Pragmatism and idealism

by William Caldwell

It would not be difficult to match this quotation, or perhaps to surpass it, with something from Carlyle in respect of the littleness of man’s claims, not merely for enjoyment, but even for existence; but we will pass on.

Pragmatism, as we have suggested, certainly falls too readily into line with the tendency of the age to demand means and instruments and utilities and working satisfactions, instead of ends and purposes and values, to demand pleasure and enjoyment instead of happiness and blessedness. Instead of allowing itself to do this it should have undertaken a criticism both of the so-called “wants” of the age, and of the soundness of its own views in respect of the truth and the happiness that are proper to man as man. There is a fine epigram of Goethe’s in respect of the limitations of the revolutionary and the liberationist attitude of those who would seek to “free” men without first trying to understand them, and to help them to their true inward development.

Aile Freiheits-Apostel, sie waren mir immer zuwider.
Willkur suchte doch nur jeder am Ende für sich.
Willst du viele befrein, so wag’ es vielen zu dienen.
Wie gefährlich das sey, willst du es wissen?
Versuch’s.[324]

Until Pragmatism then makes it clear that it is the free rational activity, and the higher spiritual nature of man that is to it the norm of all our thought, and all our activity, and the true test of all “consequences,” it has not risen to the height of the distinctive message that it is capable of giving to the thought of the present time. Unqualified by some of the ideal considerations to which we have attempted, in its name, and in its interest, to give an expression, it would not be, for example, a philosophy that could be looked upon by the great East as the last word of our Western wisdom or our Western experience. It will be well, however, to say nothing more in this connexion until we have looked at the considerations that follow (in our next chapter) upon the lofty, but impersonal, idealisation of the life and thought of man attempted by our Anglo-Hegelian Rationalism, and until we have reflected, too, upon the more feasible form of Idealism attempted in the remarkable philosophy of Bergson,[325] the greatest of all the pragmatists.

CHAPTER VIII
PRAGMATISM AND ANGLO-HEGELIAN RATIONALISM

The form of Anglo-German Rationalism or Intellectualism which I shall venture to select for the purposes of consideration from the point of view of Pragmatism and Humanism is the first volume of the recent Gifford Lectures of Dr. Bernard Bosanquet, who has long been regarded by the philosophical public of Great Britain as one of the most characteristic members of a certain section of our Neo-Hegelian school. I shall first give the barest outline of the argument and contentions of “The Principle of Individuality and Value,” and then venture upon some paragraphs of what shall seem to me to be relevant criticism.

Dr. Bosanquet’s initial position is a conception of philosophy, and its task which is for him and his book final and all-determining. To him Philosophy is (as it is to some extent to Hegel) “logic” or “the spirit of totality.” It is “essentially of the concrete and the whole,” as Science is of the “abstract and the part.” Although the best thing in life is not necessarily “philosophy,” philosophy in this sense of “logic” is the clue to “reality and value and freedom,” the key to everything, in short, that we can, or that we should, or that we actually do desire and need. It [philosophy] is “a rendering in coherent thought of what lies at the heart of actual life and love.” His next step is to indicate “the sort of things,” or the sort of “experiences,” or the sort of “facts” that philosophy needs as its material, if it would accomplish its task as “universal logic.” This he does (1) negatively, by the rejection of any form of “immediateness,” or “simple apprehension,” such as the “solid fact,” the “sense of being,” or the “unshareable self” of which we sometimes seem to hear, or such as the “naïve ideas” of “compensating justice,”[326] “ethics[327] which treats the individual as isolated” and “teleology”[328] as “guidance by finite minds,” as the data (or as part of the data) of philosophy; and (2) positively, by declaring that his subject-matter throughout will be “the principle of ‘individuality,’ of ‘self-completeness,’ as the clue to reality.” This “individuality” or “self-completeness” is then set forth in a quasi-Platonic manner as the “universal,” the real “universal” being (he insists) the “concrete universal,” the “whole,” that is to say, “the logical system of connected members,” that is to him the “ideal of all thought.” We must think of this “individuality,” therefore, either as “a living world, complete and acting out of itself, a positive, self-moulding cosmos,” or “as a definite striving of the universe”[!][329]

The next question (so far as our partial purposes are concerned) that Dr. Bosanquet asks is, “What help do we get from the notion of a ‘mind’ which ‘purposes’ or ‘desires’ things in appreciating the work of factors in the universe, or of the universe as [ex-hypothesi] self-directing and self-experiencing whole?” The answer is spread over several chapters, and is practically this, that although there is undoubtedly a “teleology” in the universe (in the shape of the “conjunctions and results of the co-operation of men,” or of “the harmony of geological and biological evolution”), and although “minds such as ours play a part in the work of direction, we cannot judge of this work in question in any human manner.” The real test of teleology or value is “wholeness,” “completeness,” “individuality” [the topic of the book], and it is made quite clear that it is the “Absolute” who is “real” and “individual” and not we. We are, indeed, in our lives “carried to the Absolute without a break,”[330] and our nature “is only in process of being communicated to us.”[331] “We should not think of ourselves after the pattern of separate things or personalities in the legal sense, nor even as selves in the sense of isolation and exclusion of others.” “Individuality” being this “logical self-completeness,” there can be only one “Individual,” and this one Individual is the one criterion of “value,” or “reality,” or “existence,” “importance” and “reality [!]” being sides of the one “characteristic” [i.e. “thinkableness” as a whole]. Dr. Bosanquet confesses in his seventh chapter that this idea of his of “individuality,” or “reality,” is essentially the Greek idea that it is only the “whole nature” of things that gives them their reality or value.

We are then assured, towards the close of this remarkable book, that “freedom” (the one thing that we mortals value as the greatest of all “goods”) is “the inherent effort of mind considered as a [!] world, and that the ”Absolute“ [the ”universal” of logic, Plato’s “Idea”] is the “high-water mark of our effort,” and that each “self” is “more like a rising and a falling tide than an isolated pillar with a fixed circumference.” The great fact of the book, the fact upon which its accomplished author rests when he talks in his Preface of his belief, “that in the main the work [of philosophy] has been done,” is the daily “transmutation of experience according to the level of the mind’s energy and self-completeness,” the continued and the continuous “self-interpretation [of ‘experience’] through the fundamental principle of individuality.”

Now it is quite obvious that according to many of the considerations that have been put forward as true in the foregoing chapters, this philosophy of Dr. Bosanquet’s which treats the “concept,” or the “universal” as an end in itself (as the one answer to all possible demands for a “teleology”) and as an “individual,” “a perfected and self-perfecting [!] individual,” can be regarded as but another instance of the abstract Rationalism against which Pragmatism and Humanism have entered their protests. It is untrue, therefore, to the real facts of knowledge and the real facts of human nature. It will be sufficient to state that the considerations of which we are thinking are (in the main) the positions that have been taken in respect of such things as: (1) the claim that a true metaphysic must serve not merely as an intellectual “system” but as a “dynamic,” and as a “motive” for action and achievement; (2) the fact of the “instrumental” character of thought and of ideas, and of all systems (of science or of philosophy or of politics) that fail to include as part of their data the various ideals of mankind; (3) the idea that all truth and all thought imply a belief in the existence of objects and persons independent of the mere mental states or activities of the thinking individual, and that belief rather than knowledge is, and always has been, man’s fundamental and working estimate of reality; (4) the fact that our human actions and re-actions upon reality are a part of what we mean by “reality,” and that these actions and re-actions of ours are real and not imaginary; (5) the attitude in general of Pragmatism to Rationalism; (6) the various concessions that have been made by representative rationalists to the pragmatist movement.