The revolt against dualism : an inquiry concerning the existence of ideas

Front matter

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Contents

PREFACE ° e oO e ° . e e ° e e e e ° e ° 1X

LECTURE I. CarTESIAN DUALISM AND NATURAL DUALISM . . . I

Il. Tue First PHASE OF THE REVOLT AND ITS OUTCOME . 34

Preface

The principal purpose of this volume is not to present a private and original speculation, but to show, through a critical survey of the reflection of the greater part of a generation of philosophers in America and Great Britain upon two important philosophical issues, that certain conclusions with respect to those issues have thereby been definitely established. The practise of philosophizing 1m vacuo I have always regarded with a distaste and suspicion. Philosophy seems to me essentially a collective and codperative business. Effective cooperation among philosophers consists, it is true, primarily in disagreement. For, given a sufficiently well defined problem, philosophy can really get forward with it only by bringing together in their logical interconnection all the considerations which have occurred, or are likely to occur, to acute and philosophically initiated minds as significantly pertinent to that problem. These considerations will always be numerous, they will always, during the progress of any philosophical inquiry, be conflicting, and they must be contributed by many minds of diverse types and different training and preconceptions. But no typical and, so to say, normal consideration can with safety be left unconsidered, if the philosopher’s distinctive but difficult duty of logical circumspection is to be observed, and if the joint inquiry is to be brought to a critically reasoned and convincing result—a result which may fairly objectively be said to be more probable than any alternative, at least in the light of the existing state of empirical knowledge, and of the relevant reflections which have thus far presented themselves to the human mind. The true procedure of philosophy as a science—as distinct from the philosophic idiosyncrasies of individuals—is thus that of a Platonic dialogue on a grand scale, in which the theses, proposed proofs, objections, rejoinders, of numerous interlocutors are focused upon a given question, and the argument gradually shapes itself, through its own immanent dialectic, to a conclusion.

It is this conception of the method in which fruitful philosophical inquiry is to be conducted that has determined the procedure followed in the greater part of the following lectures. I have tried to review what seem the main “points” that have been brought forward in the debate upon the two questions here chiefly dealt with;

and, in so far as is consistent with brevity, I have for the most part 1x x PREFACE put those points which to me seem unconvincing in the terms of those writers who have (so farasI recall) best presented them. J am very far from meaning by this that I conceive such a method to be adequately exemplified in this volume. It is not to be assumed that all the arguments which have been advanced in twenty-five years of many-sided discussion with respect to these questions are here expounded, analyzed and weighed. Some omissions are, no doubt, due to forgetfulness, ignorance, or congenital logical blind-spots, in the author; and there are others which have been imposed by limitations of space and time. This last is especially true in the case of the second lecture. Nevertheless, the discussion seems to me to have been carried on for a sufficiently long time, in a sufficiently _ connected manner, by a sufficiently large number of dissimilar, independent, ingenious and subtle philosophic minds, to make the essential outlines of the resultant logical situation plain, or at the least, to make it possible, by means of a certain amount of analysis and of discrimination between what philosophers’ reasonings prove and what their authors say they prove, to show that the long and often involved argument has come, on some crucial matters, to a decisive issue. 7

I should, however, be guilty of misleading the non-philosophic reader if, in saying this, | should cause him to suppose that there now reigns among philosophers—or even among English-speaking philosophers—a tedious unanimity on the principal topics here considered. The lectures themselves will, perhaps, seem all too plainly to show the contrary. There has, indeed, I think, long been a striking convergence of opinion towards certain conclusions at which the present study also arrives—a convergence further illustrated by some important books which have appeared since the lectures were completed. And there is also a far greater extent of unconscious or unavowed unanimity than the less observant readers of a number of recent doctrines are likely to perceive. For the contemporary philosophical world is full of the kindred of M. Jourdain —-philosophers who utter, and, indeed, prove, certain truths apparently sans le savoir. This, no doubt, seems an odd and improbable thing to assert; it is, nevertheless, one of the significant facts which I have sought to exhibit in the following pages. There remains a considerable residuum of real disagreement; and it is not chiefly in an actual consensus philosophorum, but in an examination into the logical course of the debate over the two kinds of dualism, that the justification is to be found for the summing-up of its results which I have attempted.

