PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM
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 Westermarck[255] 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 Tufts[256]) 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-Hellenists[261] 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 civilization[267]--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 creative[271] 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 limits[272]
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 which[274] 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 truth[275] 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-analysis[282] 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
sociological[283] 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 Nature[286] 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.