PRAGMATISM AS AMERICANISM
In adopting the title he has chosen for the heading of this chapter the
writer feels that he has laid himself open to criticism from several
different points of view. What has philosophy as the universal science
to do with nationalism or with any form of national characteristics?
Then even if Pragmatism be discovered to be to some extent
“Americanism” in the realm of thought, is this finding, or criticism,
a piece of appreciation or a piece of depreciation? And again, is
it possible for any individual to grasp, and to understand, and to
describe such a living and such a far-reaching force as the Americanism
of to-day?
The following things may be said by way of a partial answer to these
reflections: (1) There are American characteristics in Pragmatism, and
some of them may profitably be studied by way of an attempt to get all
the light we can upon its essential nature. Their presence therein has
been detected and recognized by critics, both American and foreign,
and reference has already been made to some of them in this book. (2)
There is no universal reason in philosophy apart from its manifestation
in the thoughts and the activities of peoples who have made or who
are making their mark upon human history. It may well be that the
common reason of mankind has as much to learn from Americanism in the
department of theory as it has already been obliged to learn from this
same quarter in the realm of practice. (3) One of the most important
phases of our entire subject is precisely this very matter of the
application of philosophy to “practice,” of the inseparability, to put
it directly, of “theory” and “practice.” It would surely, therefore, be
the strangest kind of conceit (although signs of it still exist here
and there)[289] to debar philosophy from the study of such a practical
thing as the Americanism of to-day. To connect the two with any degree
of success would certainly not be to depreciate Pragmatism, but to
strengthen it by relating it to a spirit that is affecting the entire
life and thought of mankind.
One or two other important considerations should also be borne in
mind. It goes without saying that there are in the United States and
elsewhere any number of Americans who see beyond both contemporary
Pragmatism and contemporary Americanism, and to whom it would be,
therefore, but a partial estimate of Pragmatism to characterize it
as “Americanism.” So much, to be sure, might be inferred from some
things that have already been said in respect of the reception and the
fate of Pragmatism in its own country. Again, it is one of the errors
of the day to think of Americanism as in the main merely a belief in
“practicality” and “efficiency.” To those who know it, Americanism is
practical idealism, and its aims, instead of being merely materialistic
and mechanical, are idealistic to the point of being Utopian. The
American belief in work is not really a belief in work for its
own sake, but rather a faith in the endless possibilities open to
intelligent energy with resources at its command. Lastly, it will here
certainly not be necessary either to think or to speak (even if it were
possible to do so) of _all_ American characteristics.[290]
Among the American-like characteristics in Pragmatism that have already
made themselves apparent in the foregoing chapters are its insistence
upon “action” and upon the free creative effort of the individual,
its insistence upon the man-made (or the merely human) character of
most of our vaunted truths, its instrumentalism, its radicalism,[291]
its empiricism (that is to say, its endless faith in experience),
its democratic character, and its insistence upon the necessity to
philosophy of a broad, tolerant, all-inclusive view of human nature.
So, too, are its insistence upon the basal character of belief,[292]
and upon the importance of a creed or a philosophy that really “works”
in the lives of intelligent men, its feeling of the inadequacy of a
merely scholastic or dialectical philosophy, and even its _quasi_
“practical” interpretation of itself in the realms of philosophy and
religion and ethics--its confession of itself as a “corridor-theory,”
as a point of approach to all the different systems in the history
of thought. In addition to these characteristics we shall attempt
now to speak, in the most tentative spirit, firstly, of some of the
characteristics of American university life of which Pragmatism may
perhaps be regarded as a partial expression or reflex, and then
after this, of such broadly-marked and such well-known American
characteristics as the love of the concrete (in preference to the
abstract), the love of experiment and experimentation, an intolerance
of doctrinairism and of mere book-learning, the general democratic
outlook on life and thought, the composite or amalgam-like character
of the present culture of the United States, the sociological interest
that characterizes its people, and so on. All these things are clearly
to be seen in Pragmatism as a would-be philosophical system, or as a
preliminary step in the evolution of such a system.
