Pragmatism — Lecture 7: Pragmatism and Humanism, part 1

Lecture VII Pragmatism and Humanism What hardens the heart of everyone I approach with the view of truth sketched in my last lecture is that typical idol of the tribe, the notion of THE Truth, conceived as the one answer, determinate and complete, to the one fixed enigma which the world is believed to propound.

For popular tradition, it is all the better if the answer be oracular, so as itself to awaken wonder as an enigma of the second order, veiling rather than revealing what its profundities are supposed to contain.

All the great single-word answers to the world's riddle, such as God, the One, Reason, Law, Spirit, Matter, Nature, Polarity, the Dialectic Process, the Idea, the Self, the Oversoul, draw the admiration that men have lavished on them from this oracular role.

By amateurs in philosophy and professionals alike, the universe is represented as a queer sort of petrified sphinx whose appeal to man consists in a monotonous challenge to his divining powers.

THE Truth: what a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind!

I read in an old letter--from a gifted friend who died too young--these words: "In everything, in science, art, morals and religion, there MUST be one system that is right and EVERY other wrong."

How characteristic of the enthusiasm of a certain stage of youth!

At twenty-one we rise to such a challenge and expect to find the system.

It never occurs to most of us even later that the question 'what is THE truth?'

is no real question (being irrelative to all conditions) and that the whole notion of THE truth is an abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phrase like THE Latin Language or THE Law.

Common-law judges sometimes talk about the law, and school-masters talk about the latin tongue, in a way to make their hearers think they mean entities pre-existent to the decisions or to the words and syntax, determining them unequivocally and requiring them to obey.

But the slightest exercise of reflexion makes us see that, instead of being principles of this kind, both law and latin are results.

Distinctions between the lawful and the unlawful in conduct, or between the correct and incorrect in speech, have grown up incidentally among the interactions of men's experiences in detail; and in no other way do distinctions between the true and the false in belief ever grow up.

Truth grafts itself on previous truth, modifying it in the process, just as idiom grafts itself on previous idiom, and law on previous law.

Given previous law and a novel case, and the judge will twist them into fresh law.

Previous idiom; new slang or metaphor or oddity that hits the public taste:--and presto, a new idiom is made.

Previous truth; fresh facts:--and our mind finds a new truth.

All the while, however, we pretend that the eternal is unrolling, that the one previous justice, grammar or truth is simply fulgurating, and not being made.

But imagine a youth in the courtroom trying cases with his abstract notion of 'the' law, or a censor of speech let loose among the theatres with his idea of 'the' mother-tongue, or a professor setting up to lecture on the actual universe with his rationalistic notion of 'the Truth' with a big T, and what progress do they make?

Truth, law, and language fairly boil away from them at the least touch of novel fact.

These things MAKE THEMSELVES as we go.

Our rights, wrongs, prohibitions, penalties, words, forms, idioms, beliefs, are so many new creations that add themselves as fast as history proceeds.

Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.

Laws and languages at any rate are thus seen to be man-made: things.

Mr. Schiller applies the analogy to beliefs, and proposes the name of 'Humanism' for the doctrine that to an unascertainable extent our truths are man-made products too.

Human motives sharpen all our questions, human satisfactions lurk in all our answers, all our formulas have a human twist.

This element is so inextricable in the products that Mr. Schiller sometimes seems almost to leave it an open question whether there be anything else.

"The world," he says, "is essentially [u lambda nu], it is what we make of it.

It is fruitless to define it by what it originally was or by what it is apart from us; it IS what is made of it.

Hence ...

the world is PLASTIC."

[Footnote: Personal Idealism, p. 60. ] He adds that we can learn the limits of the plasticity only by trying, and that we ought to start as if it were wholly plastic, acting methodically on that assumption, and stopping only when we are decisively rebuked.

This is Mr. Schiller's butt-end-foremost statement of the humanist position, and it has exposed him to severe attack.

I mean to defend the humanist position in this lecture, so I will insinuate a few remarks at this point.

Mr. Schiller admits as emphatically as anyone the presence of resisting factors in every actual experience of truth-making, of which the new-made special truth must take account, and with which it has perforce to 'agree.'

All our truths are beliefs about 'Reality'; and in any particular belief the reality acts as something independent, as a thing FOUND, not manufactured.

Let me here recall a bit of my last lecture.

'REALITY' IS IN GENERAL WHAT TRUTHS HAVE TO TAKE ACCOUNT OF; [Footnote: Mr. Taylor in his Elements of Metaphysics uses this excellent pragmatic definition.

