With this is completed the reply to the question: Why do men contradict
their own experience? Experience is, as Spinoza says, passion and
action, both inextricably mingled and coincident, with the good and evil
of them as interwoven as they. That piecemeal conquest of the evil which
we call civilization has not even the promise of finality. It is a
Penelope's web, always needing to be woven anew. Now, in experience
desire anticipates and outleaps action and fact rebuffs desire. Desire
realizes itself, consequently, in ideas objectified by the power of
speech into independent and autonomous subjects of discourse, whereby
experience is One, Eternal, a Spirit or Spiritually Controlled, wherein
man has Freedom and Immortality. These, the constantly desiderated
traits of a perfect universe, are in fact the limits of what adequacy
environmental satisfactions can attain, ideas hypostatized, normative of
existence, but not constituting it. With them, in philosophy and
religion, the mind confronts the experiences of death and obstruction,
of manifoldness, change and materiality, and denies them, as Peter
denied Jesus. The visible world, being not as we want it, we imagine an
unseen one that satisfies our want, declaring the visible one an
illusion by its side. So we work a radical substitution of desiderates
for actualities, of ideals for facts, of values for existences. Art
alone acknowledges the actual relations between these contrasting pairs.
Art alone so operates as in fact to convert their oppugnance into
identity. Intrinsically, its whole purpose and technique consists of
transmutation of values into existences, in the incarnation the
realization of values. The philosophy and religion of tradition, on the
contrary, consists intrinsically in the flat denial of reality, or at
least, co-reality, to existence, and the transfer of that eulogium to
value-forms as such.
Metaphysics, theology, ethics, logic, aesthetics, dialectic developments
as they are of "norms" or "realities" which themselves can have no
meaning without the "apparent," changing world they measure and belie,
assume consequently a detachment and self-sufficiency they do not
actually possess. Their historians have treated them as if they had no
context, as if the elaboration of the ideal tendencies of the successive
systems explained their origin, character, and significance. But in fact
they are unendowed with this pure intrinsicality, and their development
is not to be accounted for as exteriorization of innate motive or an
unfoldment of inward implications. They have a context; they are crossed
and interpenetrated by outer interests and extraneous considerations.
Their meaning, in so far as it is not merely aesthetic, is _nil_ apart
from these interests and considerations of which they are sometimes
expressions, sometimes reconstructions, and from which they are
persistently refuges.
Philosophy and religion are, in a word, no less than art, social facts.
They are responses to group situations without which they cannot be
understood. Although analysis has shown them to be rooted in certain
persistent motives and conditions of human nature by whose virtue they
issue in definite contours and significances, they acquire individuality
and specific importance only through interaction with the constantly
varying social situations in which they arise, on which they operate,
and by which they are in turn operated on. Philosophy has perhaps
suffered most of all from nescience of those and from devoting itself,
at a minimum, to the satisfaction of that passion for oneness, for
"logical consistency" without which philosophic "systems" would never
arise, nor the metaphysical distinction between "appearance" and
"reality"; and with which the same systems have made up a historic
aggregate of strikingly repugnant and quarrelsome units. It is this
pursuit of consistency as against correctness which has resulted in the
irrelevance of philosophy that the philosopher, unconscious of his
motives and roots, or naively identifying, through the instrumentality
of an elaborate dialectic, his instinctive and responsive valuations of
existence with its categoric essences, confuses with inward autonomy and
the vision of the "real." Consequently, the systems of tradition begin
as attempts to transvalue social situations whose existence is
troublesome and end as utterances of which the specific bearing, save to
the system of an opponent, is undiscoverable. The attempt to correct the
environment in fact concludes as an abolition of it in words. The
philosophic system becomes a solipsism, a pure lyric expression of the
appetites of human nature.
For this perversity of the philosophic tradition Plato is perhaps, more
than any one else, answerable. He is the first explicitly to have
reduplicated the world, to have set existences over against values, to
have made them dependent upon values, to have assigned absolute reality
to the compensatory ideals, and to have identified philosophy with
preoccupation with these ideals. Behind his theory of life lay far from
agreeable personal experience of the attitude of political power toward
philosophic ideas. Its ripening was coincident with the most distressing
period of the history of his country. The Peloponnesian War was the
confrontation of two social systems, radically opposed in form, method,
and outlook. Democracy, in Athens, had become synonymous with
demagoguery, corruption, inefficiency, injustice and unscrupulousness in
every aspect of public affairs. The government had no consistent policy
and no centralized responsibility; divided counsel led to continual
disaster without, and party politics rotted the strength within. Beside
Athens, Sparta, a communistic oligarchy, was a tower of strength and
effectiveness. The Spartans made mistakes; they were slow, inept, rude,
and tyrannical, but they were a unit on the war, their policy was
consistent, responsibilities were adequately centered, good order and
loyalty designated the aims and habits of life.[98] The Republic is the
response to the confrontation of Spartan and Athenian; the attempt to
find an adequate solution of the great social problem this confrontation
expressed. The successful state becomes in it the model for the
metaphysical one, and the difference between fact and ideal is amended
by dialectically forcing the implications of existence in the direction
of desire. Neither Athens nor Sparta presented a completely satisfactory
social organization. There must therefore exist a type of social
organization which is so satisfying. It must have existed from eternity,
and must be in essence identical with eternal good, identical with that
oneness and spirituality, lacking which, nothing is important. This
archetypal social organization whose essence is excellence, it is the
congenital vocation of the philosopher to contemplate and to realize.