A good deal of this book is concerned with epistemology. This subject is one which many men of science and certain philosophers

PREFACE xi seem to consider not merely unprofitable but repulsive. Since those who profess this antipathy manifestly have epistemologies, tacit or explicit, of their own, it must be assumed that what they are really expressing is a dislike for inquiries into the subject which do not begin by accepting their conclusions. It appears to be sometimes conceived that the problem is sufficiently disposed of by the remark that knowing is, after all, “a natural event,” one among the organic functions exercised by certain animals. The observation is undisputable, since anything which happens is a natural event, and knowings of some sort are commonly supposed to happen. But the proposition usually conceals the assumption that knowing is a kind of natural event which can be adequately described in terms of other organic functions, or of the ulterior utilities which it serves, or at all events of a general philosophy of nature which has been formulated without much special attention to the question as to the precise kind of phenomenon that knowing is.

These appear to me to be among the most curious aberrations to be found in contemporary thought, though they are, no doubt, natural enough manifestations of that impatience to simplify and synthetize which is the sin that doth most easily beset both philosophy and theoretical science. I should have thought it fairly evident that knowing is, on the face of it, a rather peculiar and by no means unimportant or uninteresting organic function, that it is as fitting a subject for patient scientific investigation as any other, that it is probably an especially difficult one, and that any inquiry into it should begin by regarding it as what it appears to be, namely, a phenomenon by means of which some other things—get known. Certain theorems which appear to me fundamental in what may be called descriptive epistemology I have tried to make clear and to justify in the concluding lecture. They are not, for the most part, new ; but they appear to be far from generally familiar or generally accepted among specialists in what are too invidiously and exclusively called the natural sciences ; and I am afraid that they are not so current among philosophers as I could wish. I am, however, very sensible of the fragmentariness of the treatment of the subject in that lecture. The topic in many of its aspects lay beyond the bounds of the special questions chosen as the theme of this course; and it could not be adequately treated without unduly distending the volume. I have, therefore, merely set down what I believe to be some necessary brief prolegomena to any future account of the nature of the knowing of particular existences.

I shall not attempt to name here the philosophers, living and dead, to whom I am probably indebted for most of the ‘“‘considerxii PREFACE ations” which this volume contains; the number necessarily includes nearly all of those who have taken part in the long collective inquiry with which the lectures deal, and of which I have set forth what I conceive to be the not unimportant outcome. But I should like to say that I am not least mindful of an indebtedness to those honored contemporaries from whose reasonings I have felt constrained to dissent. For in philosophy, even more than in other matters, a man often learns most from those with whom in the end he disagrees.

ARTHUR O. Lovejoy The Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, March, 1930.

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I

CARTESIAN DUALISM AND NATURAL DUALISM attempt to estimate the results of a movement of thought

which has been, on the whole, the most characteristic and most ambitious philosophic effort of our generation in the English-speaking part of the world. The last quarter-century, it may fairly confidently be predicted, will have for future historians of philosophy a distinctive interest and instructiveness as the Age of the Great Revolt against Dualism; though it is possible that they may prefer to describe this uprising as a phase of a wider Revolt of the Twentieth Century against the Seventeenth. We approach the tercentenary of the earliest writings of Galileo and Descartes ; and the occasion is being joyously celebrated in several quarters by the issuance of declarations of independence directed against those thinkers. For they and a few of their contemporaries forged a scheme of ideas which—as it is now the fashion to say, not altogether untruly—has bound the minds of reflective men, and especially of: men of science, ever since. The great physicistphilosophers of that grand siécle have been described by M. Meyerson as “the legislators of modern science’; more precisely, they were the framers of, at least, its constitutional law ; and although there have been many amendments to the instrument they drafted, and occasional local insurrections against its authority, it is only in our own generation—or so, at all events, some of our own generation enthusiastically assure us—that there has developed a really thorough-going philosophical radicalism which proposes to discard that constitution altogether, and is at the same time provided with the draft of a new one constructed on wholly different principles—or, as it would perhaps be more accurate to say, with several new ones, constructed on principles differing from one another hardly less than from those which they are to supersede. From many sides may now be heard the rallying-cries of groups inspired by highly diverse motives to attack the common enemy— and there are not wanting resounding proclamations that the

