Ominous Parallels (16 page)

Some of the new statist groups invoked religion (e.g., the Protestant Social Gospelers). Others invoked a romanticist version of science (e.g., the Reform Darwinists). Some demanded bloodshed and socialism. Most urged peaceful “reform,” i.e., a compromise between laissez-faire and socialism. But all drew their strength from the same credo. Man, they said, is the master of his social environment; he is capable of being good now; a system whose motive power is the antithesis of virtue can no longer be tolerated. As to the definition of “good,” the reformists felt certain about it. “Sacrifice, not self-interest, is the life of the individual, of society, of the nation,” says one. The “existing competitive system is thoroughly selfish... ,” says another. Individualism “is the characteristic of simple barbarism,” says a third—and laissez-faire must be replaced by “a new conception of the functions of government and consequent enlargement of its powers, and the sphere of its operations.”
¹¹

Through most of the nineteenth century the original American system, although hampered and increasingly contradicted, continued to function, sustained by the remnants of the Enlightenment heritage still embedded in the American mind. It was the remnants of a philosophy that had never had a proper foundation or defense, and that had been further undermined by a century of philosophic assault Such remnants could not hold out indefinitely.

Near the end of the century the heavy artillery of the statists was moved in. The bombardment against the Enlightenment
epistemology,
waged here earlier only by a relative handful of intellectuals, began on an unprecedented scale. The name of the new bombardment was
pragmatism.

In Europe, pragmatism was merely one element of the post-Kantian trend; in America, it became the essential form of that trend, the one which more than any other swept the intellectuals and then the country. Among European thinkers, pragmatism remained a generalized tendency; in America, the tendency took specific shape, developing into a detailed, comprehensive philosophy. To listen to pragmatists in Washington is to hear only slogans which are a final result; to read William James and John Dewey is to discover the abstract theory which underlies such a result.

American pragmatism is a continuation of the central ideas of Kant and Hegel. It is
German metaphysical idealism
given an activist development.

Man cannot know facts that exist “antecedent” to the mind, say James and Dewey, but this is not a problem because it is not the function of the mind to know such facts. The mind, says Dewey, is not a “spectator.” Knowledge—any kind of knowledge, whether in science or in ethics—is not “a disclosure of reality, of reality prior to and independent of knowing....” “The business of thought,” he says, “is not to conform to or reproduce the characters already possessed by objects. . . .”
¹²

The business of thought, Kant had said, is to construct out of the data it receives a universe of its own making—the physical (phenomenal) world. The business of thought (the Absolute thought), Hegel had said, is to produce a universe out of itself, by its own operations. The essence of mind, both concluded, is not to be a perceiver of reality, but to be the
creator
of reality. This is the heart of German idealism, and this is the heart of the pragmatist metaphysics.

Men, the pragmatists allow, do receive some kind of data on which their thought operates. These data, however, which the pragmatists call “experience,” do not represent a firm, “antecedent” reality to be identified by man, but an unformed material to be shaped, molded,
changed
by man. The function of thought is not to “spectate,” but—to use Dewey’s term—actively to “reconstruct” this material, i.e., to impose a specific character on it and thereby to bring a definite reality into existence.

The idealists, according to pragmatism, are mistaken: apart from thought, there is some sort of realm. But the non-idealists are mistaken, too: this realm is not something specific. Reality, the pragmatists state, is not “fixed and complete in itself”; it is not “ready-made”; in itself, it is “unfinished,” “plastic,” “malleable,” “indeterminate, ”
¹³
In itself, reality is a spread of something—
without identity
; something—which is nothing in particular.

The spread is not infinitely malleable. Sometimes, the pragmatists observe, the data man receives prove intractable, and man fails in his attempted “reconstruction” of reality. Why this should be—how it is possible for nothing-in-particular to be recalcitrant—pragmatism does not say. (Any explanation would have to refer to the nature of “antecedent” reality, a concept which pragmatism rejects.) As to
when
success or failure in reshaping reality will occur, no one, according to pragmatism, can know it in advance. In each situation all one can do is try and see. Thought is “experimental,” the pragmatists state, and the essence of the experiment is the attempt to discover whether in any particular case the malleable material will or will not yield to man’s demands.

