Chapter IV: Pragmatism and Human Activity

It requires now but a slight degree of penetration to see that beneath this entire matter of an apparent opposition between our “theoretical” and our “practical” satisfaction, and beneath much of the pragmatist insistence upon the “consequences” of ideas and of systems of thought, there is the great question of the simple fact of human action and of its significance for philosophy. And it might truly be said that the raising of this question is not merely another of the more or less definitely marked features of Pragmatism, but in some respects it is one outstanding characteristic.

For some reason or other, or for some strange combination of reasons, the phenomenon that we call “action”[167] (the activity of man as an agent) and the apparently simple facts of the reality and the intelligibility of action have long been regarded as matters of altogether secondary or subordinate importance by the rationalism of philosophy and by the mechanical philosophy of science. This Rationalism and this ostensibly certain and demonstrable mechanical philosophy of science suppose that the one problem of human thought is simply that of the nature of truth or of the nature of reality (the reality of the “physical” world) as if either (or each) of these things were an entity on its own account, an absolutely final finding or consideration. That this has really been the case so far as philosophy is concerned is proved by the fact even of the existence of the many characteristic deliverances and concessions of Rationalism in respect of Pragmatism to which reference has already been made in the preceding chapter. And that it has also been the case so far as science is concerned is proved by the existence of the many dogmatic attempts of many natural philosophers from Holbach to Haeckel to apply the “iron laws” of matter and motion to the reality of everything else under heaven,[168] and of everything in the heavens in spite of the frequent confessions of their own colleagues with regard to the actual and the necessary limits and limitations of science and of the scientific outlook.

Only slowly and gradually, as it were, has the consideration come into the very forefront of our speculative horizon that there is for man as a thinking being _no_ rigid _separation_ between theory and practice, between intellect and volition, between action and thought, between fact and act, between truth and reality.[169] There is clearly volition or aim, for example, in the search after truth. And there is certainly purpose in the attention[170] that is involved even in the simplest piece of perception, the selection of what interests and affects us out of the total field of vision or experience. And it is equally certain that there is thought in action--so long, that is to say, as action is regarded as action and not as impulse. Again, the man who wills the truth submits himself to an imperative just as surely as does the man who explicitly obeys the law of duty. It is thus impossible, as it were, even in the so-called intellectual life, to distinguish absolutely between theoretical and practical considerations--“truth” meaning invariably the relations obtaining in some “sphere,” or order, of fact which we separate off for some purpose or other from the infinite whole of reality. Equally impossible is it to distinguish absolutely between the theoretical and the practical in the case of the highest theoretical activity, in the case, say, of the “contemplation” that Aristotle talks of as the most “godlike” activity of man. This very contemplation, as our Neo-Hegelian[171] friends are always reminding us, is an activity that is just as much a characteristic of man, as is his power of setting his limbs in motion.

We have referred to the desire of the pragmatists to represent, and to discover, a supposedly deeper or more comprehensive view of human nature than that implicitly acted upon by Intellectualism--a view that should provide, as they think, for the organic unity of our active and our so-called reflective tendencies. This desire is surely eminently typical of what we would like to think of as the rediscovery by Pragmatism for philosophy, of the active, or the volitional, aspects of the conscious life of man, and along with this important side of our human nature, the reality also of the activities and the purposes that are revealed in what we sometimes speak of as unconscious nature. The world we know, it would hold, in the spirit and almost in the letter of Bergson, lives and grows by experiment,[172] and by activities and processes and adjustments. Pragmatism has doubtless, as we pointed out, been prone to think of itself as the only philosophy that can bake bread, that can speak to man in terms of the actual life of effort and struggle that he seems called upon to live in the environment in which he finds himself. And, as we have just been insisting, the main ground of its hostility to Rationalism is the apparent tendency of the latter to treat the various concepts and hypotheses that have been devised to explain the world, and to render it intelligible, as if they were themselves of more importance than the real persons and the real happenings that constitute the world of our experience.[173]

If it were at all desirable to recapitulate to any extent those phenomena connected with Pragmatism that seem to indicate its rediscovery of the fact of action, and of the fact of its meaning for philosophy, as its one outstanding characteristic, we may point to such considerations as the following: (1) The fact of its having sought to advance from the stage of a mere “instrumentalist” view of human thought to that of an outspoken “humanism” or a socialized utilitarianism. (2) The fact of its seeking to leave us (as the outcome of philosophy) with all our more important “beliefs,” with a general “working” view of the world in which such things as religion and ideals and enthusiasm are adequately recognized. Pragmatism is really, as we have put it, more interested in belief than in knowledge, the former being to it the characteristic, the conquering attitude of man to the world in which he finds himself. (3) Its main object is to establish a dynamical view of reality, as that which is “everywhere in the making,” as that which signifies to every person firstly that aspect of the life of things in which he is for the time being most vitally interested.[174] (4) In the spirit of the empirical philosophy generally its main anxiety is to do the fullest justice to all the aspects of our so-called human experience, looking upon theories and systems as but points of view for the interpretation of this experience, and of the great universal life that transcends it. And proceeding upon the theory that a true metaphysic must become a true “dynamic” or a true incentive to human motive, it seeks the relationships and affiliations that have been pointed out with all the different liberating and progressive tendencies in the history of human thought. (5) It would “consult moral experience directly,” finding in the world of our ordinary moral and social effort a spiritual reality[175] that raises the individual out of and above and beyond himself. And it bears testimony in its own more or less imperfect manner to the autonomous element[176] in our human personality that, in the moral life, and in such things as religious aspiration and creative effort and social service, transcends the merely theoretical descriptions of the world with which we are familiar in the generalizations of science and of history.

