Pragmatism and idealism

In spite of the objections that have been brought in the preceding chapters against Pragmatism as Instrumentalism and Practicalism, the great thing about Pragmatism as the Humanism that it is tending to become is the position that it virtually occupies in respect of the ethical and the personal factors that enter into all our notions about final truth. To Pragmatism the importance of these factors in this connexion is apparent from the outset, it being to it the merest truism that by final truth we cannot mean “truth” existing on its own account, but rather the truth of the world as inclusive of man and his purposes. For so much it stands by its very letter as well as by its spirit. And if we can find any confirmation for this attitude in some of the concessions of the rationalists that have been previously mentioned, so much the better, as it were, for Pragmatism.

Now it might well seem as if Pragmatism by the denial of an absolute or impersonal truth is so far simply another version of modern agnosticism, or of the older doctrine of the “relativity” of human knowledge. There is a great difference, however, between these two things and Pragmatism. A mere agnostical, or relativity, philosophy generally carries with it the belief that the inmost reality of things is both unknowable and out of all relation alike to human purpose and to human knowledge. Pragmatism, on the contrary, would like to maintain—-if it could do so logically—-that in human volition, we do know something about the inward meaning of things, that the “developmental” view of things is, when properly interpreted, the real view, that reality is at least what it comes to be in our “purposes” and in our ideals, and not something different from this.

The main reason, however, of the inability of Pragmatism to do what it would like to do in this connexion is what we have already complained of as its failure either to recognize, or to use, the help that could be afforded to it by (1) Idealism, and by (2) the “normative”251 view of ethical science.

In respect of the first point, we have already suggested, for example, that Pragmatism is inclined in various ways to make much of its “radical empiricism,” its contention that reality must, to begin with, be construed to be what it seems to be in our actual dealings with it and in our actual experience of it.252 To the biologist, as we put it in our fourth chapter, reality is life; to the physicist it is energy; to the theologian it is the unfolding of the dealings of God with His creatures; to the sociologist it is the sphere of the evolution of the social life of humanity; to the lover of truth it is a “partly intelligible system.” The only rational basis, however, for all this constructive interpretation of reality is the familiar idealist position of the necessary implication of the “subject” in the “object,” the fact that “things” or “existences” are invariably thought of as the elements or component parts in some working system or sphere of reality that is contemplated by some being or beings in reference to some purpose or end. On its so-called lowest plane, indeed, reality is conceived as the play of all the particles of matter, or of all the elemental forces of nature, upon each other. And on this construction of things the susceptibility of everything to the influence of everything else is no less certainly assumed than in the case of the world of life itself. But, as the idealist realizes in a moment, there is no possibility of separating, either in thought or experimentally, this supposed physical world from the so-called experiences and relations and laws through which it is interpreted and described, even as a world of objects or of forces. This is what Parmenides saw ages ago when he said that “thought” and “being” are the same thing, that “being” belongs to “thought,” that “being” is the true object of thought, and that being is the “rational” and the “thinkable” and not something outside thought. It is what a scientist, an expounder of science, like Professor J. A. Thompson means and partly states when he says, speaking of the work of many of his fellow-scientists of the day, “The matter of physical science is an abstraction, whereas the matter of our direct experience is in certain conditions the physical basis of life and the home of the soul.”253

To the objector who again retorts that this line of reflection seems to rest upon a very large assumption as to the nature of the apparently illimitable physical universe, the idealist can but reply, firstly, that we know nothing of the so-called natural world save through the so-called spiritual or psychical world,254 and secondly, that even the most complete description of the world from the point of view of science would, of course, still leave the world of our mental experiences entirely unexplained. It is surely, therefore, so far, much more logical to use this last world as at least the partial explanation of the former rather than vice versa.

And as for the “normative” view of ethics and the help it affords to Pragmatism in its contention in respect of final truth, it may be said, to begin with, that it is in the ethical life that what we call the truth of things becomes the basis of an ideal of personal achievement. It is not merely of man’s well-known transformation and utilization of the forces of nature that we are at present thinking, but of the fact that in the moral life man “superposes,” as has been said, an order of his own upon the so-called natural order of things, transforming it into a spiritual order. This superposition, if we will, this transformation, is revealed unmistakably in the history of the facts of conduct.