Kant and Hegel, each in his own way, had imposed certain limitations on the actions of the mind; they had held that, although mind is the creator of reality, the mind nevertheless has its own inner nature and fixed principles of functioning, which it has to obey. Pragmatism disagrees. Dispensing with all “rigidity,” all principles, all necessary laws, whether of reality or of the mind, the pragmatists proclaim the final climax of the idealist view: human beings, they hold, are free to select their own thought patterns in accordance with their own unrestricted choice; they are free to “experiment” with any form of thought which they can imagine or concoct; and, therefore, they are free to attempt to create whatever reality they choose, no holds barred.

In selecting a pattern of thought, according to pragmatism, there is one guide for men to follow: the demands of
action.

In the normal course of affairs, Dewey elaborates, men do not and need not think; they merely act—by habit, by routine, by unthinking impulse. But in certain situations the malleable material of reality suddenly asserts itself, and habit proves inadequate: men are unable to achieve their goals, their action is blocked by obstacles, and they begin to experience frustration, trouble, “dis-ease.” This, according to pragmatism, is when men should resort to the “instrument” of thought. And the goal of the thought is not to learn facts or know reality, but to “reconstruct” the situation so as to escape the trouble, remove the obstacles, and resume the normal process of unimpeded (and unthinking) action.

Toward this end, the mind formulates an “idea”—which is, according to Dewey, simply a “plan to
act
in a certain way as the way to arrive at the clearing up of a specific situation.” If the plan when acted on removes the frustration; if the reshaping of reality suceeds; if, in Dewey’s words, “existences, following upon the actions, rearrange or readjust themselves in the way the idea intends”—then the idea is true, pragmatically true; if not, then the idea is (pragmatically) false. The ruling epistemological standard, therefore, is consequences in action. “[An idea’s] active, dynamic function is the all-important thing about it,” writes Dewey, “and in the quality of activity induced by it lies all its truth and falsity.”
¹⁴

Since consequences in action determine truth (and since the success of man’s “experiments” to reshape reality cannot be predicted), the truth of an idea, according to pragmatism, cannot be known in advance of action. The pragmatist does not expect to know, prior to taking an action, whether or not his “plan” will work. He accepts, in Dewey’s words, “the fundamental idea that we know only after we have acted and in consequence of the outcome of action.”
¹⁵

Aristotle, and the Enlightenment shaped by his philosophy, had held that reality exists prior to and independent of human thought—and that human thought precedes human action. Man, Aristotle held, must first grasp the appropriate facts of reality; on this basis, he can then set the goals and course of his action. Pragmatism represents a total reversal of this progression. For the pragmatist, the order is: man acts; he invents forms of thought to satisfy the needs of his action; reality adapts itself accordingly (except when, inexplicably, it resists). First, action—second, thought—third, reality.

Given such a view, there is nothing (in thought or reality) to impose any fixed pattern on the course of human action. Men’s actions, according to pragmatism, are subject to perpetual change in every respect, as and when men so decide—and, therefore, so is thought, so is truth, so is reality. Men not only make reality, this view holds; they make it and then, when the demands of their action change, they remake it according to a new pattern until, suddenly blocked and “dis-eased,” they discard that pattern and “experiment” with a new model, and so on without end.

In the whirling Heraclitean flux which is the pragmatist’s universe, there are no absolutes. There are no facts, no fixed laws of logic, no certainty, no objectivity.

There are no facts, only provisional “hypotheses” which for the moment facilitate human action. There are no fixed laws of logic, only mutable “conventions,” without any basis in reality. (Aristotle’s logic, Dewey remarks, worked so well for earlier cultures that it is now overdue for a replacement.) There is no certainty—the very quest for it, says Dewey, is a fundamental aberration, a “perversion.” There is no objectivity—the object is created by the thought and action of the subject. The only question for a pragmatist in this latter regard is: what version of subjectivism to adopt?