Without attempting meanwhile to probe at all deeply into this pragmatist glorification of “action” and its importance to philosophy, let us think of a few of the considerations that may be urged in support of this idea from sources outside those of the mere practical tendencies and the affiliations of Pragmatism itself.

There is first of all the consideration that it is the fact of action that unites or brings together what we call “desire” and what we call “thought,” the world of our desires and emotions and the world of our thoughts and our knowledge. This is really a consideration of the utmost importance to us when we think of what we have allowed ourselves to call the characteristic dualism[177] of modern times, the discrepancy that seems to exist between the world of our desires and the impersonal world of science--which latter world educated people are apt to think of as the world before which everything else must bend and break, or at least bow. Our point here is not merely that of the humiliating truth of the wisdom of the wiseacres who used to tell us in our youth that we will anyhow have to act in spite of all our unanswered questions about things, but the plain statement of the fact that (say or think what we will) it is in _conscious action_ that our desires and our thoughts _do_ come together, and that it is there that they are both seen to be but partial expressions of the one reality--the life that is in things and in ourselves, and that engenders in us both emotions and thoughts, even if the latter do sometimes seem to lie “too deep for tears.” It is with this life and with the objects and aims and ends and realities that develop and sustain it that all our thoughts, as well as all our desires, are concerned. If action, therefore, could only be properly understood, if it can somehow be seen in its universal or its cosmic significance, there would be no discrepancy and no gap between the world of our ideals and the world of our thoughts. We would know what we want,[178] and we would want and desire what we know we can get--the complete development of our personality.

Again there is the evidence that exists in the sciences of biology and anthropology in support of the important role played in both animal and human evolution by effort and choice and volition and experimentation. “Already in the contractibility of protoplasm and in the activities of typical protozoons do we find ‘activities’ that imply[179] volition of some sort or degree, for there appears to be some selection of food and some spontaneity of movement: changes of direction, the taking of a circuitous course in avoidance of an obstruction, etc., indicate this.” Then again, “there are such things as the diversities in secondary sexual characters (the ‘after-thoughts of reproduction’ as they are called), the endless shift of parasites, the power of animals to alter their coloration to suit environment, and the complex ‘internal stimuli’ of the higher animals in their breeding periods and activities, which make us see only too clearly what the so-called struggle for life has been in the animal world.”...

Coming up to man let us think of what scientists point out as the effects of man’s disturbing influence in nature, and then pass from these on to the facts of anthropology in respect of the conquest of environment by what we call invention and inheritance and free initiative. “In placing _invention_,” says a writer of to-day in a recent brilliant book, “at the bottom of the scale of conditions [_i.e._ of the conditions of social development], I definitely break with the opinion that human evolution is throughout a purely natural process.... It is pre-eminently an _artificial construction_.”[180] Now it requires but the reflection of a moment or two upon considerations such as the foregoing, and upon the attested facts of history as to the breaking up of the tyranny of habit and custom by the force of reflection and free action and free initiative, to grasp how really great should be the significance to philosophy of the active and the volitional nature of man that is thus demonstrably at the root not only of our progress, but of civilization itself.

If it be objected that while there cannot, indeed, from the point of view of the general culture and civilization of mankind, be any question of the importance to philosophy of the active effort and of the _active thought_ that underlie this stupendous achievement, the case is perhaps somewhat different when we try to think of the pragmatist glorification of our human action from the point of view of the (physical?) universe as a whole.[181] To this reflection it is possible here to say but one or two things. Firstly, there is apparently at present no warrant in science for seeking to separate off this human life of ours from the evolution of animal life in general.[182] Equally little is there any warrant for separating the evolution of living matter from the evolution of what we call inanimate matter, not to speak of the initial difficulty of accounting for things like energy and radio-active matter, and the evolution and the devolution that are calmly claimed by science to be involved in the various “systems” within the universe--apart from an ordering and intelligent mind and will. There is therefore, so far, no necessary presumption against the idea of regarding human evolution as at least in some sense a continuation or development of the life that seems to pervade the universe in general. And then, secondly, there is the familiar reflection that nearly all that we think we know about the universe as a whole is but an interpretation of it in terms of the life and the energy that we experience in ourselves and in terms of some of the apparent conditions of this life and this energy. For as Bergson reminds us, “As thinking beings we may apply the laws of our physics to our world, and extend them to each of the worlds taken separately, but nothing tells us that they apply to the entire universe nor even that such affirmation has any meaning; for the universe is _not made_ but is _being made continually_. It is growing perhaps indefinitely by the addition of new worlds.”[183]