Owing very largely to the “elective” system that still prevails in the
universities of the United States, Philosophy is there (to an extent
somewhat inconceivable to the student of the European continent) in
the most active competition with other studies, and the success of a
professor of philosophy is dependent on the success of his method of
presenting his subject to students who all elect studies believed by
them to be useful or interesting or practically important. It has long
seemed to the writer that there is abundant evidence in the writings of
the pragmatists of this inevitable attempt to make philosophy a “live”
subject in competition, say, with the other two most popular subjects
in American colleges, viz. economics and biology. The importance to the
thought of to-day of biological and economic considerations is one of
the things most emphatically insisted upon by Professor Dewey in nearly
all his recent writings.[293] And both he and James--the fact is only
too evident--have always written under the pressure of the economic and
sociological interest of the American continent. And even Schiller’s
Humanism has become, as we have seen, very largely the metaphysics of
the “evolutionary process,” a characterization which we make below[294]
as a kind of criticism of the philosophy of Bergson. Our present point,
however, is merely that, owing to the generally competitive character
of the intellectual life there, this biological influence is felt more
acutely in America than elsewhere.
The one outstanding characteristic again of every approved academic
teacher in the United States is his method of handling his subject,
just as the one thing that is claimed for Pragmatism by its upholders
is that it is particularly a “methodology” of thought rather than a
complete philosophy. To the university constituency of the United
States a professor without an approved and successful method is as good
as dead, for no one would listen to him. The most manifest sign, to be
sure, of the possession of such an effective method on the part of the
university lecturer is the demonstration of skill in the treatment of
his subject, in the “approach” that he makes to it for the beginner,
in his power of setting the advanced student to work upon fruitful
problems, and of giving him a complete “orientation” in the entire
field under consideration. And then in addition to this he must be
able to indicate the practical and the educational value of what he is
teaching.
In his review of James’s classical work upon Pragmatism, Dewey, while
indicating a number of debatable points in the pragmatist philosophy,
declares emphatically his belief in that philosophy as a method of
“orientation.” The title again of Peirce’s famous pamphlet was _How
to make Ideas Clear_--a phrase of itself suggestive enough of the
inquiring mind of the young student when oppressed by apparently
conflicting and competing points of view. “We are acquainted with a
thing,” says James, “as soon as we have learned how to behave towards
it, or how to meet the behaviour we accept from it.” In one of his
books he talks about physics, for example, as giving us not so much
a theory about things as a “practical acquaintance” with bodies;
“the power to take hold of them and handle them,” indicating at the
same time his opinion that this way of regarding knowledge should
be extended to philosophy itself. All of this will serve as a proof
or illustration of the essentially “practical” and “methodological”
conception of philosophy taken by the pragmatists. Papini refers, we
remember, to the pragmatist philosophy as a power of “commanding our
material,” of “manipulating” for practical purposes the different
“thought-constructions” of the history of philosophy. And those who
have any familiarity with the early pragmatist magazine literature
know that the pragmatists used to be fond of asking themselves such
preliminary and “laboratory-like” inquiries as the following: “What
is truth _known as_?” “What is philosophy _known as_?” “What are the
different ‘thought-levels’ upon which we seem to move in our ordinary
experience?” They never exactly seem to “define” philosophy for you,
preferring to indicate what it can _do_ for you, and so on.
