Pragmatism and idealism

by William Caldwell

The one outstanding characteristic again of every approved academic teacher in the United States is his method of handling his subject, just as the one thing that is claimed for Pragmatism by its upholders is that it is particularly a “methodology” of thought rather than a complete philosophy. To the university constituency of the United States a professor without an approved and successful method is as good as dead, for no one would listen to him. The most manifest sign, to be sure, of the possession of such an effective method on the part of the university lecturer is the demonstration of skill in the treatment of his subject, in the “approach” that he makes to it for the beginner, in his power of setting the advanced student to work upon fruitful problems, and of giving him a complete “orientation” in the entire field under consideration. And then in addition to this he must be able to indicate the practical and the educational value of what he is teaching.

In his review of James’s classical work upon Pragmatism, Dewey, while indicating a number of debatable points in the pragmatist philosophy, declares emphatically his belief in that philosophy as a method of “orientation.” The title again of Peirce’s famous pamphlet was How to make Ideas Clear—a phrase of itself suggestive enough of the inquiring mind of the young student when oppressed by apparently conflicting and competing points of view. “We are acquainted with a thing,” says James, “as soon as we have learned how to behave towards it, or how to meet the behaviour we accept from it.” In one of his books he talks about physics, for example, as giving us not so much a theory about things as a “practical acquaintance” with bodies; “the power to take hold of them and handle them,” indicating at the same time his opinion that this way of regarding knowledge should be extended to philosophy itself. All of this will serve as a proof or illustration of the essentially “practical” and “methodological” conception of philosophy taken by the pragmatists. Papini refers, we remember, to the pragmatist philosophy as a power of “commanding our material,” of “manipulating” for practical purposes the different “thought-constructions” of the history of philosophy. And those who have any familiarity with the early pragmatist magazine literature know that the pragmatists used to be fond of asking themselves such preliminary and “laboratory-like” inquiries as the following: “What is truth known as?” “What is philosophy known as?” “What are the different ‘thought-levels’ upon which we seem to move in our ordinary experience?” They never exactly seem to “define” philosophy for you, preferring to indicate what it can do for you, and so on.

Turning now to the matter of American characteristics that are broader and deeper than the merely academic, we may find an illustration, for example, of the American practicality and the love of the concrete (instead of the abstract or the merely general) in the following declaration of Professor James that “the whole originality of Pragmatism, the whole point in it, is its use of the concrete way of seeing. It begins with concreteness and returns and ends with it.” Of the American love of novelty and of interest we may find an illustration in the determination of Pragmatism “never to discuss a question that has absolutely no interest and no meaning to any one.” Of Pragmatism as an exemplification of the American love of experiment, and of experimentation, with a view to definite and appreciable “returns,” we may give the following: “If you fully believe the pragmatic method you cannot look on any such word, i.e. ‘God,’ ‘Matter,’ ‘Reason,’ ‘The Absolute,’ ‘Energy,’ and such ‘solving’ names, as closing your quest. You must bring out in each word its practical cash value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution then than as a programme for more work and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed.” Of the American intolerance for mere scholarship and book-learning, and of the American inability to leave any discovery or any finished product alone without some attempt to “improve” upon it or to put it to some new use, we may cite the following: “When may a truth go into cold storage in the encyclopaedias, and when shall it come out for battle?”

Another very strongly marked characteristic of American life is the thoroughly eclectic and composite character of its general culture and of the general tone of its public life. American daily life has become, as it were, a kind of social solvent, a huge melting-pot for the culture and the habits and the customs of peoples from all over the earth. This also may be thought of as reflected in the confessedly complex and amalgam-like character of Pragmatism, in its boast and profession of being a synthesis and a fusion of so many different tendencies of human thought. As a juxtaposition, or kind of compound solution, of such a variety of things as the affirmations of religion, the hypothetical method of science, realism, romanticism, idealism, utilitarianism, and so on, it reminds us only too forcibly of the endless number of social groups and traditions, the endless number of interests and activities and projects to be seen and felt in any large American city.