On the ground, then, both of science and of philosophy[184] may it be definitely said that this human action of ours, as apparently the highest outcome of the forces of nature, becomes only too naturally and only too inevitably the highest object of our reflective consideration. As Schopenhauer put it long ago, the human body is the only object in nature that we know “on the inside.” And do or think what we will, it is this human life of ours and this mind of ours that have peopled the world of science and the world of philosophy with all the categories and all the distinctions that obtain there, with concepts like the “(Platonic) Ideas,” “form,” “matter,” “energy,” “ether,” “atom,” “substance,” “the individual,” “the universal,” “empty space,” “eternity,” “the Absolute,” “value,” “final end,” and so on.

There is much doubtless in this action philosophy, and much too in the matter of the reasons that may be brought forward in its support, that can become credible and intelligible only as we proceed. But it must all count, it would seem, in support of the idea of the pragmatist rediscovery, for philosophy, of the importance of our creative action and of our creative thought. And then there are one or two additional general considerations of which we may well think in the same connexion.

Pragmatism boasts, as we know, of being a highly democratic[185] doctrine, of contending for the emancipation of the individual and his interests from the tyranny of all kinds of absolutism, and all kinds of dogmatism (whether philosophical, or scientific, or social). No system either of thought or of practice, no supposed “world-view” of things, no body of scientific laws or abstract truths shall, as long as it holds the field of our attention, entirely crush out of existence the concrete interests and the free self-development of the individual human being.

A tendency in this direction exists, it must be admitted, in the “determinism” both of natural science and of Hegelianism, and of the social philosophy that has emanated from the one or from the other. Pragmatism, on the contrary, in all matters of the supposed determination, or the attempted limitation, of the individual by what has been accomplished either in Nature or in human history, would incline to what we generally speak of to-day as a “modernistic,” or a “liberalistic,” or even a “revolutionary,” attitude. It would reinterpret and reconstruct, in the light of the present and its needs, not only the concepts and the methods of science and philosophy, but also the various institutions and the various social practices of mankind.[186]

Similarily Pragmatism would protest, as does the newer education and the newer sociology, against any merely _doctrinaire_ (or “intellectualistic”) conception of education and culture, substituting in its place the “efficiency” or the “social service”[187] conception. And even if we must admit that this more or less practical ideal of education has been over-emphasized in our time, it is still true, as with Goethe, that it is only the “actively-free” man, the man who can work out in service and true accomplishment the ideal of human life, whose production should be regarded as the aim of a sound educational or social policy.

We shall later attempt to assign some definite reasons for the failure of Pragmatism to make the most of all this apparently justifiable insistence upon action and upon the creative activity of the individual, along with all this sympathy that it seems to evince for a progressive and a liberationist view of human policy.

Meantime, in view of all these considerations, we cannot avoid making the reflection that it is surely something of an anomaly in philosophy that a thinker’s “study” doubts about his actions and about some of the main instinctive beliefs of mankind (in which he himself shares) should have come to be regarded--as they have been by Rationalism--as considerations of a greater importance than the actions, and the beliefs, and the realities, of which they are the expression. Far be it from the writer to suggest that the suspension of judgment and the refraining from activity,[188] in the absence of adequate reason and motive, are not, and have not been of the greatest value to mankind in the matter of the development of the higher faculties and the higher ideals of the mind. There may well be, however, for Pragmatism, or for any philosophy that can work it out satisfactorily, in the free, creative, activity of man, in the duty that lies upon us all of carrying on our lives to the highest expression, a reason and a truth that must be estimated at their logical worth along with the many other reasons and truths of which we are pleased to think as the truth of things.

Short, however, of a more genuine attempt on the part of Pragmatism than anything it has as yet given us in this connexion to justify this higher reason and truth that are embodied in our consciousness of ourselves as persons, as _rational agents_, all its mere “practicalism” and all its “instrumentalism” are but the workaday and the utilitarian philosophy of which we have already complained in its earlier and cruder professions.[189]

After some attention, then, to the matter of the outstanding critical defects of Pragmatism, in its preliminary and cruder forms, we shall again return to our topic of the relatively new subject-matter it has been endeavouring to place before philosophy in its insistence upon the importance of action, and upon the need of a “dynamic,” instead of an intellectualistic and “spectator-like” theory of human personality.