Pragmatism and idealism

by William Caldwell

A striking example of the part played by moral and personal factors in the evolution of truth may easily be found, as has already been suggested, in some of the circumstances connected with the evolution of the Platonic philosophy in the mind of its creator. Plato’s constant use of the dialogue form of exposition is of itself an expression of the fact that philosophy was always to him a living and a personal thing, the outcome of an intellectual emotion of the soul in its efforts after true knowledge and spiritual perfection. It speaks also of Plato’s essentially social conception of philosophy, as a creation arising out of the contact of mind with mind, in the search after wisdom and virtue and justice. And there is little doubt that his own discontent with the social conditions of his time and with the false wisdom of the sophists was a powerful impulse in his mind in the development of that body of intellectual and ethical truth for all time that is to be found in his works. The determining consideration, again, in the arguments for immortality in the Phaedo is not so much the imperfect physical and theoretical philosophy on which they are partly made to repose as the tremendous conviction of Plato of the supreme importance of right conduct, of his belief in the principle of the “best.”

Plato has a way, too, of talking of truth as a kind of “addition”[260] to being and science, as a “being” that “shares” somehow in the “idea of the Good”—a tendency that, despite the imperfect hold of the Greek mind upon the fact and the conception of personality, we may also look upon as a confirmation of the pragmatist notion of the necessity of ethical and personal factors in a complete theory of truth.

A still more important instance of the importance of moral and practical factors to a final philosophy of things is to be found in the lasting influence of the great Hebrew teachers upon both the ancient and the modern world, although the mere mention of this topic is apt to give offence to some of our Neo-Hellenists[261] and to thinkers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The remarkable thing about the Hebrew seers is their intuition of God as “the living source of their life and strength and joy,” not as a mere first principle of thought, not as the substance of things, not as the mere “end of patient search and striving,” but as the “first principle of life and feeling.”[262] And their work for the world lay in the bringing to an end of the entire mythology and cosmology of the age of fable and fancy, and the substitution for all this of the worship of one God, as something distinct and different from all the cults of polytheism, as a great social and ethical achievement, as a true religion that loved justice and social order because it loved God. “In Hebrew poetry,”[263] says a recent authority upon this subject, “all things appear in action. The verb is the predominating element in the sentence. And though the shades of time distinctions are blurred, the richness of the language throws the precise complexion of the act into clear, strong light.” If this be so, there is, of course, no wonder that this people elaborated for mankind a living and practical, a “pragmatist” (if we will) view of the world, which is so rich by way of its very contrast both to Greek and to modern scientific conceptions. With the enumeration of two specific instances from this same writer of the Hebrew perception of the importance of practical and personal factors to a true grasp of certain fundamental ideas, we may safely leave this great source of some of the leading ideas of our western world to take care of itself. “The Hebrew counterpart to the Greek ideal of ὁ καλὸς κἀγαθός, ‘the finely-polished gentleman,’ is hāsîd, the adjective derived from hesed, that is ‘the man of love.’ As God is love, the good man is likewise a lover both of God and of his fellow-men. His love is indeed the pure reflection of God’s—tender and true and active as His is. For in no other ancient religion are the fear and love of God so indissolubly wedded to moral conduct.”[264] And secondly, speaking of immortality, Professor Gordon says, “The glad hope of immortality rests, not on speculative arguments from the nature of the soul, but on the sure ground of religious experience. Immortality is, in fact, a necessary implicate of personal religion. The man that lives with God is immortal as He is.”[265]

If the reader be inclined to interject here that all that this pragmatist talk about the importance of action obviously amounts to is simply the position that the highest truth must somehow take recognition of our beliefs as well as of our knowledge, we can but reply that he is literally so far in the right. Our point, however, for Pragmatism would here be that belief rests not merely upon the intellect, but upon the intellect in conjunction with the active and the ethical nature of man. It is mainly because we feel ourselves to be active and legislative and creative, mainly because we partly are and partly hope to be, as the phrase has it, that we believe as well as seek continually to know. Hence the rightness and the soundness of Pragmatism in its contention; the truth is not so much a datum (something given) as a construction,[266] or a thing that is made and invented by way of an approximation to an ideal.

That it is this almost in the literal sense of these words is evident from the fact of the slow and gradual accumulation of truth and knowledge about themselves and their environment by the fleeting generations of men. And even to-day the truth is not something that exists in nature or in history or in some privileged institution, or in the teaching of some guild of masters, but rather only in the attitude of mind and heart of the human beings who continue to seek it and to will it and to live it when and where they may. Truth includes, too, the truth of the social order, of civilization[267]—this last costly work being just as much the creation of the mind and the behaviour of men as is knowledge itself. And there can, it would seem, be but slight objection to an admission of the fact that it is only in so far as the truth has been conceived as inclusive of the truth of human life as well as of that of the world of things that humanity as a whole seems to have any abiding interest in its existence, even where, as in Omar Khayyàm and in other writings, the idea of its discovery is given up as impossible. Only, in other words, as the working out of the implications of desire does thought live, and the completest thought is at bottom but the working out of the deepest desire.[268]

