Pragmatism and idealism

by William Caldwell

In spite of the objections that have been brought in the preceding chapters against Pragmatism as Instrumentalism and Practicalism, the great thing about Pragmatism as the Humanism that it is tending to become is the position that it virtually occupies in respect of the ethical and the personal factors that enter into all our notions about final truth. To Pragmatism the importance of these factors in this connexion is apparent from the outset, it being to it the merest truism that by final truth we cannot mean “truth” existing on its own account, but rather the truth of the world as inclusive of man and his purposes. For so much it stands by its very letter as well as by its spirit. And if we can find any confirmation for this attitude in some of the concessions of the rationalists that have been previously mentioned, so much the better, as it were, for Pragmatism.

Now it might well seem as if Pragmatism by the denial of an absolute or impersonal truth is so far simply another version of modern agnosticism, or of the older doctrine of the “relativity” of human knowledge. There is a great difference, however, between these two things and Pragmatism. A mere agnostical, or relativity, philosophy generally carries with it the belief that the inmost reality of things is both unknowable and out of all relation alike to human purpose and to human knowledge. Pragmatism, on the contrary, would like to maintain—-if it could do so logically—-that in human volition, we do know something about the inward meaning of things, that the “developmental” view of things is, when properly interpreted, the real view, that reality is at least what it comes to be in our “purposes” and in our ideals, and not something different from this.

The main reason, however, of the inability of Pragmatism to do what it would like to do in this connexion is what we have already complained of as its failure either to recognize, or to use, the help that could be afforded to it by (1) Idealism, and by (2) the “normative”[251] view of ethical science.

In respect of the first point, we have already suggested, for example, that Pragmatism is inclined in various ways to make much of its “radical empiricism,” its contention that reality must, to begin with, be construed to be what it seems to be in our actual dealings with it and in our actual experience of it.[252] To the biologist, as we put it in our fourth chapter, reality is life; to the physicist it is energy; to the theologian it is the unfolding of the dealings of God with His creatures; to the sociologist it is the sphere of the evolution of the social life of humanity; to the lover of truth it is a “partly intelligible system.” The only rational basis, however, for all this constructive interpretation of reality is the familiar idealist position of the necessary implication of the “subject” in the “object,” the fact that “things” or “existences” are invariably thought of as the elements or component parts in some working system or sphere of reality that is contemplated by some being or beings in reference to some purpose or end. On its so-called lowest plane, indeed, reality is conceived as the play of all the particles of matter, or of all the elemental forces of nature, upon each other. And on this construction of things the susceptibility of everything to the influence of everything else is no less certainly assumed than in the case of the world of life itself. But, as the idealist realizes in a moment, there is no possibility of separating, either in thought or experimentally, this supposed physical world from the so-called experiences and relations and laws through which it is interpreted and described, even as a world of objects or of forces. This is what Parmenides saw ages ago when he said that “thought” and “being” are the same thing, that “being” belongs to “thought,” that “being” is the true object of thought, and that being is the “rational” and the “thinkable” and not something outside thought. It is what a scientist, an expounder of science, like Professor J. A. Thompson means and partly states when he says, speaking of the work of many of his fellow-scientists of the day, “The matter of physical science is an abstraction, whereas the matter of our direct experience is in certain conditions the physical basis of life and the home of the soul.”[253]

To the objector who again retorts that this line of reflection seems to rest upon a very large assumption as to the nature of the apparently illimitable physical universe, the idealist can but reply, firstly, that we know nothing of the so-called natural world save through the so-called spiritual or psychical world,[254] and secondly, that even the most complete description of the world from the point of view of science would, of course, still leave the world of our mental experiences entirely unexplained. It is surely, therefore, so far, much more logical to use this last world as at least the partial explanation of the former rather than vice versa.

