Pragmatism and idealism

by William Caldwell

[71] To be traced to Fichte’s well-known initial interpretation of Kant from the standpoint of the Practical Reason of the second “Critique,” and to Schelling’s late “positive” philosophy, and to Schopenhauer, the will philosopher par excellence. See my Schopenhauer’s System in its Philosophical Significance.

[72] As an illustration of this “conceptual shorthand,” I take the following lines from Professor Needham’s book upon General Biology (p. 222) in respect of “classification” and its relative and changing character. “Whatever our views of relationship, the series in which we arrange organisms are based upon the likenesses and differences we find to exist among them. This is classification. We associate organisms together under group names because, being so numerous and so diverse, it is only thus that our minds can deal with them. Classification furnishes the handles by which we move all our intellectual luggage. We base our groupings on what we know of the organisms. Our system of classification is therefore liable to change with every advance of knowledge.”

[73] Professor Jerusalem (the translator of James’s Pragmatism into German) is known as one of the German discoverers of Pragmatism. His Introduction to Philosophy (translated by Professor Sanders, Macmillan & Co., N.Y., 1910) is an admirable, easy, and instructive introduction to philosophy from a pragmatist point of view. It has gone through four editions in Germany. It is quite free from any taint of irrationalism and has sections upon the “theory of knowledge” and the “theory of being.” Its spirit may be inferred from the following quotations. “My philosophy is characterized by the empirical view point, the genetic method, and the biological and the social methods of interpreting the human mind” (the Preface). “Philosophy is the intellectual effort which is undertaken with a view to combining the common experiences of life and the results of scientific investigation into a harmonious and consistent world theory; a world theory, moreover, which is adapted to satisfy the requirements of the understanding and the demands of the heart. There was a time when men believed that such a theory could be constructed from the pure forms of thought, without much concern for the results of detailed investigation. But that time is for ever past” (pp. 1 and 2).

[74] Author of a work on Philosophy and Social Economy (Philosophie und Wirthschaft), in which the fundamental idea is that philosophy is essentially nothing more or less than a “conception of life” or a view of the world in general, and that the older rationalistic philosophy will therefore have to be modified in view of modern discoveries and modern ways of looking at things. It has, of course, the limitations of such a point of view, in so far as its author seems to forget that philosophy must lead human life and not merely follow it. My present point is merely to mention of the existence and work of this man as one of the continental thinkers who have anticipated the essentially social conception of philosophy taken by the pragmatists.

[75] It is easy to see the influence of Fichte’s will philosophy and practical idealism in Schellwien’s books (Philosophie und Leben, Wille und Erkenntniss, Der Geist der neuern Philosophie). He speaks of the primacy of the will (in point of time only, of course), or of the “unconscious” in the life of man, allowing, however, that man gradually transforms this natural life in the life of “creative activity” that is his proper life. He states (in the Spirit of the New Philosophy) the pragmatist idea that “belief” (p. 32) or the “feeling” that we have of the ultimate “unity” of “subject and object,” precedes (also in point of “time”) knowledge, pointing out, however, in the same place the limitations of belief. These latter, he supposes, to be overcome in the higher knowledge that we have in creative activity—an idea which, I think, may be associated to some extent with the position of Blondel.

[76] In the Phil. Rev. (xvi. p. 250) Dr. Ewald speaks of this work of this psychologizing school as existing alongside of the renewed interest in Fichte and Schelling and Hegel. It is an attempt to revive the teaching of Fries, a Kantian (at Jena) who attempted to establish the Critique of Pure Reason upon a psychological basis, believing that psychology, “based on internal experience,” must form the basis of all philosophy. It stands squarely upon the fact that all logical laws and “categories,” even the highest and most abstract, in order to “come to consciousness in man,” must be given to him as “psychological processes”—a position which is certainly true as far as it goes, and which supports, say, the genetic psychological attitude of Professor Dewey. Its attitude has been sharply criticized in some of his books by Dr. Ernst Cassirer of Berlin, a well-known upholder of a more rationalistic form of Neo-Kantianism.

[77] Dr. Simmel of Berlin (like Stein) is a prominent representative of this school (even in a recent striking book that he wrote upon the philosophy of Kant). He has written, for example, a most erudite work upon the Philosophy of Money, and this at the same time with all his university work as a fascinating and learned lecturer upon both ancient and modern philosophy.

[78] Without attempting to enter upon the matter of Harnack’s philosophy as a Neo-Kantian of the school of Ritschl, I am thinking simply of things like the following from his book on the Essence of Christianity. “It is to man that religion pertains, to man, as one who in the midst of all change and progress himself never changes” (p. 8). “The point of view of the philosophical theorists in the strict sense of the word will find no place in these lectures. Had they been delivered sixty years ago it would have been our endeavour to try to arrive by speculative reasoning at some general conception of religion, and then to define the Christian religion accordingly. But we have rightly become sceptical about the value of this procedure. Latet dolus in generalibus. We know to-day that life cannot be spanned by general conceptions” (p. 9). See also his protest (on p. 220) against the substitution of a “Hellenistic” view of religion for religion itself—a protest that is, according to Pfleiderer in his Development of Theology (p. 298), a marked characteristic of Harnack’s whole History of Dogma.

[79] I am thinking of Ritschl’s sharp distinction between “theoretical knowledge” and “religious faith” (which rises to judgments of value about the world that transcend even moral values), and of his idea that the “truth” of faith is practical, and must be “lived.” Pfleiderer says (in his Development of Theology, p. 184) that Ritschl’s “conception of religion is occupied with judgments of value [Werturtheile], i.e. with conceptions of our relation to the world which are of moment solely according to their value in awakening feelings of pleasure and pain, as our dominion over the world is furthered or checked.” His “acceptance of the idea of God as [with Kant] a practical ‘belief,’ and not an act of speculative cognition,” is also to some extent a pragmatist idea in the sense in which, in this book, I reject pragmatist ideas. Ritschl seems to have in the main only a strongly practical interest in dogmatics holding that “only the things vital are to be made vital in the actual service of the church.” He goes the length of holding that “a merely philosophical view of the world has no place in Christian theology,” holding that “metaphysical inquiry” applied to “nature” and to “spirit,” as “things to be analysed, for the purpose of finding out what they are in themselves, can from the nature of the case have no great value for Christian theology.” Of course he is right in holding that the “proofs for the existence of God, conducted by the purely metaphysical method, do not lead to the forces whose representation is given in Christianity, but merely to conceptions of a world-unity, which conceptions are neutral as regards all religion” (The Theology of Albrecht Ritschl, Swing. Longmans, Green & Co., 1901). I think this last quotation from Ritschl may be used as an expression of the idea of the pragmatists, that a true and complete philosophy must serve as a “dynamic” to human endeavour and to human motive.

[80] See the reference to Windelband in the footnote upon p. 150.