These two elements of our life, thought and desire, have had indeed a parallel development in the life of mankind. What we call the predicate of thought bespeaks invariably an underlying (or personal) reaction or attitude towards the so-called object of thought.[269] When desire ceases, as it does sometimes in the case of a disappointed man, or the pessimist, or the agnostic, or the mystic, thought too ceases. Even the philosophical mood, as likewise the expression of a desire, is as such comparable to other motives or desires, such as the scientific or the practical or the emotional, and subject, too, like them, to the various “conflicts” of personality.[270] The free speculative thought or activity that, with the Greeks, we sometimes think of as the highest attribute of our human nature, is itself but the highest phase of that free creative[271] activity which we have found to underlie the moral life and all the various constructions of mankind, inclusive of the work of civilization itself.

Lastly, there is, as we know, ample warrant in the past and the present reflections of men of science upon the apparent limits[272] and limitations of our knowledge of our environment to justify the correctness of the pragmatist insistence upon the ethical and the personal factors that enter into truth. Reference having already been made to these limits, there is perhaps little need of pursuing this topic any further, either so far as the facts themselves are concerned or so far as their admission by scientists and others is concerned. How any supposed mere physical order can ever come to know itself as such, either in the minds of men or in the minds of beings other than men, is of course the crowning difficulty of what we call a physical philosophy—a difficulty that transcends altogether the many familiar and universally admitted difficulties in respect of topics like the origin of motion and the origin of life, and the infinite number of adjustments and adaptations involved in the development of the world of things and men with which we are acquainted. Obviously, to say the very least, only when some explanation of consciousness and feeling and thought is added on to our knowledge of Nature (fragmentary as is the latter at best) will the demands of thought and of desire for unity in our knowledge be satisfied or set at rest. Now, of course, to religious thought all this costly explanation, all this completion and systematization of our knowledge are revealed, in the main, only to a faith in God and to a consequent faith in the final “perfection” of our human life as the gradual evolution of a divine kingdom. And while Pragmatism cannot, especially in its cruder or more popular form, be credited with anything like a rational justification of the religious point of view about reality and of the vision it opens up, it may, nevertheless, in virtue of its insistence upon such things as (1) the rationality of the belief that accompanies all knowledge, (2) the supposedly deeper phenomena of the science of human nature to which reference has already been made, and (3) the great spiritual reality that is present to the individual in the moral life, and that lifts him “out of himself,” and that makes it impossible for him to “understand himself by himself alone,”[273] justifiably lay claim to the possession of a thorough working sympathy with the religious view of the world.

With the direction of the attention of the reader to two important corollaries or consequences of the “pluralism” and the “dynamic idealism” of Pragmatism this chapter may well be brought to a termination.

One of the most obvious corollaries of nearly everything that has been put forward by us in the foregoing chapters as pragmatist doctrine or pragmatist tendency, is the marked distance at which[274] it all seems to stand from the various entanglements of the false philosophy of “subjective,” or “solipsistic” idealism. In other words, while we have ventured to censure Pragmatism for its inability to recognize the elemental truth[275] in Idealism, we must now record it as a merit of Pragmatism that it does not, like so much modern philosophy, take its start with the “contents” of the consciousness of the individual as the one indubitable beginning, the one inconcussum quid for all speculation. This starting-point has often, as we know, been taken (even by students of philosophy) to be the very essence of Idealism, but it is not so. Although there is indeed no “object” without a “subject,” no “matter” without “mind,” neither mind nor matter is limited to my experience of the same.[276] It is impossible for me to interpret, or even to express, to myself the contents of my experience without using the terms and the conceptions that have been invented by minds and by personalities other than my own without whom I could not, and do not, grow up into what I call my “self-consciousness.”[277] We have all talked of ourselves (as we know from experience and from psychology) in the third person as objects for a common social experience long before we learn to use the first personal pronoun. And as for the adult, his “ego” or self has a meaning and a reality only in relation to, and in comparison with, the other selves of whom he thinks as his associates. An “ego” implies invariably also an “alter” an “other,” and thus our deepest thought about the universe is always, actually and necessarily, both personal and social. Even in art, and in religion, and in philosophy, it is the communion of mind with mind, of soul with soul, that is at once our deepest experience and our deepest desire.

I do not suggest for one moment that Pragmatism is the only philosophy (if indeed we may call it a philosophy at all) that is necessarily committed to Pluralism,[278] nor am I, of course, blind to the difficulties that Pluralism, as over against Monism, presents to many thinking minds. But I do here say that if Pragmatism be true, as it is in the main (at least as an “approach” to philosophy), it follows that the reality with which we are in contact in all our thoughts and in all our theorizing is not any or all of the “contents” of the consciousness of the individual thinker, but rather the common, personal life of activity and experience and knowledge and emotion that we as individuals share with other individuals. This life is that of an entire “world of intersubjective intercourse,”[279] of a communion of thought, and feeling, and effort in which, as persons, we share the common life of persons, and are members one of another.[280]