In the recent elaborate researches in sociological ethics of Hobhouse and Westermarck255 we read, for example, of facts like the gradual “blunting of the edges of barbarian ideas,” and the recognition of the “principal moral obligations” in the early oriental civilizations, the existence of the “doctrine of forgiveness,” and of “disinterested retributive kindly emotion,” the acceptance and redistribution by Confucius of the traditional standards of Chinese ethics, the “transformation” by the Hebrew prophets of the “law of a barbarous people into the spiritual worship of one God,” of a God of “social justice,” of “mercy,” and finally of “love.” Both these writers, in view of such facts and of other facts of a kindred nature, arrive at the conclusion that the supreme authority assigned to the moral law is not altogether an illusion, that there is after all the “great permanent fact of the moral consciousness persisting through all stages of development, that whether we believe or disbelieve in God, or religion, or nature, or what not, there remain for all of us certain things to do which affect us with a greater or less degree of mental discomfort.”

Now as we think of it, there is something that Pragmatism fails to see in respect of this undoubted transformation of the merely physical basis of our life that takes place, or that has taken place, in the moral life of humanity. While firmly holding in its moral philosophy (we can see this in the typical work of Dewey and Tufts256) to its far-reaching principle that our entire intellectual life has been worked out in the closest kind of relation to our practical needs, Pragmatism has nevertheless failed to see that in the highest reaches of our active life the controlling ideas (“justice,” “humanity,” “courage,” and so on) have a value independently of any consequences other than those of their realization in the purposes and in the dispositions of men. Or, more definitely, it is just because moral ideas, like any ideas, cannot fail to work themselves out into our actions and into our very dispositions and character, that it becomes of the utmost importance to conceive of the truth they embody as having a value above all consequences and above all ordinary utility. If sought ever and always for its own sake, the highest kind of truth and insight, the truth that we apprehend in our highest intuitions and in our highest efforts, will inevitably tend to the creation of a realm of “value,” a realm of personal worth and activity that we cannot but regard as the highest reality,257 or the highest plane of experience of which we are conscious. In this thought, then, in the thought of the reality of the life and work of human beings who have given all for truth and goodness and love, there is surely at least a partial clue to the value of the great idea after which Pragmatism is blindly groping in its contention of the importance even to metaphysics of the notion of our human, “purposive” activity.

Indeed, when we think of the matter carefully it is doubtful whether the human mind would ever even have attained to the notion of ideal truth, with the correlative thought of the shortcomings or the limits of our ordinary knowledge, if it had not been for the moral life and the serious problem it sets before us as men—that of the complete satisfaction or the complete assertion of our human personality. We seek truth in the first instance because we wish to act upon certainty or upon adequate certainty, and because we feel that we must be determined by what appeals to our own convictions and motives, by what has become part of our own life and consciousness. It is only in fact because we will it, and because we want it, that the “ideal” exists—the ideal of anything, more certain knowledge about something, for example, or gratified curiosity, or satisfied desire, and so on. In every case, say, of the pursuit of an ideal we desire something or some state of things that does not yet exist. The actual, if indeed (which is doubtful) we can think of the actual merely as such, does not engender the notion of the ideal, although there is possibly a suggestion of the “ideal” in the “meaning” that we cannot, even in sense perception,258 attach to the actual.

Even science, as we call it, is very far from being a mere description of the actual, it is an ideal “construction” or “interpretation” of the same in the interest, not of mere utility, but of the wonder and the curiosity and the intellectual and aesthetical satisfaction of our entire personality, of our disinterested love of the highest truth.259

A striking example of the part played by moral and personal factors in the evolution of truth may easily be found, as has already been suggested, in some of the circumstances connected with the evolution of the Platonic philosophy in the mind of its creator. Plato’s constant use of the dialogue form of exposition is of itself an expression of the fact that philosophy was always to him a living and a personal thing, the outcome of an intellectual emotion of the soul in its efforts after true knowledge and spiritual perfection. It speaks also of Plato’s essentially social conception of philosophy, as a creation arising out of the contact of mind with mind, in the search after wisdom and virtue and justice. And there is little doubt that his own discontent with the social conditions of his time and with the false wisdom of the sophists was a powerful impulse in his mind in the development of that body of intellectual and ethical truth for all time that is to be found in his works. The determining consideration, again, in the arguments for immortality in the Phaedo is not so much the imperfect physical and theoretical philosophy on which they are partly made to repose as the tremendous conviction of Plato of the supreme importance of right conduct, of his belief in the principle of the “best.”

