Pragmatism and idealism

by William Caldwell

Dr. Bosanquet’s theory of reality has already impressed some of his most competent critics as utterly inadequate as a motive or an incentive to the efforts and endeavours of men as we know them in history and in actual life, and we shall immediately return to this topic. And although there are many signs in his Lectures that he is himself quite aware of the probability of such an impression, his book proceeds upon the even tenor of its way, following wherever his argument may lead him, irrespective entirely of the truth contained in the facts and the positions we have just recounted and reaffirmed. It lends itself, therefore, only too naturally to our present use of it as a highly instructive presentation of many, or most, of the tendencies of Rationalism and Intellectualism, against which Pragmatism and Humanism would fain protest. At the same time there is in it, as we hope to show, a fundamental element[332] of truth and of fact without which there could be no Pragmatism and no Humanism, and indeed no philosophy at all.

A broad, pervading inconsistency[333] in “Individuality and Value” which militates somewhat seriously against the idea of its being regarded as a tenable philosophy, is the obvious one between the position (1) that true reality is necessarily individual, and the position (2) that reality is to be found in the “universal” (or the “concept”) of logic.[334] It would, however, perhaps be unfair to expect Dr. Bosanquet to effect a harmony between these two positions that Aristotle (who held them both) was himself very largely unable to do. There is, in other words, a standing and a lasting contradiction between any and all philosophy which holds that it is reason [or logic] alone that attains to truth and reality, and the apparently natural and inevitable tendency of the human mind [it is represented in Dr. Bosanquet’s own procedure] to seek after “reality” in the “individual” thing, or person, or being, and in the perfecting of “individuality” in God (or in a kingdom of perfected individuals).

The positive errors, however, which we would venture to refer to as even more fatal to Dr. Bosanquet’s book than any of its incidental inconsistencies are those connected with the following pieces of procedure on his part: (1) his manifest tendency to treat the “universal” as if it were an entity on its own account with a sort of development and “value” and “culmination” of its own;[335] (2) his tendency to talk and think as if a “characteristic” or a “predicate” (i.e. the “characteristic” or “quality” that some experiencing being or some thinker attributes to reality) could be treated as anything at all apart from the action and the reaction of this “experient” (or “thinker”) conceived as an agent; (3) the tendency to talk of “minds”[336] rather than persons, as “purposing” and “desiring” things; (4) his tendency to talk as if “teleology” were “wholeness”; (5) his tendency to regard (somewhat in the manner of Spinoza) “selves” and “persons” as like “rising and falling tides,” and of the self as a “world of content”[337] engaged in certain “transformations”; and (6) his tendency to think and speak as if demonstration [“mediation” is perhaps his favourite way of thinking of the logical process] were an end in itself, as if we lived to think, instead of thinking to live.

In opposition to all this it may be affirmed firstly that every “conception” of the human mind is but the more or less clear consciousness of a disposition to activity, and is representative, not so much of the “features” of objects which might appear to be their “characteristics” from a purely theoretical point of view, as of the different ways in which objects have seemed to men to subserve the needs of their souls and bodies. The study of the development of the “concept” in connexion with the facts of memory and with the slow evolution of language, and with the “socialized percepts” of daily life will all tend to confirm this position. The phenomena of religion, for example, and all the main concepts of all the religions are to be studied not merely as intellectual phenomena, as solutions of some of the many difficulties of modern Agnosticism, or of modern Rationalism, or of modern Criticism, but as an expressive of the modes of behaviour of human beings (with all their needs and all their ideals) towards the universe in which they find themselves, and towards the various beings, seen and unseen, which this universe symbolises to them. These phenomena and these conceptions are unintelligible, in short, apart from the various activities and cults and social practices and social experiences and what not, with which they have dealt from first to last.

Then it is literally impossible to separate in the manner of Dr. Bosanquet the “predicate” of thought from the active relations sustained by things towards each other, or towards the human beings who seek to interpret these active relations for any or for all “purposes,” Dr. Bosanquet’s idea, however, of the relation of “mind” to “matter,” to use these symbols for the nonce (for they are but such), is in the main purely “representational”[338] or intellectualistic.[339] To him “mind” seems to reflect either a “bodily content” or some other kind of “content”[340] that seems to exist for a “spectator” of the world, or for the “Absolute,” rather than for the man himself as an agent, who of course uses his memories of himself, or his “ideal” of himself, for renewed effort and activity. One of the most important consequences of this unduly intellectualistic view of mind is that Dr. Bosanquet seems (both theoretically and practically) unable to see the place of “mind,” as “purpose,” in ordinary life,[341] or of the place of mind in evolution,[342] giving us in his difficult but important chapter on the “relation of mind and body” a version of things that approaches only too perilously close to Parallelism or Dualism, or even to Materialism.[343] And along with this quasi-“representational” or “copy-like” theory of mind there are to be associated his representational and intellectualistic views of the “self”[344] and the “universal”[345] and “spirit.”[346]