Turning now to the matter of American characteristics that are broader
and deeper than the merely academic, we may find an illustration,
for example, of the American practicality and the love of the
concrete (instead of the abstract or the merely general) in the
following declaration of Professor James that “the whole originality
of Pragmatism, the whole point in it, is its use of the _concrete_
way of seeing. It begins with _concreteness_ and returns and ends
with it.” Of the American love of novelty and of interest we may
find an illustration in the determination of Pragmatism “never to
discuss a question that has absolutely no interest and no meaning to
any one.” Of Pragmatism as an exemplification of the American love
of experiment, and of experimentation, with a view to definite and
appreciable “returns,” we may give the following: “If you fully believe
the pragmatic method you cannot look on any such word, _i.e._ ‘God,’
‘Matter,’ ‘Reason,’ ‘The Absolute,’ ‘Energy,’ and such ‘solving’
names, as closing your quest. You must bring out in each word its
practical cash value, set it at work within the stream of your
experience. It appears less as a solution then than as a programme for
more work and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which
existing realities _may be changed_.” Of the American intolerance for
mere scholarship and book-learning, and of the American inability
to leave any discovery or any finished product alone without some
attempt to “improve” upon it or to put it to some new use, we may
cite the following: “When may a truth go into cold storage in the
encyclopaedias, and when shall it come out for battle?”
Another very strongly marked characteristic of American life is the
thoroughly eclectic and composite character of its general culture
and of the general tone of its public life. American daily life has
become, as it were, a kind of social solvent, a huge melting-pot for
the culture and the habits and the customs of peoples from all over
the earth. This also may be thought of as reflected in the confessedly
complex and amalgam-like character of Pragmatism, in its boast and
profession of being a synthesis and a fusion of so many different
tendencies of human thought. As a juxtaposition, or kind of compound
solution, of such a variety of things as the affirmations of religion,
the hypothetical method of science, realism, romanticism, idealism,
utilitarianism, and so on, it reminds us only too forcibly of the
endless number of social groups and traditions, the endless number of
interests and activities and projects to be seen and felt in any large
American city.
Still another general characteristic of American life of which we may
well think in connexion with Pragmatism is the sociological interest
of the country, the pressure of which upon the pragmatists and their
writings has already been referred to. The social problem in America
has now become[295] the one problem that is present with everybody, and
present most of all, perhaps, with the European immigrant, who has for
various reasons hoped that he had left this problem behind him. The
effect of this upon Pragmatism is to be seen, not merely in the very
living hold that it is inclined to take of philosophy and philosophical
problems,[296] but in the fact of its boast of being a “way of living”
as well as a “way of thinking.” We have examined this idea in our
remarks upon the ethics of Pragmatism.
Of course the outstanding temperamental American characteristic that
is most clearly seen in Pragmatism is the great fact of the inevitable
bent of the American mind to action and to accomplishment,--its
positive inability to entertain any idea, or any set of ideas upon
any subject whatsoever, without experiencing at the same time the
inclination to use these ideas for invention and contrivance,[297] for
organization and exploitation. Any one who has lived in the United
States must in fact have become so habituated and so accustomed to
think of his thought and his knowledge and his capacities in terms
of their possible social utility, that he simply cannot refrain from
judging of any scheme of thought or of any set of ideas in the same
light. Anywhere, to be sure, in the United States will they allow a man
to think all he pleases about anything whatsoever--even pre-Socratic
philosophy, say, or esoteric Buddhism. And there is nothing indeed of
which the country is said, by those who know it best, to stand so much
in need as the most persistent and the most profound thought about all
important matters. But such thought, it is always added, must prove to
be constructive and positive in character, to be directed not merely to
the solution of useless questions or of questions which have long ago
been settled by others.
We shall now endeavour to think of the value[298] to philosophy and to
the thought and practice of the world (the two things are inseparable)
of some or all of these general and special characteristics which we
have sought to illustrate in Pragmatism.
We might begin by suggesting the importance to the world of the
production and development of a man of genius like James,[299] whose
fresh and living presentation of the problems of philosophy (as seen
by a psychologist) has brought the sense of a lasting and far-reaching
obligation upon his fellow-students everywhere. In no more favourable
soil could James have grown up into the range and plenitude of his
influence than in that of America and of Harvard University,[300] that
great nursing-ground of the finest kind of American imperialism. The
great thing, of course, about James was his invasion, through the
activities of his own personality,[301] of the realm of philosophical
rationalism by the fact and the principle of active personality. His
whole general activity was a living embodiment of the principle of
all humanism, that personality and the various phases of personal
experience are of more importance to philosophy in the way of theory
than any number of supposedly self-coherent, rational or abstract
systems, than any amount of reasoning that is determined solely by the
ideal of conceptual consistency.
