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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781684224579 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Martino Fine Books |
| Publication date: | 05/11/2020 |
| Pages: | 108 |
| Sales rank: | 1,005,299 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.69(w) x 9.61(h) x 0.22(d) |
About the Author
Ignas K. Skrupskelis is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Lecture I
The Present Dilemma in Philosophy
In the preface to that admirable collection of essays of his called 'Heretics/ Mr. Chesterton writes these words: "There are some people — and I am one of them — who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them."
I think with Mr. Chesterton in this matter. I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds. You know the same of me. And yet I confess to a certain tremor at the audacity of the enterprise which I am about to begin. For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos. I have no right to assume that many of you are students of the cosmos in the class-room sense, yet here I stand desirous of interesting you in a philosophy which to no small extent has to be technically treated. I wish to fill you with sympathy with a contemporaneous tendency in which I profoundly believe, and yet I have to talk like a professor to you who are not students. Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind! I have heard friends and colleagues try to popularize philosophy in this very hall, but they soon grew dry, and then technical, and the results were only partially encouraging. So my enterprise is a bold one. The founder of pragmatism himself recently gave a course of lectures at the Lowell Institute with that very word in its title — flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness! None of us, I fancy, understood all that he said — yet here I stand, making a very similar venture.
I risk it because the very lectures I speak of drew — they brought good audiences. There is, it must be confessed, a curious fascination in hearing deep things talked about, even tho neither we nor the disputants understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of the vastness. Let a controversy begin in a smoking-room anywhere, about free-will or God's omniscience, or good and evil, and see how everyone in the place pricks up his ears. Philosophy's results concern us all most vitally, and philosophy's queerest arguments tickle agreeably our sense of subtlety and ingenuity.
Believing in philosophy myself devoutly, and believing also that a kind of new dawn is breaking upon us philosophers, I feel impelled, per fas aut nefas, to try to impart to you some news of the situation.
Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas. It Takes no bread,' as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often are to common people, no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends over the world's perspectives. These illuminations at least, and the contrast-effects of darkness and mystery that accompany them, give to what it says an interest that is much more than professional.
The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with the world's character, and in his heart considers them incompetent and 'not in it,' in the philosophic business, even tho they may far excel him in dialectical ability.
Yet in the forum he can make no claim, on the bare ground of his temperament, to superior discernment or authority. There arises thus a certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: the potentest of all our premises is never mentioned. I am sure it would contribute to clearness if in these lectures we should break this rule and mention it, and I accordingly feel free to do so.
Of course I am talking here of very positively marked men, men of radical idiosyncracy, who have set their stamp and likeness on philosophy and figure in its history. Plato, Locke, Hegel, Spencer, are such temperamental thinkers. Most of us have, of course, no very definite intellectual temperament, we are a mixture of opposite ingredients, each one present very moderately. We hardly know our own preferences in abstract matters; some of us are easily talked out of them, and end by following the fashion or taking up with the beliefs of the most impressive philosopher in our neighborhood, whoever he may be. But the one thing that has counted so far in philosophy is that a man should see things, see them straight in his own peculiar way, and be dissatisfied with any opposite way of seeing them. There is no reason to suppose that this strong temperamental vision is from now onward to count no longer in the history of man's beliefs.
Now the particular difference of temperament that I have in mind in making these remarks is one that has counted in literature, art, government and manners as well as in philosophy. In manners we find formalists and free-and-easy persons. In government, authoritarians and anarchists. In literature, purists or academicals, and realists. In art, classics and romantics. You recognize these contrasts as familiar; well, in philosophy we have a very similar contrast expressed in the pair of terms 'rationalist' and 'empiricist,' 'empiricist' meaning your lover of facts in all their crude variety, 'rationalist' meaning your devotee to abstract and eternal principles. No one can live an hour without both facts and principles, so it is a difference rather of emphasis; yet it breeds antipathies of the most pungent character between those who lay the emphasis differently; and we shall find it extraordinarily convenient to express a certain contrast in men's ways of taking their universe, by talking of the 'empiricist' and of the 'rationalist' temper. These terms make the contrast simple and massive.