I

I PROPOSE in these lectures to review the course and to enemy has in fact been already overthrown. “The history of modern philosophy,” observes a recent writer, “is a history of the development of Cartesianism in its dual aspect of idealism and mechanism. Only within recent years has that triumphant progress been checked. The manifold errors of the system have always been obvious and freely criticized. But only now have we begun to realize how totally wrong are its very first assumptions; only now have we begun to see in this simple and direct philosophy the source of all the great intellectual sophisms of our age.” + Thus we who have watched the fall of so many long-established political dynasties have also, it would appear, been witnesses of what may in the end be recognized as a far more important event—“‘the dethronement of Descartes.”” So Professor Whitehead has found in the characteristic theses or rather preconceptions of the seventeenth century the fous et origo malorum—the artificial and “quite unbelievable” set of “scientific abstractions” by which “modern philosophy has been ruined.” ? Professor Burtt likewise, through another course of reflection, has been brought to the belief that the worst confusions and perplexities of modern thought have arisen from the failure of all the great thinkers of the past two and a half centuries to “subject to a critical examination the whole system of categories which had come to its clearest expression in Newton’s Principia’; and he sees in such a drastic re€xamination, leading to a reconstruction upon new foundations, the imperative task of the philosopher of to-day. Much greater, however, is the number of contemporary thinkers who, less concerned to define their views in terms of their historical relations, are nevertheless in fact zealously engaged in attempts to emancipate philosophy from one or another of those fundamental assumptions which—as is supposed—a few men of genius between 1630 and 1690 were able to impose upon a great part of the thought of all the generations between them and ourselves.

The motives inspiring these efforts are, as I have intimated, various and in part somewhat incongruous; and the ‘ ‘seventeenth-century ideas” which are the subjects of attack are correspondingly diverse. But the phase of the insurrection which has been the most conspicuous, which, in the issues it raises, is the most important, which has had the widest support and has enlisted the greatest and most various philosophical talents, has been the attempt to escape from that double dualism which the seventeenth-century philosophers did not, indeed, originate, but to which they

1“The Dethronement of Descartes,” leading article in the London Times

Literary Supplement, Sept. 9, 1926. 2 Science and the Modern World, p. 79.

gave reasoned and methodical expression—the epistemological dualism of the theory of representative perception, and the psychophysical dualism which conceives empirical reality to fall asunder into a world of mind and a world of matter mutually exclusive and utterly antithetic. The supposition, so long accepted as unchallengeable, that all apprehension of objective reality is mediated through subjective existents, that “ideas” forever interpose themselves between the knower and the objects which he would know, has become repellent and incredible to many of our contemporaries ; and the cleavage of the universe into two realms having almost no attributes in common, the divorce between experience and nature, the isolation of the mental from the physical order, has seemed to not a few representative and influential thinkers to be unendurable in itself and the source of numerous artificial problems and gratuitous difficulties which can be solved only by denying their presupposition. Thus the thing above all others needful for philosophy in our time has appeared to many acute intelligences to be to get rid of this “bifurcation of nature” —without falling into the idealism or phenomenalism which had hitherto seemed the only alternatives, and which, in fact, were, in their historic genesis, mainly consequences of the same fundamental preconceptions. Against both dualisms, then, our age has witnessed an assault—in neither case wholly unprecedented—but bolder, more sustained, more resourceful, and upon a wider front, than can be found anywhere in the previous history of philosophy.