Philosophers are hence the paragons among animals, lovers of truth,
haters of falsehood and of multiplicity, spectators of all time and all
existence. In them the power to govern should be vested. Their nature is
of the same stuff as the Highest Good with which it concerns itself, but
being such, it appears, merely "appears" alas! irrelevant to the actual
situations of the daily life. The philosopher is hence opposed and
expelled by that arch-sophist, Public Opinion: the man on the street,
failing to understand him, dubs him prater, star-gazer,
good-for-nothing.[99] He becomes an ineffectual stranger, an outlaw, in
a world in which he should be master.
Plato's description of the philosopher and philosophy is, it will be
seen, at once an apology and a program. But it is a program which has
been petrified into a compensatory ideal. The confession of impotence,
the abandonment of the programmatic intent is due to identification of
the ideal with metaphysical fact, to the hypostasis of the ideal. With
Christianism, that being a philosophy operating as a religion,
world-weariness made the apology unnecessary and converted the
hypostasis into the basis of that program of complete surrender of the
attempt to master the problems of existence upon which ensued the arrest
of science and civilization for a thousand years. The Greeks were not
world-weary, and consequently, their joy in life and existence
contributed a minimum of relevance to their other-worldly dreams. Need it
be reasserted that the whole Platonic system, at its richest and best in
the Republic, is both an expression of and a compensation for a concrete
social situation? Once it was formulated it became a part of that
situation, altered it, served as another among the actual causes which
determined the subsequent history of philosophy. Its historic and
efficacious significance is defined by that situation, but philosophers
ignore the situation and accept the system as painters accept a
landscape--as the thing in itself.
Now, the aesthetic aspect of the philosophic system, its autonomy, and
consequent irrelevancy, are undeniable. Once it comes to be, its
intrinsic excellence may constitute its infallible justification for
existence, with no more to be said; and if its defenders or proponents
claimed nothing more for it than this immediate satisfactoriness, there
would be no quarrel with them. There is, however, present in their minds
a sense of the other bearings of their systems. They claim them, in any
event, to be _true_, that is, to be relevant to a situation regarded as
more important because more lastingly determinative of conduct, more
"real" than the situation of which they are born. Their systems are
offered, hence, as maps of life, as guides to the everlasting. That they
intend to define some method for the conservation of life eternally, is
clear enough from their initial motivation and formal issue: all the
Socratics, with their minds fixed on happiness or salvation according to
the prevalence of disillusionment among them; the Christian systems,
still Socratic, but as resolutely other-worldly as disillusioned
Buddhists; the systems of Spinoza, of Kant, the whole subsequent horde
of idealisms, up to the contemporary Germanoid and German idealistic
soliloquies,--they all declare that the vanity and multiplicity of life
as it is leads them to seek for the permanent and the meaningful, and
they each find it according to the idiosyncrasies of the particular
impulses and terms they start with. That their Snark turns out in every
case to be a Boojum is another story.
Yet this story is what gives philosophy, like religion, its social
significance. If its roots, as its actual biography shows, did not reach
deep in the soil of events, if its issues had no fruitage in events made
over by its being, it would never have been so closely identified with
intelligence and its systematic hypostasis would never have ensued. The
fact is that philosophy, like all forms of creative intelligence, is a
tool before it is a perfection. Its autonomy supervenes on its
efficaciousness; it does not precede its efficaciousness. Men
philosophize in order to live before they live in order to philosophize.
Aristotle's description of the self-sufficiency of theory is possible
only for a life wherein theory had already earned this self-sufficiency
as practice, in a life, that is, which is itself an art, organized by
the application of value-forms to its existent psycho-physical processes
in such a way that its existence incarnates the values it desiderates
and the values perfect the existence that embodies them.
The biography of philosophy, hence, reveals it to have the same
possibilities and the same fate that all other ideas have. Today ideas
are the patent of our humanity, the stuff and form of intelligence, the
differentiae between us and the beasts. In so far forth, they express the
surplusage of vitality over need, the creative freedom of life at play.