Plato has a way, too, of talking of truth as a kind of “addition”260 to being and science, as a “being” that “shares” somehow in the “idea of the Good”—a tendency that, despite the imperfect hold of the Greek mind upon the fact and the conception of personality, we may also look upon as a confirmation of the pragmatist notion of the necessity of ethical and personal factors in a complete theory of truth.

A still more important instance of the importance of moral and practical factors to a final philosophy of things is to be found in the lasting influence of the great Hebrew teachers upon both the ancient and the modern world, although the mere mention of this topic is apt to give offence to some of our Neo-Hellenists261 and to thinkers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The remarkable thing about the Hebrew seers is their intuition of God as “the living source of their life and strength and joy,” not as a mere first principle of thought, not as the substance of things, not as the mere “end of patient search and striving,” but as the “first principle of life and feeling.”262 And their work for the world lay in the bringing to an end of the entire mythology and cosmology of the age of fable and fancy, and the substitution for all this of the worship of one God, as something distinct and different from all the cults of polytheism, as a great social and ethical achievement, as a true religion that loved justice and social order because it loved God. “In Hebrew poetry,”263 says a recent authority upon this subject, “all things appear in action. The verb is the predominating element in the sentence. And though the shades of time distinctions are blurred, the richness of the language throws the precise complexion of the act into clear, strong light.” If this be so, there is, of course, no wonder that this people elaborated for mankind a living and practical, a “pragmatist” (if we will) view of the world, which is so rich by way of its very contrast both to Greek and to modern scientific conceptions. With the enumeration of two specific instances from this same writer of the Hebrew perception of the importance of practical and personal factors to a true grasp of certain fundamental ideas, we may safely leave this great source of some of the leading ideas of our western world to take care of itself. “The Hebrew counterpart to the Greek ideal of ὁ καλὸς κἀγαθός, ‘the finely-polished gentleman,’ is hāsîd, the adjective derived from hesed, that is ‘the man of love.’ As God is love, the good man is likewise a lover both of God and of his fellow-men. His love is indeed the pure reflection of God’s—tender and true and active as His is. For in no other ancient religion are the fear and love of God so indissolubly wedded to moral conduct.”264 And secondly, speaking of immortality, Professor Gordon says, “The glad hope of immortality rests, not on speculative arguments from the nature of the soul, but on the sure ground of religious experience. Immortality is, in fact, a necessary implicate of personal religion. The man that lives with God is immortal as He is.”265

If the reader be inclined to interject here that all that this pragmatist talk about the importance of action obviously amounts to is simply the position that the highest truth must somehow take recognition of our beliefs as well as of our knowledge, we can but reply that he is literally so far in the right. Our point, however, for Pragmatism would here be that belief rests not merely upon the intellect, but upon the intellect in conjunction with the active and the ethical nature of man. It is mainly because we feel ourselves to be active and legislative and creative, mainly because we partly are and partly hope to be, as the phrase has it, that we believe as well as seek continually to know. Hence the rightness and the soundness of Pragmatism in its contention; the truth is not so much a datum (something given) as a construction,266 or a thing that is made and invented by way of an approximation to an ideal.

That it is this almost in the literal sense of these words is evident from the fact of the slow and gradual accumulation of truth and knowledge about themselves and their environment by the fleeting generations of men. And even to-day the truth is not something that exists in nature or in history or in some privileged institution, or in the teaching of some guild of masters, but rather only in the attitude of mind and heart of the human beings who continue to seek it and to will it and to live it when and where they may. Truth includes, too, the truth of the social order, of civilization267—this last costly work being just as much the creation of the mind and the behaviour of men as is knowledge itself. And there can, it would seem, be but slight objection to an admission of the fact that it is only in so far as the truth has been conceived as inclusive of the truth of human life as well as of that of the world of things that humanity as a whole seems to have any abiding interest in its existence, even where, as in Omar Khayyàm and in other writings, the idea of its discovery is given up as impossible. Only, in other words, as the working out of the implications of desire does thought live, and the completest thought is at bottom but the working out of the deepest desire.268