There are, doubtless, hints in Dr. Bosanquet’s pages of a more “dynamic” view of mind or of a deeper view[347] than this merely “representational” view, but they are not developed or worked into the main portion of his argument, which they would doubtless very largely transform. This is greatly to be regretted, for we remember that even Hegel seemed to notice the splitting-up of the real for our human purposes which takes place in the ordinary judgment. And of course, as we have noticed, all “purpose” is practical and theoretical at one and the same time.

Then, thirdly, it is persons, and not “minds,” who desire and purpose things, “mind” being a concept invented by the spectator of activity in a person other than himself, which (from the analogy of his own conscious activity and experience) he believes to be purposive.[348] Dr. Bosanquet’s use, too, of the expression “mind” invariably leaves out of the range of consideration the phenomena of desire and volition—intelligible, both of them, only by reference to an end that is to be understood from within, and not from outside of the personality, from the point of view of the mere spectator. The phenomena of desire and volition are just as integral ingredients of our lives as persons as are our cognitive states.

Fourthly, it is doubtful whether the treatment of teleology as “wholeness” (or its sublimation in “Individuality and Value” into “wholeness”) is much of an explanation of this difficult topic, or indeed whether it is any explanation at all. Dr. Bosanquet, in fact, confesses that teleology is a conception which “loses its distinctive meaning as we deepen its philosophical interpretation, and that it has very little meaning when applied to the universe as a whole” which is the universe[!] as a workman of limited resources, aiming at some things and obliged to accept others as means to these.” And it is equally impossible, he holds, to apply “to the universe” the distinction of “what is purpose for its own sake and what is not so.” In fact, Dr. Bosanquet’s treatment of teleology is thus mainly negative, as including not only this rejection[349] of the notion in reference to the “universe as a whole,” but its rejection, too, in reference to the purposes of our human life;[350] although he admits (as of course he must) that the conception of end or purpose is drawn from some of the features (“the simplest features,” he says) of our “finite life,” or “finite consciousness.” If the notion were “to be retained at all,” he says, “it could only be a name for some principle which would help to tell us what has value quite independent of being or not being, the purpose of some mind.”[351] Now, of course, according to the Pragmatism and Humanism that we have been considering in this book, no intelligent person could take any conceivable interest in such a useless fancy as a teleology of this kind. Thus teleology is really blotted out altogether of existence in this volume, and with its disappearance there must go also the notion of any value that might be intelligibly associated with the idea of the attainment of purposes or ends by the human beings with whom we are acquainted in our ordinary daily life.

We shall below[352] refer to the fact that this rejection of teleology and value is one that must be regarded as fatal to ethics or to Absolutism in the realm of ethics. It requires, too, to be added here that even the most unprejudiced reading of Dr. Bosanquet’s work must create in the mind of the reader the conviction that its author is altogether unfair to the views of those who believe in the existence of definite manifestations of purpose in human life.[353] He talks as if those who uphold this idea or this fact are committed either to the absurd notion that man is “the end of the universe,” or to the equally absurd notion that “art, thought, society, history, in which mind begins to transcend its finiteness should be ascribed to the directive abilities of units in a plurality, precisely apart from the world content and the underlying solidarity of spirits, the medium through which all great things are done.”

With a view of bringing our discussion of these striking Gifford Lectures within the scope of the general subject of this book the following might be regarded as their leading, fundamental characteristics to which the most serious kind of exception might well be taken: (1) its “abstractionism”[354] and its general injustice to fact due to its initial and persistent “conviction”[355] [strange to say, this is the very word used by Bosanquet] that the real movement in things is a “logical” movement; (2) its fallacious conception of the task of philosophy as mainly the obligation to think the world “without contradiction”; (3) its obvious tendency in the direction of the “subjective idealism”[356] that has been the bane of so much modern philosophy and that is discarded altogether[357] by Pragmatism and Humanism; (4) its retention of many of the characteristic polemical[358] faults of Neo-Hegelianism and its manifestation of a similar spirit of polemical unfairness[359] on the part of their accomplished author; (5) its implication in several really hopeless contradictions in addition to the broad contradiction already referred to; (6) its failure