This is the thing we see in the imaginings and fantasies of childhood,
whose environment is by social intent formed to favor and sustain its
being. The capacity for spontaneity of idea appears to decrease with
maturity, and the few favored healthy mortals with whom it remains are
called men of genius. William James was such a man, and there are a few
still among the philosophers. But in the mass and in the long run, ideas
are not a primary confirmation of our humanity; in the mass and long
they are warnings of menace to it, a sign of its disintegration. Even so
radical an intellectualist as Mr. Santayana cherishes this observation
to the degree of almost suggesting it as the dogma that all ideas have
their origin in inner or outer maladjustment.[100] However this may be,
that the dominant philosophic ideas arise out of radical disharmonies
between nature and human nature need not be here reiterated, while the
provocative character of minor maladjustments is to be inferred from the
fertility of ideas in unstable minds, of whatever type, from the
neurasthenic to the mad. Ideas represent in these cases the limits of
vital elasticity, the attempt of the organism to maintain its organic
balance; it is as if a balloon, compressed on one side, bulged on the
other.
Ideas, then, bear three types of relations to organic life, relations
socially incarnated in traditional art, religion, and philosophy. First
of all they may be an expression of innate capacities, the very essence
of the freedom of life. In certain arts, such as music, they are just
this. In the opposite case they may be the effect of the compression of
innate capacities, an outcome of obstruction to the free low of life.
They are then compensatory. Where expressive ideas are confluent with
existence, compensatory ideas diverge from existence; they become pure
value-forms whose paramount realization is traditional philosophy. Their
rise and motivation in both these forms is unconscious. They are ideas,
but not yet intelligence. The third instance falls between these
original two. The idea is neither merely a free expression of innate
capacities, nor a compensation for their obstruction or compression.
Arising as the effect of a disharmony, it develops as an enchannelment
of organic powers directed to the conversion of the disharmony into an
adjustment. It does not _use up_ vital energies like the expressive
idea, it is not an abortion of them, like the compensatory idea. It uses
them, and is aware that it uses them--that is, it is a program of action
upon the environment, of conversion of values into existences. Such an
idea has the differentia of intelligence. It is creative; it actually
converts nature into forms appropriate to human nature. It abolishes the
Otherworld of the compensatory tradition in philosophy by incarnating it
in this world; it abolishes the Otherworld of the religionist, rendered
important by belittling the actual one, by restoring the working
relationships between thoughts and things. This restoration develops as
reconstruction of the world in fact. It consists specifically of the art
and science which compose the efficacious enterprises of history and of
which the actual web of our civilization is spun.
Manifest in its purity in art, it attends unconsciously both religion
and philosophy, for the strands of life keep interweaving, and whatever
is, in our collective being, changes and is changed by whatever else may
be, that is in reach. The life of reason is initially unconscious
because it can learn only by living to seek a reason for life. Once it
discovers that it can become self-maintaining alone through relevance to
its ground and conditions, the control which this relevance yields makes
it so infectious that it tends to permeate every human institution, even
religion and philosophy. Philosophy, it is true, has lagged behind even
religion in relevancy, but the lagging has been due not to the
intention of the philosopher but to the inherent character of the task
he assumed. Both art and religion, we have seen, possess an immediacy
and concreteness which philosophy lacks. Art reconstructs correlative
portions of the environment for the eye, the ear, the hopes and fears of
the daily life. Religion extends this reconstruction beyond the actual
environment, but applies its saving technique at the critical points in
the career of the group or the individual; to control the food-supply,
to protect in birth, pubescence, marriage, and death. All its motives
are grounded in specific instincts and needs, all its reconstructions
and compensations culminate with reference to these. Philosophy, on the
other hand, deals with the _whole_ nature of man and his _whole_
environment. It seeks primaries and ultimates. Its traditional task is
so to define the universe as to articulate thereby a theory of life and
eternal salvation. It establishes contact with reality at no individual,
specific point: its reals are "real in general." It aims, in a word, to
be relevant to all nature, and to express the whole soul of man. The
consequence is inevitable: it forfeits relevance to everything natural;
touching nothing actual, it reconstructs nothing actual. Its concretest
incarnation is a dialectic design woven of words. The systems of
tradition, hence, are works of art, to be contemplated, enjoyed, and
believed in, but not to be acted on. For, since action is always
concrete and specific, always determined to time, place, and occasion,
we cannot in fact adapt ourselves to the aggregate infinitude of the
environment, or that to ourselves. Something always stands out,
recalcitrant, invincible, defiant. But it is just such an adaptation
that philosophy intends, and the futility of the intention is evinced by
the fact that the systems of tradition continue side by side with the
realities they deny, and live unmixed in one and the same mind, as a
picture of the ocean on the wall of a dining room in an inland town. Our
operative relations to them tend always to be essentially aesthetic. We
may and do believe in them in spite of life and experience, because
belief in them, involving no action, involves no practical risk. Where
action is a consequence of a philosophic system, the system seems to
dichotomize into art and religion. It becomes particularized into a
technique of living or the dogma of a sect, and so particularized it
becomes radically self-conscious and an aspect of creative intelligence.