These two elements of our life, thought and desire, have had indeed a parallel development in the life of mankind. What we call the predicate of thought bespeaks invariably an underlying (or personal) reaction or attitude towards the so-called object of thought.269 When desire ceases, as it does sometimes in the case of a disappointed man, or the pessimist, or the agnostic, or the mystic, thought too ceases. Even the philosophical mood, as likewise the expression of a desire, is as such comparable to other motives or desires, such as the scientific or the practical or the emotional, and subject, too, like them, to the various “conflicts” of personality.270 The free speculative thought or activity that, with the Greeks, we sometimes think of as the highest attribute of our human nature, is itself but the highest phase of that free creative271 activity which we have found to underlie the moral life and all the various constructions of mankind, inclusive of the work of civilization itself.

Lastly, there is, as we know, ample warrant in the past and the present reflections of men of science upon the apparent limits272 and limitations of our knowledge of our environment to justify the correctness of the pragmatist insistence upon the ethical and the personal factors that enter into truth. Reference having already been made to these limits, there is perhaps little need of pursuing this topic any further, either so far as the facts themselves are concerned or so far as their admission by scientists and others is concerned. How any supposed mere physical order can ever come to know itself as such, either in the minds of men or in the minds of beings other than men, is of course the crowning difficulty of what we call a physical philosophy—a difficulty that transcends altogether the many familiar and universally admitted difficulties in respect of topics like the origin of motion and the origin of life, and the infinite number of adjustments and adaptations involved in the development of the world of things and men with which we are acquainted. Obviously, to say the very least, only when some explanation of consciousness and feeling and thought is added on to our knowledge of Nature (fragmentary as is the latter at best) will the demands of thought and of desire for unity in our knowledge be satisfied or set at rest. Now, of course, to religious thought all this costly explanation, all this completion and systematization of our knowledge are revealed, in the main, only to a faith in God and to a consequent faith in the final “perfection” of our human life as the gradual evolution of a divine kingdom. And while Pragmatism cannot, especially in its cruder or more popular form, be credited with anything like a rational justification of the religious point of view about reality and of the vision it opens up, it may, nevertheless, in virtue of its insistence upon such things as (1) the rationality of the belief that accompanies all knowledge, (2) the supposedly deeper phenomena of the science of human nature to which reference has already been made, and (3) the great spiritual reality that is present to the individual in the moral life, and that lifts him “out of himself,” and that makes it impossible for him to “understand himself by himself alone,”273 justifiably lay claim to the possession of a thorough working sympathy with the religious view of the world.

With the direction of the attention of the reader to two important corollaries or consequences of the “pluralism” and the “dynamic idealism” of Pragmatism this chapter may well be brought to a termination.

One of the most obvious corollaries of nearly everything that has been put forward by us in the foregoing chapters as pragmatist doctrine or pragmatist tendency, is the marked distance at which274 it all seems to stand from the various entanglements of the false philosophy of “subjective,” or “solipsistic” idealism. In other words, while we have ventured to censure Pragmatism for its inability to recognize the elemental truth275 in Idealism, we must now record it as a merit of Pragmatism that it does not, like so much modern philosophy, take its start with the “contents” of the consciousness of the individual as the one indubitable beginning, the one inconcussum quid for all speculation. This starting-point has often, as we know, been taken (even by students of philosophy) to be the very essence of Idealism, but it is not so. Although there is indeed no “object” without a “subject,” no “matter” without “mind,” neither mind nor matter is limited to my experience of the same.276 It is impossible for me to interpret, or even to express, to myself the contents of my experience without using the terms and the conceptions that have been invented by minds and by personalities other than my own without whom I could not, and do not, grow up into what I call my “self-consciousness.”277 We have all talked of ourselves (as we know from experience and from psychology) in the third person as objects for a common social experience long before we learn to use the first personal pronoun. And as for the adult, his “ego” or self has a meaning and a reality only in relation to, and in comparison with, the other selves of whom he thinks as his associates. An “ego” implies invariably also an “alter” an “other,” and thus our deepest thought about the universe is always, actually and necessarily, both personal and social. Even in art, and in religion, and in philosophy, it is the communion of mind with mind, of soul with soul, that is at once our deepest experience and our deepest desire.

