Pragmatism and idealism

by William Caldwell

As for the freedom-philosophy with which Bergson’s Actionism is to be associated, this is worked out by him, firstly, in the most perfect correspondence with what he believes to be the facts of life and mind; and, secondly, in terms of that anti-rationalism (or hostility to the merely scientific intellect) which is his working theory of knowledge. His views upon this subject have also been depreciated and misunderstood by some of his opponents who attack what they call his “intuitional” treatment of the freedom-question—his insistence upon the direct intuition of our life that we have when we act consciously, and when we are “most ourselves”—when we act out “freely” our own nature. To him the primary fact for any human being is the life-impulse that is both instinctive and reflective, that is certainly far more of a fundamental reality than any of those entities or concepts (“cells,” “atoms,” “forces,” “laws,” or what not) which, with Kant, he clearly sees to be the creation of the intellect for its descriptive and practical purposes. This life is “free” in the sense that we are not “determined” by any or all of those forces and laws to which our intellect subjects everything else, but which it cannot apply to the life that is more than mere matter, that is a real becoming and a real process, a real creation and development.

The “spiritualism,” again, of his interpretation of this life and activity rests, to begin with, upon his opinion that the very inception of the activity, and the adjustment, and the selection in which the simplest life-effort, and the simplest perception of a living being consist, indicate the presence and the operation of a controlling agency,[400] or mind, or principle of spiritual “choice” that is not, and cannot be, explained on the principles of a mechanical science or philosophy. This principle is, in a word, the life-force, or the creative activity, the élan vital of which we read so much in his books, that has “seized upon matter,” vitalizing it into force and energy, into the “play” upon each other of all the varied activities and grades and forms of the will to live, and into the various forms of socialized and co-operative living on the part of animals and men. We shall immediately remark upon the matter of the apparent limitations of this spiritual philosophy of life, or reality, that is here but indicated or stated.

One of its essential features, so far as we are at present concerned, is his claim that his introduction of a spiritual principle into the life-force, or the creative activity that has expressed itself in the various grades and forms of life, both animal and human, is not a phase of the old philosophy[401] or theology of “final causes” or of a predetermined[402] “teleology.” To this old finalism or teleology[403] the life of organic nature (the “organs” and “cells,” the “instinctive” actions, and the “adjustments” of animals, and so on) were all due to the work of a pre-existing, calculating intelligence operating upon matter; whereas to him they are but different expressions or creations of the life-force that is as little predetermined in organic evolution, as it is in the realm of the activities interpreted for us (in part) by the newer physics and the newer chemistry—in the processes, for example, that are exemplified in the generation of a star out of a nebula. This entire treatment, however, of the notion of purpose in nature is a matter of great difficulty in the philosophy of Bergson, and his own thought (as I shall presently state) is apt to strike us as just as hypothetical as some of the views he attempts to combat. It raises, too, the question of the valuation of his philosophy as a whole, and of its relation to the great thinker who still stands in the very centre of the entire modern movement from Copernicus to Comte and Darwin—Immanuel Kant.[404]

We shall best get at the matter of the fuller developments of the philosophy of Bergson that are of interest to us at present, by indicating some of the results that would accrue from it to the constructive philosophy in which we are interested as the outcome of Pragmatism and Idealism. Among these would be, firstly, a new and a fresh, and yet a perfectly rational apprehension of the fact of the necessarily abstract and hypothetical[405] character of the analyses to which our world is subjected by the science and by the technic and the supposed “economy” of our present culture.[406] Then an equally new and equally rational (or “rationally grounded”) conviction of the inadequacy of the physical and the scientific categories to the comprehension and the explanation of life and of the life of the spirit. Thirdly, a confirmation of many of the tendencies to which the Pragmatism and the Voluntarism and the Humanism of the last century have given a more or less one-sided and imperfect formulation. Among such confirmed tendencies are (α) the attempt they have all made to attain to a deeper[407] view of human nature than the view hitherto taken by rationalism and intellectualism, (β) their emphasis upon the freedom and the initiative[408] of the individual and upon the necessity, on the part of philosophy, of a “dynamic” or “motive-awakening”[409] theory of reality, (γ) their insistence[410] similarly upon the necessity to our thought of a direct contact with reality, and upon the impossibility of our beginning in philosophy without assumptions of one kind or another, (δ) their refusal to make any ultimate separation[411] between the intellect and the will, between the highest thought and the highest emotion, (ε) their tendency to regard belief[412] rather than knowledge as our fundamental estimate of truth and reality.