Then again, it might be held that the entire academic world of to-day
has a great deal to learn from the conditions under which all subjects
(philosophy included) are taught and investigated in the typical
American university of the day. We have referred to the fact that the
American professor or investigator faces the work of instruction and
research in an environment replete with all modern facilities and
conveniences.[302] The very existence of this environment along with
the presence throughout his country of university men and workers
from all over the world with all their obvious merits and defects as
“social types” prevent him in a hundred ways from that slavery to
some one school of thought, to some one method of research that is so
often a characteristic of the scholar of the old world. The entire
information and scholarship in any one science (say, philosophy) is
worth to him what he can make of it, here and now, for himself and for
his age and for his immediate environment. He simply cannot think of
any idea or any line of reflection, in his own or in any other field,
without thinking at the same time of its “consequences,” immediate,
secondary, and remote. This inability is an instance of the working
of the pragmatist element in scholarship and in thought with all its
advantages and disadvantages.[303]
And it is true too, it might be held, even upon the principles of
Idealism that the mere facts of knowledge (for they are as endless in
number as are the different points of view from which we may perceive
and analyse phenomena) are “worth”[304] to-day very largely only what
they have meant and what they may yet mean to human life, to human
thought, to civilization. While there is certainly no useless truth
and no utterly unimportant fact, it is quite possible to burden and
hamper the mind of youth with supposed truths and facts that have
little or no relevancy to any coherent or any real point of view about
human knowledge and human interests either of the past or the present.
It is merely, for example, in the light of the effects that they
have had upon the life and thought of humanity[305] that the great
philosophical systems of the past ought (after the necessary period of
preliminary study on the part of the pupil) to be presented to students
in university lectures. A teacher who cannot set them forth in this
spirit is really not a teacher at all--a man who can make his subject
live again in the thought of the present.[306]
If the limits of our space and our subject permitted of the attempt, we
might easily continue the study of the pragmatist element in American
scholarship from the point of view of the whole general economy of a
university as a social institution, and from that of the benefit that
has accrued to the modern world from the many successful attempts at
the organization of knowledge from an international point of view, that
have come into being under American initiative.[307]
Lastly it is surely impossible to exaggerate the value to philosophy
of the so-called “democratic,”[308] open-minded attitude of Pragmatism
that is seen in its unprejudiced recognition of such things as the
ordinary facts of life, the struggle that constitutes the life of the
average man, the fragmentary and partial[309] character of most of our
knowledge, and so on. All this contrasts in the most favourable way
with the scholastic and the Procrustean attitude to facts that has so
long characterized philosophical rationalism from Leibniz and Wolff to
the Kantians and to the Neo-Kantians and the Neo-Hegelians of our own
time. Thanks partly to this direct and democratic attitude of mind on
the part of the pragmatists and humanists, and thanks too to the entire
psychological and sociological movement of modern times, the points
of view of the different leading thinkers of different countries are
beginning to receive their fitting recognition in the general economy
of human thought to be compared with each other, and with still other
possible points of view.
No one, it seems to me, can read the books of James without feeling
that philosophy can again, as the universal science indeed, “begin
anywhere” in a far less restricted sense than that in which Hegel
interpreted this ingenious saying of his in respect of the freedom of
human thinking.[310]
As for the inevitable drawbacks and limitations of the very Americanism
which we have been endeavouring to discover in Pragmatism, it cannot,
to begin with, be entirely without an element of risk to philosophy,
and to the real welfare of a country, that the highest kind of insight
should be brought too ruthlessly into competition with the various
specialized studies, and the various utilitarian[311] pursuits of
modern times, and with popular tendencies generally. The public,
for many reasons, should not be too readily encouraged to think of
philosophy as merely “a” study like other studies and pursuits, to be
baited with the idea of its utility and its profitable consequences.
