Intellectual advance occurs in two ways. At times increase of knowledge
is organized about old conceptions, while these are expanded, elaborated
and refined, but not seriously revised, much less abandoned. At other
times, the increase of knowledge demands qualitative rather than
quantitative change; alteration, not addition. Men's minds grow cold to
their former intellectual concerns; ideas that were burning fade;
interests that were urgent seem remote. Men face in another direction;
their older perplexities are unreal; considerations passed over as
negligible loom up. Former problems may not have been solved, but they
no longer press for solutions.
Philosophy is no exception to the rule. But it is unusually
conservative--not, necessarily, in proffering solutions, but in clinging
to problems. It has been so allied with theology and theological morals
as representatives of men's chief interests, that radical alteration has
been shocking. Men's activities took a decidedly new turn, for example,
in the seventeenth century, and it seems as if philosophy, under the
lead of thinkers like Bacon and Descartes, was to execute an about-face.
But, in spite of the ferment, it turned out that many of the older
problems were but translated from Latin into the vernacular or into the
new terminology furnished by science.
The association of philosophy with academic teaching has reinforced this
intrinsic conservatism. Scholastic philosophy persisted in universities
after men's thoughts outside of the walls of colleges had moved in other
directions. In the last hundred years intellectual advances of science
and politics have in like fashion been crystallized into material of
instruction and now resist further change. I would not say that the
spirit of teaching is hostile to that of liberal inquiry, but a
philosophy which exists largely as something to be taught rather than
wholly as something to be reflected upon is conducive to discussion of
views held by others rather than to immediate response. Philosophy when
taught inevitably magnifies the history of past thought, and leads
professional philosophers to approach their subject-matter through its
formulation in received systems. It tends, also, to emphasize points
upon which men have divided into schools, for these lend themselves to
retrospective definition and elaboration. Consequently, philosophical
discussion is likely to be a dressing out of antithetical traditions,
where criticism of one view is thought to afford proof of the truth of
its opposite (as if formulation of views guaranteed logical exclusives).
Direct preoccupation with contemporary difficulties is left to
literature and politics.
If changing conduct and expanding knowledge ever required a willingness
to surrender not merely old solutions but old problems it is now. I do
not mean that we can turn abruptly away from all traditional issues.
This is impossible; it would be the undoing of the one who attempted it.
Irrespective of the professionalizing of philosophy, the ideas
philosophers discuss are still those in which Western civilization has
been bred. They are in the backs of the heads of educated people. But
what serious-minded men not engaged in the professional business of
philosophy most want to know is what modifications and abandonments of
intellectual inheritance are required by the newer industrial,
political, and scientific movements. They want to know what these newer
movements mean when translated into general ideas. Unless professional
philosophy can mobilize itself sufficiently to assist in this
clarification and redirection of men's thoughts, it is likely to get
more and more sidetracked from the main currents of contemporary life.
This essay may, then, be looked upon as an attempt to forward the
emancipation of philosophy from too intimate and exclusive attachment to
traditional problems. It is not in intent a criticism of various
solutions that have been offered, but raises a question _as to the
genuineness, under the present conditions of science and social life, of
the problems_.
The limited object of my discussion will, doubtless, give an exaggerated
impression of my conviction as to the artificiality of much recent
philosophizing. Not that I have wilfully exaggerated in what I have
said, but that the limitations of my purpose have led me not to say many
things pertinent to a broader purpose. A discussion less restricted
would strive to enforce the genuineness, in their own context, of
questions now discussed mainly because they have been discussed rather
than because contemporary conditions of life suggest them. It would also
be a grateful task to dwell upon the precious contributions made by
philosophic systems which as a whole are impossible. In the course of
the development of unreal premises and the discussion of artificial
problems, points of view have emerged which are indispensable
possessions of culture. The horizon has been widened; ideas of great
fecundity struck out; imagination quickened; a sense of the meaning of
things created. It may even be asked whether these accompaniments of
classic systems have not often been treated as a kind of guarantee of
the systems themselves. But while it is a sign of an illiberal mind to
throw away the fertile and ample ideas of a Spinoza, a Kant, or a Hegel,
because their setting is not logically adequate, is surely a sign of an
undisciplined one to treat their contributions to culture as
confirmations of premises with which they have no necessary connection.
