Pragmatism and idealism

by William Caldwell

As for Pragmatism and pragmatist achievements in Germany, there is, as might well be supposed, little need of saying much. The genius of the country is against both; and if there is any Pragmatism in Germany, it must have contrived somehow to have been “born again” of the “spirit” before obtaining official recognition.[66] So much even might be inferred from the otherwise generous recognition accorded to the work of James by scholars and thinkers like Eucken and Stein[67] and the rest. Those men cannot see Pragmatism save in the broad light of the “humanism” that has always characterised philosophy, when properly appreciated, and understood in the light of its true genesis. Pragmatism has in fact been long known in Germany under the older names of “Voluntarism” and “Humanism,” although it may doubtless be associated there with some of the more pronounced tendencies of the hour, such as the recent insistence of the “Göttingen Fries School” upon the importance of the “genetic” and the “descriptive” point of view in regard even to the matter of the supposed first principles of knowledge, the hypothetical and methodological conception of philosophy taken by philosophical scientists like Mach and Ostwald[68] and their followers, the “empiricism” and “realism” of thinkers like the late Dr. Avenarius[69] of Zurich.

Then the so-called “teleological,” or “practical,” character of our human thinking has also been recognized in modern German thought long before the days of Peirce and Dewey, even by such strictly academic thinkers as Lotze and Sigwart. The work of the latter thinker upon Logic, by the way, was translated into English under distinctly Neo-Hegelian influences. In the second portion of this work the universal presuppositions of knowledge are considered, not merely as a priori truths, but as akin in some important respects “to the ethical principles by which we are wont to determine and guide our free conscious activity.”[70] But even apart from this matter of the natural association of Pragmatism with the Voluntarism that has long existed in German philosophy,[71] we may undoubtedly pass to the following things in contemporary and recent German thought as sympathetic, in the main, to the pragmatist tendencies of James and Dewey and Schiller: (1) the practical conception of science and philosophy, as both of them a kind of “economy of the attention,” a sort of “conceptual shorthand”[72] (for the purposes of the “description” of our environment) that we have referred to in the case of Mach and Ostwald; (2) the close association between the “metaphysical” and the “cultural” in books like those of Jerusalem[73] and Eleutheropulos;[74] (3) the sharp criticism of the Rationalism of the Critical Idealism by the two last-mentioned thinkers, and by some of the members of the new Fichte[75] School like Schellwien; and last but not least, (4) the tendency to take a psychological[76] and a sociological[77] (instead of a merely logical) view of the functions of thought and philosophy, that is just as accentuated in Germany at the present time as it is elsewhere.

James and Schiller have both been fond of referring to the work of many of these last-mentioned men as favourable to a conception of philosophy less as a “theory of knowledge” (or a “theory of being”) in the old sense than as a Weltanschauungslehre (a view of the world as whole), a “discussion of the various possible programmes for man’s life” to which reference has already been made in the case of Papini and others. And we might associate with their predilections and persuasions in this regard the apparent Pragmatism also of a great scholar like Harnack[78] in reference to the subordination of religious dogma to the realities of the religious life, or the Pragmatism of Ritschl[79] himself, in regard to the subordinate place in living religion of mere intellectual theory, or even some of the tendencies of the celebrated value-philosophy of Rickert and Windelband[80] and Münsterberg[81] and the rest. But again the main trouble about all this quasi-German support for the pragmatists is that most of these contemporary thinkers have taken pains to trace the roots of their teaching back into the great systems of the past. The pragmatists, on the other hand, have been notoriously careless about the matter of the various affiliations of their “corridor-like” and eclectic theory.

There are many reasons, however, against regarding even the philosophical expression of many of the practical and scientific tendencies of Germany as at all favourable to the acceptance of Pragmatism as a satisfactory philosophy from the German point of view. Among these reasons are: (1) The fact that it is naturally impossible to find any real support in past or present German philosophy for the impossible breach that exists in Pragmatism between the “theoretical” and the “practical,” and (2) the fact that Germany has only recently passed through a period of sharp conflict between the psychological (or the “genetic”) and the logical point of view regarding knowledge, resulting in a confessed victory for the latter. And then again (3) even if there is a partial correspondence between Pragmatism and the quasi economic (or “practical”) conception taken of philosophy by some of the younger men in Germany who have not altogether outlived their reaction against Rationalism, there are other tendencies there that are far more characteristic of the spirit and of the traditions of the country. Among these are the New Idealism generally, the strong Neo-Kantian movement of the Marburg school[82] and their followers in different places, the revived interest in Hegel[83] and in Schelling, the Neo-Romanticism of Jena, with its booklets upon such topics as The Culture of the Soul, Life with Nature, German Idealism, and so on.[84] And then (4) there are just as many difficulties in the way of regarding the psychological and sociological philosophy of men like Jerusalem and Eleutheropulos as anything like a final philosophy of knowledge, as there is in attempting to do the same thing with the merely preliminary and tentative philosophy of James and his associates.