More simple and massive than are usually the men of whom the terms are predicated. For every sort of permutation and combination is possible in human nature; and if I now proceed to define more fully what I have in mind when I speak of rationalists and empiricists, by adding to each of those titles some secondary qualifying characteristics, I beg you to regard my conduct as to a certain extent arbitrary. I select types of combination that nature offers very frequently, but by no means uniformly, and I select them solely for their convenience in helping me to my ulterior purpose of characterizing pragmatism. Historically we find the terms 'intellectualism' and 'sensationalism' used as synonyms of 'rationalism' and 'empiricism.' Well, nature seems to combine most frequently with intellectualism an idealistic and optimistic tendency. Empiricists on the other hand are not uncommonly materialistic, and their optimism is apt to be decidedly conditional and tremulous. Rationalism is always monistic. It starts from wholes and universal, and makes much of the unity of things. Empiricism starts from the parts, and makes of the whole a collection — is not averse therefore to calling itself pluralistic. Rationalism usually considers itself more religious than empiricism, but there is much to say about this claim, so I merely mention it. It is a true claim when the individual rationalist is what is called a man of feeling, and when the individual empiricist prides himself on being hard-headed. In that case the rationalist will usually also be in favor of what is called free-will, and the empiricist will be a fatalist — I use the terms most popularly current. The rationalist finally will be of dogmatic temper in his affirmations, while the empiricist may be more sceptical and open to discussion.
I will write these traits down in two columns. I think you will practically recognize the two types of mental make-up that I mean if I head the columns by the titles 'tender-minded' and 'tough-minded' respectively.
The Tender-minded Rationalistic (going by 'principles'),
Pray postpone for a moment the question whether the two contrasted mixtures which I have written down are each inwardly coherent and self-consistent or not — I shall very soon have a good deal to say on that point. It suffices for our immediate purpose that tender-minded and tough-minded people, characterized as I have written them down, do both exist. Each of you probably knows some well-marked example of each type, and you know what each example thinks of the example on the other side of the line. They have a low opinion of each other. Their antagonism, whenever as individuals their temperaments have been intense, has formed in all ages a part of the philosophic atmosphere of the time. It forms a part of the philosophic atmosphere to-day. The tough think of the tender as sentimentalists and soft-heads. The tender feel the tough to be unrefined, callous, or brutal. Their mutual reaction is very much like that that takes place when Bostonian tourists mingle with a population like that of Cripple Creek. Each type believes the other to be inferior to itself; but disdain in the one case is mingled with amusement, in the other it has a dash of fear.
Now, as I have already insisted, few of us are tender-foot Bostonians pure and simple, and few are typical Rocky Mountain toughs, in philosophy. Most of us have a hankering for the good things on both sides of the line. Facts are good, of course — give us lots of facts. Principles are good — give us plenty of principles. The world is indubitably one if you look at it in one way, but as indubitably is it many, if you look at it in another. It is both one and many — let us adopt a sort of pluralistic monism. Everything of course is necessarily determined, and yet of course our wills are free: a sort of free-will determinism is the true philosophy. The evil of the parts is undeniable; but the whole can't be evil: so practical pessimism may be combined with metaphysical optimism. And so forth — your ordinary philosophic layman never being a radical, never straightening out his system, but living vaguely in one plausible compartment of it or another to suit the temptations of successive hours.
But some of us are more than mere laymen in philosophy. We are worthy of the name of amateur athletes, and are vexed by too much inconsistency and vacillation in our creed. We cannot preserve a good intellectual conscience so long as we keep mixing incompatibles from opposite sides of the line.