I
A criticism of current philosophizing from the standpoint of the
traditional quality of its problems must begin somewhere, and the choice
of a beginning is arbitrary. It has appeared to me that the notion of
experience implied in the questions most actively discussed gives a
natural point of departure. For, if I mistake not, it is just the
inherited view of experience common to the empirical school and its
opponents which keeps alive many discussions even of matters that on
their face are quite remote from it, while it is also this view which is
most untenable in the light of existing science and social practice.
Accordingly I set out with a brief statement of some of the chief
contrasts between the orthodox description of experience and that
congenial to present conditions.
(i) In the orthodox view, experience is regarded primarily as a
knowledge-affair. But to eyes not looking through ancient spectacles, it
assuredly appears as an affair of the intercourse of a living being with
its physical and social environment. (ii) According to tradition
experience is (at least primarily) a psychical thing, infected
throughout by "subjectivity." What experience suggests about itself is a
genuinely objective world which enters into the actions and sufferings
of men and undergoes modifications through their responses. (iii) So far
as anything beyond a bare present is recognized by the established
doctrine, the past exclusively counts. Registration of what has taken
place, reference to precedent, is believed to be the essence of
experience. Empiricism is conceived of as tied up to what has been, or
is, "given." But experience in its vital form is experimental, an effort
to change the given; it is characterized by projection, by reaching
forward into the unknown; connexion with a future is its salient trait.
(iv) The empirical tradition is committed to particularism. Connexions
and continuities are supposed to be foreign to experience, to be
by-products of dubious validity. An experience that is an undergoing of
an environment and a striving for its control in new directions is
pregnant with connexions. (v) In the traditional notion experience and
thought are antithetical terms. Inference, so far as it is other than a
revival of what has been given in the past, goes beyond experience;
hence it is either invalid, or else a measure of desperation by which,
using experience as a springboard, we jump out to a world of stable
things and other selves. But experience, taken free of the restrictions
imposed by the older concept, is full of inference. There is,
apparently, no conscious experience without inference; reflection is
native and constant.
These contrasts, with a consideration of the effect of substituting the
account of experience relevant to modern life for the inherited account,
afford the subject-matter of the following discussion.
Suppose we take seriously the contribution made to our idea of
experience by biology,--not that recent biological science discovered
the facts, but that it has so emphasized them that there is no longer an
excuse for ignoring them or treating them as negligible. Any account of
experience must now fit into the consideration that experiencing means
living; and that living goes on in and because of an environing medium,
not in a vacuum. Where there is experience, there is a living being.
Where there is life, there is a double connexion maintained with the
environment. In part, environmental energies constitute organic
functions; they enter into them. Life is not possible without such
direct support by the environment. But while all organic changes depend
upon the natural energies of the environment for their origination and
occurrence, the natural energies sometimes carry the organic functions
prosperously forward, and sometimes act counter to their continuance.
Growth and decay, health and disease, are alike continuous with
activities of the natural surroundings. The difference lies in the
bearing of what happens upon future life-activity. From the standpoint
of this future reference environmental incidents fall into groups: those
favorable to life-activities, and those hostile.
The successful activities of the organism, those within which
environmental assistance is incorporated, react upon the environment to
bring about modifications favorable to their own future. The human being
has upon his hands the problem of responding to what is going on around
him so that these changes will take one turn rather than another,
namely, that required by its own further functioning. While backed in
part by the environment, its life is anything but a peaceful exhalation
of environment. It is obliged to struggle--that is to say, to employ the
direct support given by the environment in order indirectly to effect
changes that would not otherwise occur. In this sense, life goes on by
means of controlling the environment. Its activities must change the
changes going on around it; they must neutralize hostile occurrences;
they must transform neutral events into cooeperative factors or into an
efflorescence of new features.
Dialectic developments of the notion of self-preservation, of the
_conatus essendi_, often ignore all the important facts of the actual
process. They argue as if self-control, self-development, went on
directly as a sort of unrolling push from within. But life endures only
in virtue of the support of the environment. And since the environment
is only incompletely enlisted in our behalf, self-preservation--or
self-realization or whatever--is always indirect--always an affair of
the way in which our present activities affect the direction taken by
independent changes in the surroundings. Hindrances must be turned into
means.
We are also given to playing loose with the conception of adjustment, as
if that meant something fixed--a kind of accommodation once for all
(ideally at least) of the organism _to_ an environment. But as life
requires the fitness of the environment to the organic functions,
adjustment to the environment means not passive acceptance of the
latter, but acting so that the environing changes take a certain turn.
The "higher" the type of life, the more adjustment takes the form of an
adjusting of the factors of the environment to one another in the
interest of life; the less the significance of living, the more it
becomes an adjustment to a given environment till at the lower end of
the scale the differences between living and the non-living disappear.