So particularized, it is, however, no longer philosophy, and philosophy
has (I hope I may say this without professional bias) an inalienable
place in the life of reason. This place is rationally defined for it by
the discovery of its ground and function in the making of civilization;
and by the perfection of its possibilities through the definition of its
natural relationships. Thus, it is, in its essential historic character
at least, as fine an art as music, the most inward and human of all
arts. It may be, and human nature being what it is, undoubtedly will
continue to be, an added item to the creations wherewith man makes his
world a better place to live in, precious in that it envisages and
projects the excellences and perfections his heart desires and his
imagination therefore defines. So taken, it is not a substitution for
the world, but an addition to it, a refraction of it through the medium
of human nature, as a landscape painting by Whistler or Turner is not a
substitution for the actual landscape, but an interpretation and
imaginative perfection of it, more suitable to the eye of man. A system
like Bergson's is such a work, and its aesthetic adequacy, its beauty,
may be measured by the acknowledgment it receives and the influence it
exercises. Choosing one of the items of experience as its medium, and
this item the most precious in the mind's eye which the history of
philosophy reveals, it proceeds to fabricate a dialectical image of
experience in which all the compensatory desiderates are expressed and
realized. It entices minds of all orders, and they are happy to dwell in
it, for the nonce realizing in the perception of the system the values
it utters. By abandoning all pretense to be true, philosophic systems of
the traditional sort may attain the simple but supreme excellence of
beauty, and rest content therewith.
The philosophic ideal, however, is traditionally not beauty but truth:
the function of a philosophic system is not presentative, but
_re_presentative and causal, and that the systems of tradition have had
and still have consequences as well as character, is obvious enough. It
is, however, to be noted that these consequences have issued out of the
fact that the systems have been specific items of existence among other
equally and even more specific items, thought by particular men, at
particular times and in particular places. As such they have been
programs for meeting events and incarnating values; operative ideals
aiming to recreate the world according to determined standards. They
have looked forward rather than backward, have tacitly acknowledged the
reality of change, the irreducible pluralism of nature, and the
genuineness of the activities, oppugnant or harmonizing, between the
items of the Cosmic. Many they ostensibly negate. The truth, in a word,
has been experimental and prospective; the desiderates they uttered
operated actually as such and not as already existing. Historians of
philosophy, treating it as if it had no context, have denied or ignored
this role of philosophy in human events, but historians of the events
themselves could not avoid observing and enregistering it.
Only within very recent years, as an effect of the concept of evolution
in the field of the sciences, have philosophers as such envisaged this
non-aesthetic aspect of philosophy's ground and function in the making of
civilization and have made it the basis for a sober vision which may or
may not have beauty, but which cannot have finality. Such a vision is
again nothing more than traditional philosophy become conscious of its
character and limitations and shorn of its pretense. It is a program to
execute rather than a metaphysic to rest in. Its procedure is the
procedure of all the arts and sciences. It frankly acknowledges the
realities of immediate experience, the turbulence and complexity of the
flux, the interpenetrative confusion of orders, the inward
self-diversification of even the simplest thing, which "change" means,
and the continual emergence of novel entities, unforeseen and
unprevisible, from the reciprocal action of the older aggregate. This
perceptual reality it aims to remould according to the heart's desire.
Accordingly it drops the pretense of envisaging the universe and devotes
itself to its more modest task of applying its standards to a particular
item that needs to be remade. It is believed in, but no longer without
risk, for, without becoming a dogma, it still subjects itself to the
tests of action. So it acknowledges that it must and will itself undergo
constant modification through the process of action, in which it uses
events, in their meanings rather than in their natures, to map out the
future and to make it amenable to human nature. Philosophy so used is,
as John Dewey somewhere says, a mode and organ of experience among many
others. In a world the very core of which is change, it is directed upon
that which is not yet, to previse and to form its character and to map
out the way of life within it. Its aim is the liberation and enlargement
of human capacities, the enfranchisement of man by the actual
realization of values. In its integrate character therefore, it
envisages the life of reason and realizes it as the art of life. Where
it is successful, beauty and use are confluent and identical in it. It
converts sight into insight. It infuses existence with value, making
them one. It is the concrete incarnation of Creative Intelligence.