Pragmatism and idealism

by William Caldwell

NOTE

It is necessary for me to append a few words as to the possible connexion between the foregoing criticism of the first volume of Dr. Bosanquet’s Gifford Lectures and the subject-matter of the second volume, which appeared while I was preparing the manuscript of this book for the press. I have been able only to inspect its contents and to inform myself about the ways in which it has impressed some of its representative critics. What I have thus learned does not, in my opinion, make it necessary for me to unsay or to rewrite what I have said in this chapter. My desire was to indicate the kind of criticism that the pragmatists and the humanists, as far as I understand them, would be inclined to make of Absolutism as represented in the Principle of Individuality and Value as the last significant Anglo-Hegelian output. This, I think, I have done, and the reader may be desirably left to himself to settle the question of the relation of the first of Dr. Bosanquet’s books to its companion volume that appeared in the following calendar year. I cannot, however, be so wilfully blind to the existence of this second great “Gifford” book of his as to appear to ignore the fact, that on its very face and surface it seems to do many of the things that I have allowed myself to signalize as things that Absolutism and Anglo-Hegelianism have not done, or have done but imperfectly. Its very title, The Value and Destiny of the Individual, and the titles of many of its chapters, and the reception accorded to it in such instructive reviews as those of Professor Sir Henry Jones and Professor Muirhead (in the July numbers of the Hibbert Journal and Mind respectively), are to my mind convincing proof that it is by far the most serious Anglo-Hegelian attempt of the passing generation to deal with many of the objections that have been brought against Rationalistic Idealism by the pragmatists and the voluntarists, by the defenders of faith and feeling and experience, and (before all these recent people) by many independent idealist writers of our time in England and elsewhere. In the interest of truth and of the thinking public generally, I append the mere titles of some of the chapters and divisions of Dr. Bosanquet’s second volume: “The Value of Personal Feeling, and the Grounds of the Distinctness of Persons,” “The Moulding of Souls,” “The Miracle of Will,” the “Hazards and Hardships of Finite Selfhood,” the “Stability and Security of Finite Selfhood,” “The Religious Consciousness,” “The Destiny of the Finite Self,” “The Gates of the Future.” There is in all the rich content that is thus indicated, and in all the high and deep discussion of “the ideas of a lifetime” that it includes, a veritable mine of philosophical reflection for the reader who desires to think in a connected, or Hegelian, manner about things—a mine, too, that is at least indicative of the wide territory both of fact and of principle upon which pragmatist philosophy must enter before it can become a true philosophy. I cannot find, however—this was surely not to be expected in a thinker of Dr. Bosanquet’s power—that the principles of argumentation that determined the nature and contents of the earlier volume have undergone any modification in its success or successor; indeed, what is here offered, and discovered by the reader and the critics, is but a continuation and application of the same dialectic principles to “finite beings, that is, in effect to human souls.” If any one will take upon himself the task of estimating the success or the non-success of the enterprise he will travel through a piece of philosophical writing that is as comprehensive and as coherent, and as elevating in its tone, as anything that has appeared from the Neo-Hegelian camp. The things that I chiefly feel and believe about it are, firstly, that its account of the facts of life and thought are, again, all determined by certain presuppositions about conceivability and about the principles of contradiction and negation; secondly, that it is still the same “whole” of logic that is to it the test of all reality and individuality; and, thirdly, that it is, again, a great pity that Dr. Bosanquet should not have acted upon some sort of recognition of the relation of his own dialectical principles to those of his master Hegel, or to those of some of his Neo-Hegelian predecessors in England and America. Although it is almost an impertinence on the part of one who has just made the acquaintance of this outstanding volume to speak in any detail of its contents, I can indicate part of my meaning by pointing out that it is throughout such things as “finite mind,” the “finite mind” that is “best understood by approaching it from the side of the continuum” [the “whole”], the “finite mind” that is “shaped by the universe,” that is “torn between existence and self-transcendence,” “appearance,” an “externality which is the object of mind,” the “positive principle of totality or individuality manifesting itself in a number of forms,” “good” and “evil as attitudes concerning a creature’s whole being,” “volition” in terms of the “principle that there is for every situation a larger and more effective point of view than the given”—that are discussed, and not the real persons who have what they call “minds” and “volitions” and “attitudes,” and who invent all these principles and distinctions to describe the world of their experience and the world of their thoughts. As against him Pragmatism and Humanism would, I think, both insist that the first reality for all thought and speculation is not the “logical whole” that underlies, in the mind of the thinker, the greater number of all his categories and distinctions, but the life and the lives of the persons in a world of inter-subjective intercourse, wherein these points of view are used for different purposes. And I cannot see how Dr. Bosanquet is entitled to scorn all those who hold to the idea of the reality of the lives of the persons who are agents and thinkers in this personal realm, which is for us the highest reality of the universe, as believers in the “exclusiveness of personality,” although I would certainly agree with him that our experience, when properly interpreted, carries us beyond the subjectivism and the individualism of some forms of Pragmatism or Pluralism. The reader who is anxious to know about the real value of the Hegelianism upon which Dr. Bosanquet’s philosophy reposes should consult the work of Croce upon the “living” and the “dead” elements in Hegel’s System. It has recently been translated into English. Dr. Bosanquet, like many Hegelians, seems to me to overlook almost entirely the important elements in the philosophy of Kant—of some of which I speak of in the next chapter as developed in the spiritualistic philosophy of Bergson.