Still another general characteristic of American life of which we may well think in connexion with Pragmatism is the sociological interest of the country, the pressure of which upon the pragmatists and their writings has already been referred to. The social problem in America has now become[295] the one problem that is present with everybody, and present most of all, perhaps, with the European immigrant, who has for various reasons hoped that he had left this problem behind him. The effect of this upon Pragmatism is to be seen, not merely in the very living hold that it is inclined to take of philosophy and philosophical problems,[296] but in the fact of its boast of being a “way of living” as well as a “way of thinking.” We have examined this idea in our remarks upon the ethics of Pragmatism.

Of course the outstanding temperamental American characteristic that is most clearly seen in Pragmatism is the great fact of the inevitable bent of the American mind to action and to accomplishment,—its positive inability to entertain any idea, or any set of ideas upon any subject whatsoever, without experiencing at the same time the inclination to use these ideas for invention and contrivance,[297] for organization and exploitation. Any one who has lived in the United States must in fact have become so habituated and so accustomed to think of his thought and his knowledge and his capacities in terms of their possible social utility, that he simply cannot refrain from judging of any scheme of thought or of any set of ideas in the same light. Anywhere, to be sure, in the United States will they allow a man to think all he pleases about anything whatsoever—even pre-Socratic philosophy, say, or esoteric Buddhism. And there is nothing indeed of which the country is said, by those who know it best, to stand so much in need as the most persistent and the most profound thought about all important matters. But such thought, it is always added, must prove to be constructive and positive in character, to be directed not merely to the solution of useless questions or of questions which have long ago been settled by others.

We shall now endeavour to think of the value[298] to philosophy and to the thought and practice of the world (the two things are inseparable) of some or all of these general and special characteristics which we have sought to illustrate in Pragmatism.

We might begin by suggesting the importance to the world of the production and development of a man of genius like James,[299] whose fresh and living presentation of the problems of philosophy (as seen by a psychologist) has brought the sense of a lasting and far-reaching obligation upon his fellow-students everywhere. In no more favourable soil could James have grown up into the range and plenitude of his influence than in that of America and of Harvard University,[300] that great nursing-ground of the finest kind of American imperialism. The great thing, of course, about James was his invasion, through the activities of his own personality,[301] of the realm of philosophical rationalism by the fact and the principle of active personality. His whole general activity was a living embodiment of the principle of all humanism, that personality and the various phases of personal experience are of more importance to philosophy in the way of theory than any number of supposedly self-coherent, rational or abstract systems, than any amount of reasoning that is determined solely by the ideal of conceptual consistency.

Then again, it might be held that the entire academic world of to-day has a great deal to learn from the conditions under which all subjects (philosophy included) are taught and investigated in the typical American university of the day. We have referred to the fact that the American professor or investigator faces the work of instruction and research in an environment replete with all modern facilities and conveniences.[302] The very existence of this environment along with the presence throughout his country of university men and workers from all over the world with all their obvious merits and defects as “social types” prevent him in a hundred ways from that slavery to some one school of thought, to some one method of research that is so often a characteristic of the scholar of the old world. The entire information and scholarship in any one science (say, philosophy) is worth to him what he can make of it, here and now, for himself and for his age and for his immediate environment. He simply cannot think of any idea or any line of reflection, in his own or in any other field, without thinking at the same time of its “consequences,” immediate, secondary, and remote. This inability is an instance of the working of the pragmatist element in scholarship and in thought with all its advantages and disadvantages.[303]

And it is true too, it might be held, even upon the principles of Idealism that the mere facts of knowledge (for they are as endless in number as are the different points of view from which we may perceive and analyse phenomena) are “worth”[304] to-day very largely only what they have meant and what they may yet mean to human life, to human thought, to civilization. While there is certainly no useless truth and no utterly unimportant fact, it is quite possible to burden and hamper the mind of youth with supposed truths and facts that have little or no relevancy to any coherent or any real point of view about human knowledge and human interests either of the past or the present. It is merely, for example, in the light of the effects that they have had upon the life and thought of humanity[305] that the great philosophical systems of the past ought (after the necessary period of preliminary study on the part of the pupil) to be presented to students in university lectures. A teacher who cannot set them forth in this spirit is really not a teacher at all—a man who can make his subject live again in the thought of the present.[306]