Philosophy, on the contrary, is the universal study that gives to all
other studies and pursuits their relative place and value. If left too
much to be a mere matter of choice on the part of the young and the
unthinking, it will soon find itself in the neglected position of the
wisdom that utters her voice at the street corners. It must be secured
an integral, and even a necessary place in the world of instruction--a
condition that is still the case, it is to be remembered, in
Catholic[312] as distinguished from many so-called “liberal” and
“Protestant” seats of learning.
It is possible indeed, as we have already suggested, that the
recognition of an aristocratic or a Catholic element in learning would,
in some respects, be of more true use in the schools of America than a
mere pragmatist philosophy of life and education. And it is therefore
not to be wondered at that Americans themselves should already have
expressed something of a distrust for a philosophy and an educational
policy that are too akin to the practical commercialism of the
hour.[313]
Then again, despite the large element of truth that there is in the
idea of philosophy “discovering” (rather than itself “being”) the true
“dynamic” or “motive-awakening” view of the system of things in which
we live, philosophy itself was never intended to bear the entire weight
and strain that are put upon it by the pragmatists. In their enthusiasm
they would make out of it, as we have seen, a religion (and a new one
at that!) and a social philosophy, as well as the theory of knowledge
and the “approach” to reality that we are accustomed to look for in a
system of philosophy.
It is only in periods of transition and reconstruction, like the
present age, when men have become acutely sensible of the limitations
of traditional views of things, that they are inclined in their
disappointment to look to scientific and professional thinkers for
creeds that shall take the place of what they seem for the moment to
be losing. It is in such times chiefly that philosophy flourishes, and
that it is apt to acquire an undue importance by being called upon to
do things that of itself it cannot do. Among the latter impossibilities
is to be placed, for example, the idea of its being able to offer
(almost in any sense) a substitute for the direct experience[314]
of the common life, or for the realities of our affections and our
emotions, or for the ideals engendered by the common life.
Owing partly to the limitations of the Intellectualism that has
hitherto characterized so much of the culture and the educational
policy of the last century there are still everywhere scores of people
under the illusion that the truth of life will be revealed to them
in the theory of some book, in the new views or the new gospel of
some emancipated and original thinker. In this vain hope of theirs
they are obviously forgetful of even the pragmatist truth that all
theories are but a kind of transformation, or abstract expression,
of the experiences of real life and of real living. And part of the
trouble with the pragmatists is that they themselves have unwittingly
ministered to this mistaken attitude of mind by creating the impression
that their theory of taking the kingdom of Heaven by storm, by the
violence of their postulations and of their plea for a “working view”
of things, is indeed the new gospel of which men have long been in
search. The race, however, is not always to the swift and the eager,
nor the kingdom to those who are loudest in their cryings of “Lord,
Lord.” And as a friend of mine aptly applied it as against all
practicalism and Pragmatism, “there remaineth a rest to the people of
God.”[315] The ordinary man, it should be borne in mind, does not in a
certain sense really need philosophy. Its audience is with the few, and
it is to do it but scant service to think of making it attractive to
the many by the obliteration of most of its distinctive characteristics
and difficulties, and by the failure to point out its inherent
limitations. It is not by any means, as we have been indicating, a
substitute either for life, or for positive religion. Nor can it ever
have much of a message, even for the few, if they imagine themselves,
on account of their wisdom, to be elevated above the needs of the
ordinary discipline of life.
Then again, there is surely an element of considerable danger in
the American-like depreciation of doctrine and theory which we
have noticed in two or three different connexions on the part of
Pragmatism. In the busy, necessitous life of the United States this
depreciation[316] is sometimes said to be visible in the great
sacrifice of life[317] and energy that is continually taking place
there owing to an unduly literal acceptance on the part of every one
of the idea that each individual has a sort of divine right to seek
and to interpret his experience for himself. In Pragmatism it might be
said to be illustrated in the comparative weakness in the essentials
of logic and ethics to which we have already referred, in the matter
of a sound theory of first principles. And also in its failure to take
any really critical recognition[318] of the question of its theoretical
and practical affiliations to tendencies new and old, many or most of
which have long ago been estimated at their true worth and value. Then
there is its comparatively superficial interpretation[319] of what is
known in the thought of the day as “Darwinism” and “Evolutionism” and
the endless belief of the unthinking in “progress,” and its failure
to see that its very Americanism[320] and its very popularity are
things that are deserving of the most careful study and criticism.
