weak spots of Pragmatism has perhaps then been sufficiently indicated. We have seen, in fact, the readiness of Pragmatism to confess its inability[239] to prove its own philosophy—that is, to prove it in the ordinary sense of the term.[240] That it should have made this confession is, of course, only in keeping with the fact that its interest in logic is confined to such subordinate topics as the framing and verification of hypotheses, the development of concepts and judgments in the “thought-process,” and so on. Of complete proof, as involving both deduction and induction, it takes but the scantiest recognition. And it has made almost no effort to connect its discoveries in “genetic logic” and in the theory of hypotheses with the traditional body of logical doctrine.[241] Nor, as may perhaps be inferred from the preceding paragraph, has it made any serious attempt to consider the question of the discovery of new truth in relation to the more or less perfectly formulated systems and schemes of truth already in the possession of mankind.

The case is similar in regard to the “theory of knowledge” of the pragmatists. While they have made many important suggestions regarding the relation of all the main categories and principles of our human thought to the theoretical and practical needs of mankind, there is in their teachings little that is satisfactory and explicit in the matter of the systematization of first principles,[242] and little too that is satisfactory in respect of the relation of knowledge to reality. They sometimes admit (with James) the importance of general points of view like the “causal,” the “temporal,” “end,” and “purpose,” and so on. At other times they confess with Schiller that questions about ultimate truth and ultimate reality cannot be allowed to weigh upon our spirits, seeing that “actual knowing” always starts from the “existing situation.”

Now of course actual knowing certainly does start from the particular case of the existing situation, but, as all thinkers from Aristotle to Hume have seen, it is by no means explained by this existing situation. In real knowledge this is always made intelligible by references to points of view and to experiences that altogether transcend it. The true theory of knowledge, in short, involves the familiar Kantian distinction between the “origin” and the “validity” of knowledge—a thing that the pragmatists seem continually and deliberately to ignore. Schiller, to be sure, reminds us with justice that we must endeavour to “connect,” rather than invariably “contrast,” the two terms of this distinction. But this again is by no means what the pragmatists themselves have done. They fail, in fact, to connect their hints about the practical or experimental origin of most of our points of view about reality with the problem of the validity of first principles generally.