Pragmatism and idealism

by William Caldwell

(4) There is really no place either in Dr. Bosanquet’s “concrete universal” or in his fugitive pages upon ethics for the reality of the distinction between good and evil (as “willed” in actions or as present in dispositions and tendencies). Good and evil[371] are for him, “contents” either for himself as a spectator of man’s actions, or for the “concrete universal,” or the “whole,” or the completed “individual” of his too consummate book.

(5) Like nearly all forms of Absolutism (Hegelianism, Neo-Hegelianism, Spinozism, Hobbism) Dr. Bosanquet’s ethics (or the vestigial ethics with which he leaves us) comes perilously near to what is known as Determinism[372] or Fatalism or even Materialism.

As for the first of the preceding five points, it is perfectly evident that any discussion of the various psychological phenomena that are doubtless involved in conduct can be regarded as but a preliminary step to the discussion of the real problems of ethics—that of the actions and habits and standards of persons who are the subjects of rights and duties and who affirm certain actions to be right, and certain other actions to be wrong. The point, however, about Dr. Bosanquet’s psychological abstractionism, especially when it rises to the height of writing as if the “self” as the “active form of a totality of striving,” or the “self as it happens to be,” were the same thing as the “personal self” with which we alone are mainly concerned in ethics, is that it is but another instance of the old “spectator”[373] fallacy that we have already found to underlie his whole treatment of the “self” and of “purpose” and of “striving.” Such a philosophy, or point of view, is quite foreign to ethics, because it is only in the ethical life that we think of ourselves as “persons,” as beings playing a part, as actors or players upon the great stage of life. By not facing the ethical life directly, from within, instead of from without, Dr. Bosanquet has entirely failed to understand it. And if he had attempted this internal consideration of “personality,” his whole metaphysic of “individuality” and of the great society of beings who inhabit (or who may be thought of as inhabiting) this universe, would have been very different from what it is.

Then as for the second and third points, it is surely evident from the footnotes that have been appended in connexion with the matter of his transformation of the facts of ethics in the interests of other things like logic, and aesthetics, and metaphysics, that there is indeed, in Bosanquet, no recognition of what must be called the genuine, or independent reality of the moral life, or of the moral ideal as a force in human nature. And as for the fourth point, students of modern ethics are naturally by this time perfectly familiar with the tendency of Rationalism to make evil action and the “evil self” simply the affirmation of a “logically incoherent” point of view. It exists in an English writer like Wollaston[374] as well as in a German philosopher like Hegel. This tendency is indeed a piece of sophistry and illusion because the distinction between good and evil, and the distinction between right and wrong (perhaps the better and the more crucial formulation of the two—for us moderns at least) is unintelligible apart from the fact or the idea of the existence of moral agents, who make (in their volition, and in the judgments that accompany or precede their volitions) a “norm,” or rule, or line between the ethically permissible and the ethically unpermissible. The rationalism that makes these distinctions merely a matter of “logic,” overlooks the fact that in actual life men must be warded off from wrong-doing (and they are in many cases actually so warded off by their consciences and by other things, like the love of home, or the love of honour, or the love of God) by something stronger than the mere idea of a possible theoretical mistake.

As for the fifth point of the Determinism or the Necessitarianism that hangs like a sword of Damocles over the entire ethic of Dr. Bosanquet, the nature of this should be perfectly apparent from many of the statements and considerations that have been brought forward as typical of his entire line of thought. He teaches a “passivism”[375] and an “intellectualism” that are just as pronounced and just as essential to his thought as they are to the great system of his master, Hegel, in whose ambitious philosophy of spirit man’s whole destiny is unfolded without the possibility of his playing himself any appreciable part in the impersonal, dialectic movement in which it is made to consist.