CHAPTER IX
PRAGMATISM AND IDEALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERGSON[386]

The pragmatist elements in the philosophy of Bergson of which it is, perhaps, legitimate for us to speak here are (1) his “Anti-Intellectualism,” and (2) his “Activism” or “Actionism.” The latter culminates in his freedom-philosophy and his spiritualism. I shall comment shortly upon these two things, and then suggest one or two general criticisms of his philosophy as a whole.

Bergson’s anti-intellectualism rests ultimately upon his contention that the human intellect is related in the main to the needs of action, that the brain is an organ of action rather than an organ of thought, that our intelligence is at home only in the realm of the physical and the mathematical sciences,[387] that contrivance and invention and the practical comprehension of the “material” are its proper activities, and that for these latter purposes it splits up the world of the senses and the understanding into a discontinuous aggregate of physical units, which it then proceeds to reconstruct in a spatial and temporal order. We perceive in Nature, he holds, what interests[388] us in the way of our vital needs; our intellect is adapted, not for the understanding or the purely rational (“abstract”) comprehension of “causality” and the “life of things,” but for the maintenance and furtherance of our own lives, and for the creation of the instruments and agencies (signs, language, tools, imagined sequences and laws, essences, causes, the “descriptions” of science, the special senses, the convolutions of the brain, etc.) that minister to this. Science is to-day still penetrated through and through with primitive metaphysics, with the metaphysics of animism, with a belief in separate things like forces, atoms, elements, or what not—indicative all of them of its attempt to “divide up” the real that it may command it for theoretical and practical purposes. We can see this in the “structural psychology”[389] of the day and its analysis of our mental life into “elements,” in respect of the number and character of which there are lasting differences of opinion among the masters of the science—into “impressions,” and “affections,” and sensations, images, memories, ideas, and so on. And we can see it, too, in the erroneous attempts sometimes made by psychologists to treat these entities as if they had clearly defined temporal and spatial characteristics or qualities.

The supreme mistake of philosophy, according to Bergson, has been to import into the domain of speculation a method of thinking that was originally destined for action. It has forgotten that nearly all the leading conceptions of common sense and of science and of “analysis” have been invented, not for final and general, but for relative and particular purposes. And it has fallen too readily under the influence of a certain traditional view of the relations between metaphysics and science—the view, namely, that philosophy should just take the findings of science and of common-sense about the world as its initial material, subjecting them, of course, to a certain preliminary reinterpretation, but finally reconstructing them, almost as they were, into a system.[390] The one thing, in short, that philosophy has failed to understand is the life and the movement and the process of the world, as an infinitely more important fact than the endless terms and conceptions and entities (“will,” “reason,” “Ideas,” etc.) into which it has been analysed. We might sum up the whole by saying that Bergson’s anti-intellectualism is simply a protest, not against the use, but only against the “systematic misuse”[391] of general conceptions that have been current in science and philosophy “since the time of Socrates,” a protest, however, that in his case is not merely general and negative, but particularised and positive.[392]

Like any and all anti-intellectualism, Bergson’s anti-intellectualism is liable to serious misinterpretation, and it is currently misinterpreted and misrepresented as “irrationalism.” His intention, however, is not to destroy and to condemn philosophy and reasoning, and to exalt mere intuition and faith, but rather to “liberate”[393] our human consciousness of ourselves and of the world from the dogmatism of what he regards to be the utilitarian intellect, from the many hopeless contradictions and antinomies and puzzles of the mere analytic understanding. Philosophy, in particular, he would free from the last traces and symptoms of scientific rationalism, although fully aware of the fact that our modern philosophy had its very departure from the rationalism of the great founders of modern science like Kepler and Galileo and the rest.

He would strike at the roots of all this confident rationalism or scientific philosophy by opening up a broader and a deeper view of truth than that afforded to the merely piece-meal and utilitarian view.

As for the Actionism and the action philosophy of Bergson, this is perhaps more in line than any other tendency of the day with the new life and the new thought of the twentieth century, although (like Pragmatism) it stands in need of correction or revision by the principles of a sound ethical philosophy, by the Idealism that is not, and cannot be, the mere creation of to-day or yesterday. In essence it is, to begin with, but an extension to the mind as a whole and to all its so-called special faculties (“sensation,” “perception,” “memory,” “ideation,” “judgment,” “thinking,” “emotion,” and the rest) of the “dynamic,”[394] instead of the older, static point of view that the recent science of our time has applied to matter and to life, and that Pragmatism and the “hypothetical method” have sought to apply to all the ordinary conceptions and constructions that exist in the different domains of the different sciences.[395] It is also, from our point of view, as we may see, an attempt at the expression, in the terms of a comparatively simple philosophy, of many of the considerations in respect of knowledge and conduct that have been brought forward in the preceding pages of this book. We have already dwelt in different ways, for example, upon the fact that there is no perception or sensation without an organic reaction on the part of the percipient or the sentient being, that an idea is in a sense a motor attitude (a way of comprehending particulars or particular facts in relation to our purposes and our ends), that a logical judgment represents a “division” of the real, or of the processes of Nature, for some purpose or other, that our whole mental life is purposive, that there is no “pure” cognition without attendant emotion and[396] volition, that it is in action that desire and thought come together, that our whole knowledge of the world is necessarily a knowledge of it in terms of our purposes and our highest attitudes, and so on. All of this is, as it were, an indication of the psychological and the logical considerations upon which Bergson bases his positive,[397] activistic, philosophy of mind.

It is to be remembered in Bergson’s interest that when we speak of his Actionism[398] we do not mean a narrowing down[399] on his part of the activities of the soul to physical labour and to mere utilitarian effort, but its capacity, also, for that creative activity which he takes to be the very keynote of personal life and the evolutionary process.