I do not suggest for one moment that Pragmatism is the only philosophy (if indeed we may call it a philosophy at all) that is necessarily committed to Pluralism,278 nor am I, of course, blind to the difficulties that Pluralism, as over against Monism, presents to many thinking minds. But I do here say that if Pragmatism be true, as it is in the main (at least as an “approach” to philosophy), it follows that the reality with which we are in contact in all our thoughts and in all our theorizing is not any or all of the “contents” of the consciousness of the individual thinker, but rather the common, personal life of activity and experience and knowledge and emotion that we as individuals share with other individuals. This life is that of an entire “world of intersubjective intercourse,”279 of a communion of thought, and feeling, and effort in which, as persons, we share the common life of persons, and are members one of another.280

Truth itself, in fact, as may be seen, of course, from the very connexion of the word truth with other words like “try”281 and “utter” (and in its root with words like “ware” and “verihood”), is a social possession, implying both seekers and finders, listeners and verifiers as well as speakers and thinkers. Its existence implies a universe of discourse, as the logicians put it, in which thoughts and conceptions are elaborated and corrected, not merely by a kind of self-analysis282 and internal development, but by the test of the action to which they lead and of the “responses” they awaken in the lives and thoughts of other persons. And it is this very sociological283 and “pluralistic” character of Pragmatism that, along with its tendency to “affirmation” in the matter of the reality of the religious life, has helped to render it (as far as it goes) such a living and such a credible philosophy to-day.

Another consequence of the dynamic idealism and the “radical empiricism” of Pragmatism is the “immediacy” of our contact with reality, for which it is naturally inclined to stand in the matter of what we may call the philosophy of perception. What this new “immediacy” and this new directness of our contact with reality would mean to philosophical and scientific thought can be fully appreciated only by those who have made the effort of years to live in a “thought world,” in which the first reality is what the logicians term “mediation”284 or inference, a world of thoughts without the reality of a really effective thinker, or the reality of a world of real action—a world from which it is somehow impossible to escape either honestly or logically. It would be a return, of course, on the part of the thinker to the direct sense of life with which we are familiar in instinct and in all true living and in all real thought,285 in all honest effort and accomplishment, and yet not a “return” in any of the impossible senses in which men have often (and with a tragic earnestness) sought to return to Nature286 and to the uncorrupted reality of things. And we have not indeed done justice to the “instrumentalism” and the “hypothetical” treatment of ideas and of systems of thought for which Pragmatism and Humanism both stand until we see that so far from its being (almost in any sense) the duty of the thinker to justify, to his philosophy, this direct contact with the infinite life of the world, that has been the common possession of countless mortals who have lived their life, it is, on the contrary, his duty to justify (to himself and to his public) the various thought-systems of metaphysic, by setting forth the various points of departure and the various points of contact they have in the reality of the life of things.287

We spoke at the close of our fourth chapter of the strange irony that may be discovered in the fate of philosophers who have come to attach a greater importance to their own speculations and theories than to the great reality (whatever it may be, or whatever it may prove itself to be) of which all philosophy is but an imperfect (although a necessary) explanation. And the reader has doubtless come across the cynical French definition of metaphysics as the “art of losing one’s way systematically”288 (l’art de s’égarer avec méthode). In view of all this, and in view of all the inevitable pain and difficulty of the solitary thinkers of all time, it is indeed not the least part of the service of Pragmatism and Humanism, and of the “vitalistic” and “voluntaristic” philosophy with which it may be naturally associated to-day, to have compelled even metaphysicians to feel that it is the living reality of the world that we know and that we experience, that is first, last, and foremost the real subject-matter of philosophy.

With the real sceptic, then, with David Hume, we may indeed be “diffident” of our “doubts” and at the same time absolutely “free” and unprejudiced in our hold upon, and in our treatment of, metaphysical systems as, all of them, but so many more or less successful attempts to state and explain, in terms appreciable by the understanding and the reason, the character and the reality of the infinite life with which we are in contact in our acts and in our thoughts and in our aspirations. Of the reality of that life we can never be sceptical, for it is the life that we know in that “world of inter-subjective” intercourse that, according to Pragmatism and Humanism, is implied even in sense-perception and in our daily experience.