] and the FIRST part of reality from this point of view is the flux of our sensations.

Sensations are forced upon us, coming we know not whence.

Over their nature, order, and quantity we have as good as no control.

THEY are neither true nor false; they simply ARE.

It is only what we say about them, only the names we give them, our theories of their source and nature and remote relations, that may be true or not.

The SECOND part of reality, as something that our beliefs must also obediently take account of, is the RELATIONS that obtain between our sensations or between their copies in our minds.

This part falls into two sub-parts: 1) the relations that are mutable and accidental, as those of date and place; and 2) those that are fixed and essential because they are grounded on the inner natures of their terms--such as likeness and unlikeness.

Both sorts of relation are matters of immediate perception.

Both are 'facts.'

But it is the latter kind of fact that forms the more important sub-part of reality for our theories of knowledge.

Inner relations namely are 'eternal,' are perceived whenever their sensible terms are compared; and of them our thought--mathematical and logical thought, so-called--must eternally take account.

The THIRD part of reality, additional to these perceptions (tho largely based upon them), is the PREVIOUS TRUTHS of which every new inquiry takes account.

This third part is a much less obdurately resisting factor: it often ends by giving way.

In speaking of these three portions of reality as at all times controlling our belief's formation, I am only reminding you of what we heard in our last hour.

Now however fixed these elements of reality may be, we still have a certain freedom in our dealings with them.

Take our sensations.

THAT

they are is undoubtedly beyond our control; but WHICH we attend to, note, and make emphatic in our conclusions depends on our own interests;

and, according as we lay the emphasis here or there, quite different formulations of truth result.

We read the same facts differently.

'Waterloo,' with the same fixed details, spells a 'victory' for an englishman; for a frenchman it spells a 'defeat.'

So, for an optimist philosopher the universe spells victory, for a pessimist, defeat.

What we say about reality thus depends on the perspective into which we throw it.

The THAT of it is its own; but the WHAT depends on the WHICH;

and the which depends on US.

Both the sensational and the relational parts of reality are dumb: they say absolutely nothing about themselves.

We it is who have to speak for them.

This dumbness of sensations has led such intellectualists as T. H.

Green and Edward Caird to shove them almost beyond the pale of philosophic recognition, but pragmatists refuse to go so far.

A sensation is rather like a client who has given his case to a lawyer and then has passively to listen in the courtroom to whatever account of his affairs, pleasant or unpleasant, the lawyer finds it most expedient to give.

Hence, even in the field of sensation, our minds exert a certain arbitrary choice.

By our inclusions and omissions we trace the field's extent; by our emphasis we mark its foreground and its background; by our order we read it in this direction or in that.

We receive in short the block of marble, but we carve the statue ourselves.

This applies to the 'eternal' parts of reality as well: we shuffle our perceptions of intrinsic relation and arrange them just as freely.

We read them in one serial order or another, class them in this way or in that, treat one or the other as more fundamental, until our beliefs about them form those bodies of truth known as logics, geometries, or arithmetics, in each and all of which the form and order in which the whole is cast is flagrantly man-made.

Thus, to say nothing of the new FACTS which men add to the matter of reality by the acts of their own lives, they have already impressed their mental forms on that whole third of reality which I have called 'previous truths.'

Every hour brings its new percepts, its own facts of sensation and relation, to be truly taken account of; but the whole of our PAST dealings with such facts is already funded in the previous truths.

It is therefore only the smallest and recentest fraction of the first two parts of reality that comes to us without the human touch, and that fraction has immediately to become humanized in the sense of being squared, assimilated, or in some way adapted, to the humanized mass already there.

As a matter of fact we can hardly take in an impression at all, in the absence of a pre-conception of what impressions there may possibly be.

When we talk of reality 'independent' of human thinking, then, it seems a thing very hard to find.

It reduces to the notion of what is just entering into experience, and yet to be named, or else to some imagined aboriginal presence in experience, before any belief about the presence had arisen, before any human conception had been applied.

It is what is absolutely dumb and evanescent, the merely ideal limit of our minds.

We may glimpse it, but we never grasp it; what we grasp is always some substitute for it which previous human thinking has peptonized and cooked for our consumption.

If so vulgar an expression were allowed us, we might say that wherever we find it, it has been already FAKED.

This is what Mr. Schiller has in mind when he calls independent reality a mere unresisting [u lambda nu], which IS only to be made over by us.

That is Mr. Schiller's belief about the sensible core of reality.

We 'encounter' it (in Mr. Bradley's words) but don't possess it.