William James characteristically, although not consistently, adopts the personal version. Human actions and purposes, he holds, vary from individual to individual, and therefore so does truth. John Dewey, typifying the dominant wing of the movement, rejects this approach; his
social
subjectivism represents a more faithful adherence to the ideas of Hegel (whose disciple Dewey had been in the early years of his career). There is, according to Dewey, no such thing as an autonomous individual: a man’s intelligence, he holds, is fundamentally conditioned by the collective thinking of other men; the mind is not a “private” phenomenon, it is a social phenomenon. In this view, the pragmatist “reconstructor” of reality is not the individual but society. Pragmatic truth, accordingly, is that which works for the group. Truth, like thought, is “public”; it is those hypotheses which facilitate the actions and purposes of the community at large.

In the field of ethics, too, James avows his subjectivism forthrightly. Value-judgments, he holds, can be based only on feeling—on arbitrary desire or demand, whatever its content. “Any desire,” he writes in an early essay, “is imperative to the extent of its amount; it
makes
itself valid by the fact that it exists at all.” Hence,
“the essence of good is simply to satisfy demand.
The demand may be for anything under the sun.”
¹⁶

Not so, declares Dewey. Before men act on a desire, he says, they must first evaluate the means required to implement it and the consequences that will (probably) flow from acting on it. What standard is to guide this evaluation? There are no absolutes, answers Dewey; in each particular situation, men are to evaluate the desire at issue by reference to whatever values they do not choose to question at the time, although any one of these values may be questioned and discarded in the next situation. The test of a desire is its compatibility not with reality, but with the rest of men’s desires of the moment. The operative standard, therefore, is feeling. In this way, despite his heated disclaimers, Dewey’s ethical position reduces in the end to that of James. (Dewey regards his version of the pragmatist ethics as the method of being “intelligent,” “scientific,” and “objective” in regard to value-judgments. )

When pragmatists claim that action is the philosophic primary, the deeper meaning of their claim is: feeling is the primary, the metaphysical bulwark on which the pragmatist universe is built, the irreducible, all-controlling factor, which determines action, and thus thought, and thus reality. At the core of the pragmatist universe is emotion—raw, unreasoned, blind; or, in the traditional terminology, “will.”

Pragmatism accepts fully the voluntarist irrationalism of the nineteenth-century romanticists. The typical romanticist, however, openly dismissed reason in favor of feelings. Pragmatism goes one step further: it urges the same dismissal and calls it a new view of reason.

By itself, as a distinctive theory, the pragmatist ethics is contentless. It urges men to pursue “practicality,” but refrains from specifying any “rigid” set of values that could serve to define the concept. As a result, pragmatists—despite their repudiation of all systems of morality—are compelled, if they are to implement their ethical approach at all, to rely on value codes formulated by other, non-pragmatist moralists. As a rule the pragmatist appropriates these codes without acknowledging them; he accepts them by a process of osmosis, eclectically absorbing the cultural deposits left by the moral theories of his predecessors—and protesting all the while the futility of these theories.

The dominant, virtually the only, moral code advocated by modern intellectuals in Europe and in America is some variant of
altruism.
This, accordingly, is what most American pragmatists routinely preach. Typically, they do not crusade for it (there are no absolutes), or even adhere to it systematically (there is no system). They merely take it for granted as unquestionable whenever they feel like it—which, given their Kantian-Hegelian schooling, is 90 percent (or more) of the time.

In politics, also, pragmatism presents itself as opposed to “rigidity,” to “dogma,” to “extremes” of any kind (whether capitalist or socialist); it avows that it is relativist, “moderate,” “experimental.” As in ethics, however, so here: the pragmatist is compelled to employ some kind of standard to evaluate the results of his social experiments, a standard which, given his own self-imposed default, he necessarily absorbs from other, non-pragmatist trend-setters. Dewey virtually admits as much when he declares that “the genuine work of the intellectual class at any period” is not to originate standards or ideals, but “to detect and make articulate the nascent movements of their time”
¹⁷
—which means: to take over and propagate whatever standards and ideals have already been launched by earlier intellectuals.