What have the pragmatists left in their hands of their theory, if its
mere “methodology” and its “efficiency-philosophy” and its would-be
enthusiasm were eliminated from it?
Like Americanism in general (which began, of course, as a revolutionary
and a “liberationist” policy), Pragmatism is inclined in some ways
to make too much of peoples’ rights and interests, and too little
of their duties and privileges and of their real needs and their
fundamental, human instincts. It is in the understanding alone of these
latter things that true wisdom and true satisfaction[321] are to be
found. And like the American demand for pleasure and for a good time
generally, Pragmatism is in many respects too much a mere philosophy
of “postulations” and “demands,” too much a mere formulation of the
eager and impetuous demands of the emancipated man and woman of the
time---as forgetful as they of many of the deeper[322] facts of life
and of the economy of our human civilization. In demanding that the
“consequences” of all pursuits (even those of study and philosophy)
shall be “satisfying,” and that philosophy shall satisfy our active
nature, it forgets the sense of disillusionment that comes to all rash
and mistaken effort. It certainly does not follow that a man is going
to get certain things from the world and from philosophy merely because
he demands them any more than does the _discovery_ and the _possession_
of happiness follow from the “right”[323] of the individual to seek
it in his own best way. Nor is it even true that man is called upon
to “act” to anything like the extent contemplated by an unduly
enthusiastic Americanism and an unduly enthusiastic Pragmatism. The
writer is glad to be able to append in this connexion a quotation taken
by an American critic of Pragmatism from Forberg in his criticism of
the action-philosophy of Fichte: “Action, action, is the vocation of
man! Strictly speaking, this principle is false. Man is not called upon
to act, but to act justly. If he cannot act without acting unjustly he
had better remain inactive.”
It would not be difficult to match this quotation, or perhaps to
surpass it, with something from Carlyle in respect of the littleness of
man’s claims, not merely for enjoyment, but even for existence; but we
will pass on.
Pragmatism, as we have suggested, certainly falls too readily into
line with the tendency of the age to demand means and instruments and
utilities and working satisfactions, instead of ends and purposes and
values, to demand pleasure and enjoyment instead of happiness and
blessedness. Instead of allowing itself to do this it should have
undertaken a criticism both of the so-called “wants” of the age, and
of the soundness of its own views in respect of the truth and the
happiness that are proper to man as man. There is a fine epigram of
Goethe’s in respect of the limitations of the revolutionary and the
liberationist attitude of those who would seek to “free” men without
first trying to understand them, and to help them to their true inward
development.
Aile Freiheits-Apostel, sie waren mir immer zuwider.
Willkur suchte doch nur jeder am Ende für sich.
Willst du viele befrein, so wag’ es vielen zu dienen.
Wie gefährlich das sey, willst du es wissen?
Versuch’s.[324]
Until Pragmatism then makes it clear that it is the free rational
activity, and the higher spiritual nature of man that is to it the
norm of all our thought, and all our activity, and the true test of
all “consequences,” it has not risen to the height of the distinctive
message that it is capable of giving to the thought of the present
time. Unqualified by some of the ideal considerations to which we have
attempted, in its name, and in its interest, to give an expression, it
would not be, for example, a philosophy that could be looked upon by
the great East as the last word of our Western wisdom or our Western
experience. It will be well, however, to say nothing more in this
connexion until we have looked at the considerations that follow (in
our next chapter) upon the lofty, but impersonal, idealisation of the
life and thought of man attempted by our Anglo-Hegelian Rationalism,
and until we have reflected, too, upon the more feasible form of
Idealism attempted in the remarkable philosophy of Bergson,[325] the
greatest of all the pragmatists.