Superficially this sounds like Kant's view; but between categories fulminated before nature began, and categories gradually forming themselves in nature's presence, the whole chasm between rationalism and empiricism yawns.

To the genuine 'Kantianer' Schiller will always be to Kant as a satyr to Hyperion.

Other pragmatists may reach more positive beliefs about the sensible core of reality.

They may think to get at it in its independent nature, by peeling off the successive man-made wrappings.

They may make theories that tell us where it comes from and all about it; and if these theories work satisfactorily they will be true.

The transcendental idealists say there is no core, the finally completed wrapping being reality and truth in one.

Scholasticism still teaches that the core is 'matter.'

Professor Bergson, Heymans, Strong, and others, believe in the core and bravely try to define it.

Messrs. Dewey and Schiller treat it as a 'limit.'

Which is the truer of all these diverse accounts, or of others comparable with them, unless it be the one that finally proves the most satisfactory?

On the one hand there will stand reality, on the other an account of it which proves impossible to better or to alter.

If the impossibility prove permanent, the truth of the account will be absolute.

Other content of truth than this I can find nowhere.

If the anti-pragmatists have any other meaning, let them for heaven's sake reveal it, let them grant us access to it!

Not BEING reality, but only our belief ABOUT reality, it will contain human elements, but these will KNOW the non-human element, in the only sense in which there can be knowledge of anything.

Does the river make its banks, or do the banks make the river?

Does a man walk with his right leg or with his left leg more essentially?

Just as impossible may it be to separate the real from the human factors in the growth of our cognitive experience.

Let this stand as a first brief indication of the humanistic position.

Does it seem paradoxical?

If so, I will try to make it plausible by a few illustrations, which will lead to a fuller acquaintance with the subject.

In many familiar objects everyone will recognize the human element.

We conceive a given reality in this way or in that, to suit our purpose, and the reality passively submits to the conception.

You can take the number 27 as the cube of 3, or as the product of 3 and 9, or as 26 PLUS 1, or 100 MINUS 73, or in countless other ways, of which one will be just as true as another.

You can take a chessboard as black squares on a white ground, or as white squares on a black ground, and neither conception is a false one.

You can treat the adjoined figure [Figure of a 'Star of David'] as a star, as two big triangles crossing each other, as a hexagon with legs set up on its angles, as six equal triangles hanging together by their tips, etc. All these treatments are true treatments--the sensible THAT upon the paper resists no one of them.

You can say of a line that it runs east, or you can say that it runs west, and the line per se accepts both descriptions without rebelling at the inconsistency.

We carve out groups of stars in the heavens, and call them constellations, and the stars patiently suffer us to do so--tho if they knew what we were doing, some of them might feel much surprised at the partners we had given them.

We name the same constellation diversely, as Charles's Wain, the Great Bear, or the Dipper.

None of the names will be false, and one will be as true as another, for all are applicable.

In all these cases we humanly make an addition to some sensible reality, and that reality tolerates the addition.

All the additions 'agree' with the reality; they fit it, while they build it out.

No one of them is false.

Which may be treated as the more true, depends altogether on the human use of it.

If the 27 is a number of dollars which I find in a drawer where I had left 28, it is 28 minus 1. If it is the number of inches in a shelf which I wish to insert into a cupboard 26 inches wide, it is 26 plus 1. If I wish to ennoble the heavens by the constellations I see there, 'Charles's Wain' would be more true than 'Dipper.'

My friend Frederick Myers was humorously indignant that that prodigious star-group should remind us Americans of nothing but a culinary utensil.

What shall we call a THING anyhow?

It seems quite arbitrary, for we carve out everything, just as we carve out constellations, to suit our human purposes.

For me, this whole 'audience' is one thing, which grows now restless, now attentive.

I have no use at present for its individual units, so I don't consider them.

So of an 'army,' of a 'nation.'

But in your own eyes, ladies and gentlemen, to call you 'audience' is an accidental way of taking you.

The permanently real things for you are your individual persons.

To an anatomist, again, those persons are but organisms, and the real things are the organs.

Not the organs, so much as their constituent cells, say the histologists; not the cells, but their molecules, say in turn the chemists.

We break the flux of sensible reality into things, then, at our will.

We create the subjects of our true as well as of our false propositions.

We create the predicates also.

Many of the predicates of things express only the relations of the things to us and to our feelings.

Such predicates of course are human additions.

Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and was a menace to Rome's freedom.

He is also an American school-room pest, made into one by the reaction of our schoolboys on his writings.

The added predicate is as true of him as the earlier ones.