Returning now to America and England, although Pragmatism is eminently an American[85] doctrine, it would, of course, be absurd to imagine that Pragmatism has carried the entire thought of the United States with it.[86] It encountered there, even at the outset, at least something of the contempt and the incredulity and the hostility that it met with elsewhere, and also much of the American shrewd indifference to a much-advertised new article. The message of James as a philosopher, too, was doubtless discounted (at least by the well-informed) in the light of his previous brilliant work as a descriptive psychologist, and also, perhaps, in the light of his wonderfully suggestive personality.[87]

What actually happened in America in respect of the pragmatist movement was, first of all, the sudden emergence of a magazine literature[88] in connexion with the Will-to-Believe philosophy of James and the California address, and in connexion (according to the generous testimony of James) with Deweyism or “Instrumentalism.” Much of this tiresome and hair-splitting magazine discussion of “ideas as instruments of thought,” and of the “consequences” (“theoretical” or “practical” or what not) by which ideas were to be “tested,” was pronounced by James, in 1906, to be largely crude and superficial. It had the indirect merit, however, of yielding one or two valuable estimates of the many inconsistencies in Pragmatism, and of the many different kinds of Pragmatism or instrumentalism that there seemed to be, and of the value of Pragmatism as a “theory of knowledge,” and as a “philosophical generalization.” The upshot of the whole preliminary discussion was (1) the discovery that, Pragmatism having arisen (as Dewey himself put it) out of a multitude of conflicting tendencies in regard to what we might call the “approach” to philosophy, would probably soon “dissolve itself” back again into some of the streams out of which it had arisen,[89] and (2) the discovery that all that this early “methodological” pragmatism amounted to was the harmless doctrine that the meaning of any conception expressed itself in the past or future conduct or experience of actual, or possible, sentient creatures.

We shall again take occasion[90] to refer to this comparative failure of Pragmatism to give any systematic or unified account of the consequences by which it would seek to test the truth of propositions. Its failure, however, in this connexion is a matter of secondary importance in comparison with the great lesson[91] to be drawn from its idea that there can be for man no objective truth about the universe, apart from the idea of its meaning[92] or significance to his experience and to his conscious activity.

What is now taking place in America in this second decade [i.e. in the years after 1908] of the pragmatist movement is apparently (1) the sharpest kind of official rationalist condemnation of Pragmatism as an imperfectly proved and a merely “subjective” and a highly unsystematic philosophy; (2) the appearance of a number of instructive booklets[93] upon Pragmatism and the pragmatist movement, some of them expository and critical, some of them in the main sympathetic, some of them condemnatory and even contemptuous, and some of them attempts at further constructive work along pragmatist lines; (3) indications here and there of the acceptance and the promulgation of older and newer doctrines antithetic and hostile to Pragmatism—some of them possibly as typically American as Pragmatism itself.

As a single illustration of the partly constructive work that is being attempted in the name and the spirit of pragmatism, we may instance the line of reflection entered upon by Professor Moore[94] in consequence of his claim that to Pragmatism the fundamental thing in any judgment or proposition is not so much its consequences, but its “value.” This claim may, no doubt, be supported by the many declarations of James and Schiller that the “true,” like the “good” and the “beautiful,” is simply a “valuation,” and not the fetish that the rationalists make it out to be. It is doubtful, however, as we may try to indicate, whether this “value” interpretation of Pragmatism can be carried out independently of the more systematic attempts at a general philosophy of value that are being made to-day in Germany and America and elsewhere. And then it would be a matter of no ordinary difficulty to clear up the inconsistency that doubtless exists between Pragmatism as a value philosophy and Pragmatism as a mere philosophy of “consequences.” It is “immediate,” and “verifiable,” and “definitely appreciated” consequences, rather than the higher values of our experience that (up to the present time) seem to have bulked largely in the argumentations of the pragmatists.

And as an illustration of a doctrine that is both American and hostile to pragmatism, we may instance the New Realism[95] that was recently launched in a collective manifesto in The Journal of Philosophy and Scientific Methods. This realism is, to be sure, hostile to every form of “subjectivism” or personalism, and may in a certain sense be regarded as the emergence into full daylight of the realism or dualism that we found to be lurking[96] in James’s “radical empiricism.” It is, therefore, as it were, one of the signs that Pragmatism is perhaps breaking up in America into some of the more elemental tendencies out of which it developed—in this case the American desire for operative (or effective) realism and for a “direct”[97] contact with reality instead of the indirect contact of so many metaphysical systems.