And now I come to the first positively important point which I wish to make. Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in existence as there are at the present day. Our children, one may say, are almost born scientific. But our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout. Now take a man of this type, and let him be also a philosophic amateur, unwilling to mix a hodge-podge system after the fashion of a common layman, and what does he find his situation to be, in this blessed year of our Lord 1906? He wants facts; he wants science; but he also wants a religion. And being an amateur and not an independent originator in philosophy he naturally looks for guidance to the experts and professionals whom he finds already in the field. A very large number of you here present, possibly a majority of you, are amateurs of just this sort.
Now what kinds of philosophy do you find actually offered to meet your need? You find an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough for your purpose. If you look to the quarter where facts are most considered you find the whole tough-minded program in operation, and the 'conflict between science and religion' in full blast. Either it is that Rocky Mountain tough of a Haeckel with his materialistic monism, his ethergod and his jest at your God as a 'gaseous vertebrate'; or it is Spencer treating the world's history as a redistribution of matter and motion solely, and bowing religion politely out at the front door: — she may indeed continue to exist, but she must never show her face inside the temple.
For a hundred and fifty years past the progress of science has seemed to mean the enlargement of the material universe and the diminution of man's importance. The result is what one may call the growth of naturalistic or positivistic feeling. Man is no lawgiver to nature, he is an absorber. She it is who stands firm; he it is who must accommodate himself. Let him record truth, inhuman tho it be, and submit to it! The romantic spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic and depressing. Ideals appear as inert by-products of physiology; what is higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of 'nothing but' — nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort. You get, in short, a materialistic universe, in which only the tough-minded find themselves congenially at home.
If now, on the other hand, you turn to the religious quarter for consolation, and take counsel of the tender-minded philosophies, what do you find?
Religious philosophy in our day and generation is, among us English-reading people, of two main types. One of these is more radical and aggressive, the other has more the air of fighting a slow retreat. By the more radical wing of religious philosophy I mean the so-called transcendental idealism of the Anglo-Hegelian school, the philosophy of such men as Green, the Cairds, Bosanquet and Royce. This philosophy has greatly influenced the more studious members of our protestant ministry. It is pantheistic, and undoubtedly it has already blunted the edge of the traditional theism in protestantism at large.
That theism remains, however. It is the lineal descendant, through one stage of concession after another, of the dogmatic scholastic theism still taught rigorously in the seminaries of the catholic church. For a long time it used to be called among us the philosophy of the Scottish school. It is what I meant by the philosophy that has the air of fighting a slow retreat. Between the encroachments of the hegelians and other philosophers of the 'Absolute/ on the one hand, and those of the scientific evolutionists and agnostics, on the other, the men that give us this kind of a philosophy, James Martineau, Professor Bowne, Professor Ladd and others, must feel themselves rather tightly squeezed. Fairminded and candid as you like, this philosophy is not radical in temper. It is eclectic, a thing of compromises, that seeks a modus vivendi above all things. It accepts the facts of darwinism, the facts of cerebral physiology, but it does nothing active or enthusiastic with them. It lacks the victorious and aggressive note. It lacks prestige in consequence; whereas absolutism has a certain prestige due to the more radical style of it.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
LECTURE I The Present Dilemma in PhilosophyChesterton quoted.
Everyone has a philosophy.
Temperament is a factor in all philosophizing.
Rationalists and empiricists.
The tender-minded and the tough-minded.
Most men wish both facts and religion.
Empiricism gives facts without religion.
Rationalism gives religion without facts.
The layman's dilemma.
The unreality in rationalistic systems.
"Leibnitz on the damned, as an example."
M.I. Swift on the optimism of idealists.
Pragmatism as a mediating system.
An objection.
"Reply: philosophies have characters like men, and are liable to as summary judgments."
Spencer as an example.
LECTURE II What Pragmatism Means
The squirrel.
Pragmatism as a method.
History of the method.
Its character and affinities.
How it contrasts with rationalism and intellectualism.
A 'corridor theory.'
"Pragmatism as a theory of truth, equivalent to 'humanism.'"
"Earlier views of mathematical, logical, and natural truth."
More recent views.
Schiller's and Dewey's 'instrumental' view.