A fourth constructive result, however, of the philosophy of Bergson would be not the mere confirmation of any number of pragmatist and humanist tendencies, but their integration, and their transformation into the evidences and the manifestation of a new spiritual philosophy of life and of the universe generally. It is this possible quasi integration and transformation of so many of the tendencies of Pragmatism and Voluntarism and of the Philosophy of Science of the day, that makes Bergson the greatest of all the pragmatists—although the term hardly occurs in his main writings, and although he breathes from first to last the air of an idealism[413] and a spiritualism that is above and beyond all the mere instrumentalism, and the mere empiricism and the ethical opportunism of Pragmatism.

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The following are some of the difficulties and counter-considerations that stand in the way of the intelligibility and the supposed novelty of the philosophy of Bergson. (1) It is in some respects but a biological philosophy after all, a would-be philosophical interpretation of the “evolutionary process” which takes many things for granted and ignores many difficulties. Some of these things are the life-force itself, the élan de vie, the vital aspects that he sees in the forces of nature, the “eternal movement” of which he is always speaking as the only reality and as the very life of the universe, the whole “adaptation” philosophy that characterises his own teleology despite his attacks on “mechanism” and on “finalism,” and so on. One is tempted, indeed, to think that in much of all this he forgets his own doctrine of the hypothetical character of science and philosophy, and that, in his very anxiety to escape from mechanism and from rationalism, and Paleyism, he credits Nature with a contingency and a “freedom”[414] that corresponds in their way to the chaos, of which the Greeks thought as a necessary background to the cosmos. He seems, in other words, to deify into a kind of eternal “becoming” and a quasi free and creative “duration,” his own (necessary) inability to grasp the system of things.

Then, secondly, there is a veritable crop of difficulties that arise out of his contention that our intellect is adapted “only to matter.” What, for example, of the various non-utilitarian[415] intuitions of art and morality and religion, that are as undoubtedly facts of our conscious experience as is our comprehension and utilisation of “matter” for the various purposes of civilisation?[416] If it be literally true that our understanding is “incapacitated” for the comprehension of life and of the creative activities of the soul, a new set of categories and a higher form of intelligence (than the merely material) must be elaborated for this special purpose. And if this higher form of intelligence be the “intuition” of which Bergson undoubtedly makes so much, then he must be more careful than he often is in suggesting that intuition and a philosophy of our intuitions “must go counter to the intellect.”[417] His theory of art reduces itself, for example, in the main to the negative contention that spiritual perception is always simply “anti-mechanical,”[418] simply the power of seeing things in another way than that of the engineer or the craftsman, the homo faber.

Thirdly, there are many dualisms or oppositions in his doctrine or expressed teaching, reducible all of them to the one great Cartesian dualism between the mind and the matter that are said by him to intersect in memory, and in perception, and in the life of the spirit generally—the opposition, for example, between instinct and intelligence, that between intelligence and intuition,[419] between the “mechanical” and the “organic,” between the “upward” and the “downward” movements that he attributes to the life-force. And there is a striking inconsistency between his apparent acceptance of the teaching of Kant in respect of the limitations of the physical and the temporal way of looking at things (ourselves included and our actions) and his belief in an eternal “duration,”[420] or movement, or process of which he is always speaking as the very life and texture of everything. This “real” or “pure” “duration” is a thing that troubles all students of his philosophy; it seems to make Bergson believe in what James talked of as a “strung-along” universe. And there is an inconsistency between the supremacy that he seems willing to accord to mind and spirit in the case of the new individuals who are always being born into the world, and the absence of a similar supremacy (or determining rôle) in the case of the mind or spirit without whose existence and operation the universe is unthinkable.[421]

As for the latter contradiction, we may note in his favour that he talks, at least once or twice, of “God” as “unceasing life”[422] and “active freedom,” and I am inclined to take this master thought as possibly a kind of foundation for his rich and suggestive philosophy of life and reality. But there is in his writings nothing like the thorough-going attempt that we find in the philosophy of Aristotle[423] to ground the motion and the life of the world in God as its final cause and its ultimate explanation. Equally little is there in Bergson a thorough-going attempt to work out the Idealism[424] upon which his whole system reposes—his initial conception of objects as “images,” or “ideas” for a consciousness, or for the life-force, or for the different “centres of activity” with which he peoples the worlds.