These statements are of an external kind. They are about the conditions
of experience, rather than about experiencing itself. But assuredly
experience as it concretely takes place bears out the statements.
Experience is primarily a process of undergoing: a process of standing
something; of suffering and passion, of affection, in the literal sense
of these words. The organism has to endure, to undergo, the
consequences of its own actions. Experience is no slipping along in a
path fixed by inner consciousness. Private consciousness is an
incidental outcome of experience of a vital objective sort; it is not
its source. Undergoing, however, is never mere passivity. The most
patient patient is more than a receptor. He is also an agent--a reactor,
one trying experiments, one concerned with undergoing in a way which may
influence what is still to happen. Sheer endurance, side-stepping
evasions, are, after all, ways of treating the environment with a view
to what such treatment will accomplish. Even if we shut ourselves up in
the most clam-like fashion, we are doing something; our passivity is an
active attitude, not an extinction of response. Just as there is no
assertive action, no aggressive attack upon things as they are, which is
all action, so there is no undergoing which is not on our part also a
going on and a going through.
Experience, in other words, is a matter of _simultaneous_ doings and
sufferings. Our undergoings are experiments in varying the course of
events; our active tryings are trials and tests of ourselves. This
duplicity of experience shows itself in our happiness and misery, our
successes and failures. Triumphs are dangerous when dwelt upon or lived
off from; successes use themselves up. Any achieved equilibrium of
adjustment with the environment is precarious because we cannot evenly
keep pace with changes in the environment. These are so opposed in
direction that we must choose. We must take the risk of casting in our
lot with one movement or the other. Nothing can eliminate all risk, all
adventure; the one thing doomed to failure is to try to keep even with
the whole environment at once--that is to say, to maintain the happy
moment when all things go our way.
The obstacles which confront us are stimuli to variation, to novel
response, and hence are occasions of progress. If a favor done us by the
environment conceals a threat, so its disfavor is a potential means of
hitherto unexperienced modes of success. To treat misery as anything but
misery, as for example a blessing in disguise or a necessary factor in
good, is disingenuous apologetics. But to say that the progress of the
race has been stimulated by ills undergone, and that men have been moved
by what they suffer to search out new and better courses of action is to
speak veraciously.
The preoccupation of experience with things which are coming (are now
coming, not just to come) is obvious to any one whose interest in
experience is empirical. Since we live forward; since we live in a world
where changes are going on whose issue means our weal or woe; since
every act of ours modifies these changes and hence is fraught with
promise, or charged with hostile energies--what should experience be but
a future implicated in a present! Adjustment is no timeless state; it is
a continuing process. To say that a change takes time may be to say
something about the event which is external and uninstructive. But
adjustment of organism to environment takes time in the pregnant sense;
every step in the process is conditioned by reference to further
changes which it effects. What is going on in the environment is the
concern of the organism; not what is already "there" in accomplished and
finished form. In so far as the issue of what is going on may be
affected by intervention of the organism, the moving event is a
challenge which stretches the agent-patient to meet what is coming.
Experiencing exhibits things in their unterminated aspect moving toward
determinate conclusions. The finished and done with is of import as
affecting the future, not on its own account: in short, because it is
not, really, done with.
Anticipation is therefore more primary than recollection; projection
than summoning of the past; the prospective than the retrospective.
Given a world like that in which we live, a world in which environing
changes are partly favorable and partly callously indifferent, and
experience is bound to be prospective in import; for any control
attainable by the living creature depends upon what is done to alter the
state of things. Success and failure are the primary "categories" of
life; achieving of good and averting of ill are its supreme interests;
hope and anxiety (which are not self-enclosed states of feeling, but
active attitudes of welcome and wariness) are dominant qualities of
experience. Imaginative forecast of the future is this forerunning
quality of behavior rendered available for guidance in the present.
Day-dreaming and castle-building and esthetic realization of what is not
practically achieved are offshoots of this practical trait, or else
practical intelligence is a chastened fantasy. It makes little
difference. Imaginative recovery of the bygone is indispensable to
successful invasion of the future, but its status is that of an
instrument. To ignore its import is the sign of an undisciplined agent;
but to isolate the past, dwelling upon it for its own sake and giving it
the eulogistic name of knowledge, is to substitute the reminiscence of
old-age for effective intelligence. The movement of the agent-patient to
meet the future is partial and passionate; yet detached and impartial
study of the past is the only alternative to luck in assuring success to
passion.