The formation of new beliefs.
Older truth always has to be kept account of.
Older truth arose similarly.
The 'humanistic' doctrine.
Rationalistic criticisms of it.
Pragmatism as mediator between empiricism and religion.
Barrenness of transcendental idealism.
How far the concept of Absolute must be called true.
The true is the good in the way of belief.
The clash of truths.
Pragmatism unstiffens discussion.
LECTURE III Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered
The problem of substance.
The Eucharist.
Berkely's pragmatic treatment of material substance.
Locke's of personal identity.
The problem of materialism.
Rationalistic treatment of it.
Pragmatic treatment.
"God' is no better than 'Matter' as a principle, unless he promise more."
Pragmatic comparison of the two principles.
The problem of design.
Design' per se is barren.
The question is what design.
The problem of 'free-will.'
Its relations to 'accountability.'
Free-will a cosmological theory.
The pragmatic issue at stake in all these problems is what do the alternatives promise.
LECTURE IV The One and Many
Total reflection.
"Philosophy seeks not only unity, but totality."
Rationalistic feeling about unity.
"Pragmatically considered, the world is one in many ways."
One time and space.
One subject of discourse.
Its parts interact.
Its oneness and manyness are co-ordinate.
Question of one origin.
Generic oneness.
One purpose.
One story.
One knower.
Value of pragmatic method.
Absolute monism.
Vivekananda.
Various types of union discussed.
Conclusions: We must oppose monistic dogmatism and follow empirical findings.
LECTURE V Pragmatism and Common Sense
Noetic pluralism.
How our knowledge grows.
Earlier ways of thinking remain.
Prehistoric ancestors discovered the common sense concepts.
List of them.
They came gradually into use.
Space and time.
Things.'
Kinds.
Cause' and 'law.'
"Common sense one stage in mental evolution, due to geniuses."
"The 'critical' stages: 1) scientific and 2) philosophic, compared with common sense."
Impossible to say which is the more 'true.'
LECTURE VI Pragmatism's Conception of Truth
The polemic situation.
What does agreement with reality mean?
It means verifiability.
Verifiability means ability to guide us propserously through experience.
Completed verfications seldom needful.
Eternal' truths.
"Consistency, with language, with previous truths."
Rationalist objections.
"Truth is a good, like, health, wealth, etc."
It is expedient thinking.
The past.
Truth grows.
Rationalist objections.
Reply to them.
LECTURE VII Pragmatism and Humanism
The notion of Truth.
Schiller on 'Humanism.'
Three sorts of reality of which any new truth must take account.
To 'take account' is ambiguous.
Absolutely independent reality is hard to find.
The human contribution is ubiquitous and builds out the given.
Essence of pragmatism's contrast with rationalism.
Rationalism affirms a transempirical world.
Motives for this.
Tough-mindedness rejects them.
A genuine alternative.
Pragmatism mediates.
LECTURE VIII Pragmatism and Religion
Utility of the Absolute.
Whitman's poem 'To You.'
Two ways of taking it.
My friend's letter.
Necessities versus possibilities.
Possibility' defined.
Three views of the world's salvation.
Pragmatism is melioristic.
We may create reality.
Why should anything be?
Supposed choice before creation.
The healthy and the morbid reply.
The 'tender' and the 'tough' types of religion.
Pragmatism mediates.
What People are Saying About This
The meanings--twenty? thirty?--of "pragmatism" continue to be a central question in American philosophy and intellectual history. A chance to see the development and working of James's own mind from the inside, as it were, should do much to help us understand where he himself stood and what he himself meant...In brief, scholars, students, and the general reading public should all display an interest in a critical edition of James's works.
The meanings--twenty? thirty?--of "pragmatism" continue to be a central question in American philosophy and intellectual history. A chance to see the development and working of James's own mind from the inside, as it were, should do much to help us understand where he himself stood and what he himself meant...In brief, scholars, students, and the general reading public should all display an interest in a critical edition of James's works.