It is now necessary to speak definitely and outspokenly of the element of supreme truth and value in Dr. Bosanquet’s unique book, of the positive contribution it makes to philosophy and to natural theology.[376] This is, in a word, its tribute to the permanent element of truth and reality in the idealistic philosophy. And he testifies to this in his “belief” that in the main the work of philosophy has been done, and “that what is now needed is to recall and concentrate the modern mind from its distraction rather than to invent wholly new theoretic conceptions.” This declaration is of itself a position of considerable importance, however widely one is obliged to differ from its author as to what exactly it is that has already been demonstrated and accomplished “in philosophy.” If there has really been “nothing done” in philosophy since the time of Socrates, if philosophy is to-day no true antithesis of, and corrective to science, then there is possible neither Pragmatism, nor Humanism, nor any other, possibly more fundamental, philosophy. There can, as Dr. Bosanquet puts it, “indeed be no progress if no definite ground is ever to be recognized as gained.” This then is the first thing of transcendent importance in “Individuality and Value,” its insistance upon the fundamentally different estimate of reality given by philosophy in distinction from science and its merely hypothetical treatment of reality. This “difference” is, of course, but natural, seeing that to philosophy there are no things or phenomena without minds, or persons or beings to whom they appear as things and phenomena.

The second great thing of “Individuality and Value” is its insistence upon the need to all philosophy of a recognized grasp of the principle of “Meaning.”[377] What this instance implies to Dr. Bosanquet is, that “at no point in our lives [either] as [agents or] thinkers are we to accept any supposed element of fact or circumstance as having any significance” apart from the great “whole” or the great “reality,” with which we believe ourselves to be in contact in our daily experience, when interpreted in the light of our consciousness of ourselves as persons. In the letter of the book his interpretation of the great “whole,” or the great reality, of life is by no means as broad and as deep as the one at which we have just hinted in attempting to describe his position. But overriding altogether the mere intellectualism of Dr. Bosanquet’s interpretation, is the fact of the dynamic idealism for which he virtually stands,[378] in virtue of the great and the simple effort of his lectures[379] to find “value” in “our daily experience with its huge obstinate plurality of independent facts.” He would start, as we mentioned (at the beginning of this chapter), with what he believes to be “the daily transformation of our experience as verified within what we uncritically take as our private consciousness, so far as its weakness may permit,” and “as verified on a larger scale when we think of such splendid creations as the State and fine art and religion,” and when we think, too, of “the mode of our participation in them.” Now again nothing could indeed be more nobly true (in idea) of the great work of the philosopher than the proper theory and description of this “daily transformation” of our lives, out of the life of “sense” and the life of selfishness, into the spiritual communion[380] that is the essence of all right thinking and all right living.

But we may go further than all this and signalize one or two things in Dr. Bosanquet that we venture to construe as a kind of unconscious testimony, on his part, to the very humanism for which we have been contending throughout.

The things to which we refer are, firstly, his use of the word “belief”[381] in speaking of his opinion that the work of philosophy has in the main been accomplished, and, second, his fine and really praiseworthy[382] confession that his lectures, whatever they may have done or may not have done, at least “contain the record of a very strong conviction.” Dr. Bosanquet’s departure, in the letter of his argumentation, from the spirit of these declarations only accentuates what we regard as the regrettable failure and abstractionism of his whole official (or professed) philosophy.

His use of the word belief[383] shows that it is, after all his professional homage to “mediation” and to the necessary abstractions of logic and system, belief and not knowledge that is to him the final and “working” estimate of truth and of reality. And the same conclusion follows from the second matter of the confession of which we have spoken, that his entire argumentation is but the expression of a strong conviction.[384] It is again, therefore, we would insist a spiritual conviction, and not a conceptual system that is actually and necessarily the moving force of his entire intellectual activity. And, we would add to his own face, it is a conviction moreover that “works,” and not a “logical whole” or a mere conceptual ideal, that he must (as a philosopher) engender in the mind of his average reader about reality. His “logical whole” and his “individuality as logical completeness,” “work” with him [Professor Bosanquet] for the reason that he is primarily an intellectual worker, a worker in the realm of mind. But reality (as the whole world of human work and human effort is there to tell us) is more than an intellectual system. And what is a conviction to him is not necessarily a conviction that works with the ordinary man, who knows reality better than he does, or who knows it (like himself) in his desires and in his beliefs rather than in the terms and conceptions that are the mere tools of the intellect and the specialist. For, taking his book as a whole, we may say about it that the dissolution of reality into a conceptual system that is effected there is at best but another convincing proof of the truth of the words of the great David Hume,[385] that the understanding, “when it acts alone, and according to its most general principles, entirely subverts itself, and leaves not the slightest degree of evidence in any proposition, either in philosophy or common life.”