And as for the “normative” view of ethics and the help it affords to Pragmatism in its contention in respect of final truth, it may be said, to begin with, that it is in the ethical life that what we call the truth of things becomes the basis of an ideal of personal achievement. It is not merely of man’s well-known transformation and utilization of the forces of nature that we are at present thinking, but of the fact that in the moral life man “superposes,” as has been said, an order of his own upon the so-called natural order of things, transforming it into a spiritual order. This superposition, if we will, this transformation, is revealed unmistakably in the history of the facts of conduct.

In the recent elaborate researches in sociological ethics of Hobhouse and Westermarck[255] we read, for example, of facts like the gradual “blunting of the edges of barbarian ideas,” and the recognition of the “principal moral obligations” in the early oriental civilizations, the existence of the “doctrine of forgiveness,” and of “disinterested retributive kindly emotion,” the acceptance and redistribution by Confucius of the traditional standards of Chinese ethics, the “transformation” by the Hebrew prophets of the “law of a barbarous people into the spiritual worship of one God,” of a God of “social justice,” of “mercy,” and finally of “love.” Both these writers, in view of such facts and of other facts of a kindred nature, arrive at the conclusion that the supreme authority assigned to the moral law is not altogether an illusion, that there is after all the “great permanent fact of the moral consciousness persisting through all stages of development, that whether we believe or disbelieve in God, or religion, or nature, or what not, there remain for all of us certain things to do which affect us with a greater or less degree of mental discomfort.”

Now as we think of it, there is something that Pragmatism fails to see in respect of this undoubted transformation of the merely physical basis of our life that takes place, or that has taken place, in the moral life of humanity. While firmly holding in its moral philosophy (we can see this in the typical work of Dewey and Tufts[256]) to its far-reaching principle that our entire intellectual life has been worked out in the closest kind of relation to our practical needs, Pragmatism has nevertheless failed to see that in the highest reaches of our active life the controlling ideas (“justice,” “humanity,” “courage,” and so on) have a value independently of any consequences other than those of their realization in the purposes and in the dispositions of men. Or, more definitely, it is just because moral ideas, like any ideas, cannot fail to work themselves out into our actions and into our very dispositions and character, that it becomes of the utmost importance to conceive of the truth they embody as having a value above all consequences and above all ordinary utility. If sought ever and always for its own sake, the highest kind of truth and insight, the truth that we apprehend in our highest intuitions and in our highest efforts, will inevitably tend to the creation of a realm of “value,” a realm of personal worth and activity that we cannot but regard as the highest reality,[257] or the highest plane of experience of which we are conscious. In this thought, then, in the thought of the reality of the life and work of human beings who have given all for truth and goodness and love, there is surely at least a partial clue to the value of the great idea after which Pragmatism is blindly groping in its contention of the importance even to metaphysics of the notion of our human, “purposive” activity.

Indeed, when we think of the matter carefully it is doubtful whether the human mind would ever even have attained to the notion of ideal truth, with the correlative thought of the shortcomings or the limits of our ordinary knowledge, if it had not been for the moral life and the serious problem it sets before us as men—that of the complete satisfaction or the complete assertion of our human personality. We seek truth in the first instance because we wish to act upon certainty or upon adequate certainty, and because we feel that we must be determined by what appeals to our own convictions and motives, by what has become part of our own life and consciousness. It is only in fact because we will it, and because we want it, that the “ideal” exists—the ideal of anything, more certain knowledge about something, for example, or gratified curiosity, or satisfied desire, and so on. In every case, say, of the pursuit of an ideal we desire something or some state of things that does not yet exist. The actual, if indeed (which is doubtful) we can think of the actual merely as such, does not engender the notion of the ideal, although there is possibly a suggestion of the “ideal” in the “meaning” that we cannot, even in sense perception,[258] attach to the actual.

Even science, as we call it, is very far from being a mere description of the actual, it is an ideal “construction” or “interpretation” of the same in the interest, not of mere utility, but of the wonder and the curiosity and the intellectual and aesthetical satisfaction of our entire personality, of our disinterested love of the highest truth.[259]