There may, it is true, be heard from other quarters equally confident and apparently not less numerous voices declaring that our own day has been made forever memorable by the final triumph of the ideas which the seventeenth century first systematically elaborated. The promulgation of the Einsteinian doctrine of relativity can hardly be considered an unimportant incident of the past quarter-century ; and that doctrine as a whole—. e., the special and the general theory taken together—has appeared to some of its most eminent expositors to be simply the consummation and justification of the program initiated by Galileo and Descartes. The bifurcation of nature into a subjective and an objective order and the exclusion of all non-geometrical properties and nonmechanical processes from the latter—these principles, which the founders of the modern philosophy of science discerned but were unable to formulate altogether correctly or to carry through consistently and convincingly, have now, we are told, through the work of Einstein, been established and given their ultimate, generalized, and exact interpretation and application. Thus Bergson speaks of la démonstration compléte du mécanisme cartésien qu’aura peutétre réalisée Einstein 3—complete, that is to say, for the external, spatial or quasi-spatial order with which physical science is concerned. Similarly M. Abel Rey writes that

The theory of relativity is the present culmination of the system of science that is based upon the mathematization of the knowledge of material reality—and consequently upon the conceptions of arrangement and movement in space as the universal and necessary—if not the sufficient—characteristics of such reality.*

And the same writer sees also in Einstein’s theory the final extension of the Cartesian dualism—or of a dualism even older than Descartes’: the doctrine of relativity is, he declares, “precisely the continuation of that evolution which, at earlier stages, consisted in the establishment of the distinction between dream and waking life, and between the illusions of the senses and the objective data of experience.’’® Numerous other philosophers and physicists have regarded the theory of relativity as proving, not that Galileo and Descartes were moving in the wrong direction, but only that neither moved far enough in the right direction —that, namely, of excluding the characters of our perceptual experience from the non-relative, independent, objective realm of being which is the physical world. In Einstein’s generalized theory, Weyl has remarked, ‘Descartes’ dream of a purely geometrical physics seems about to be fulfilled in a wonderful way which could not have been foreseen by him.” ® Einstein’s achievement, says Eddington, “consists essentially in this: he has succeeded in separating far more completely than hitherto the share of the observer and the share of external nature in the things we see happen.” * M. Meyerson likewise recognizes in the general theory of relativity a new version of that identification of matter with space which is, he observes, “the postulate upon which the whole (Cartesian) system rests’; but he is unwilling to grant that the credit for the clearer expression and bolder application of this

8 Durée et simultanéité, p. 42. But for Bergson, it is perhaps needless to add, be Sagi order has only a derivative and, for pure metaphysics, a specious reality.

4 Revue plulosophique, 1922, p. 215.

7 Space, Time and Gravitation, pref., p. v. In spite of the remark cited, it should be added, Eddington elsewhere in the same volume declares that “the object of the relativity theory is not to attempt the hopeless task of apportioning responsibility between the observer and the external world” (p. 33); but then proceeds once more to show in detail how just this “hopeless task” has been accomplished by Einstein (pp. 33-6).

postulate is to be given to its twentieth-century representatives: les relativistes y mettent infinvment moins de hardtesse et de clarté, mais le résultat final est bien le méme.® And he too finds that what the relativistic physicist seeks to attain is “a representation of the physical phenomenon purged of all the peculiarities actually found in the perceptions of each particular observer,’ which “he can only do by detaching the phenomenon more completely from the observer than science has ever done before.” ® Finally, to conclude these illustrations, an American physicist in an important recent work on the philosophy of science has declared that “‘it is precisely in an improved understanding of our mental relations to nature that the permanent contribution of relativity is to be found.” 7°

Such is the conflict of opinion among presumably competent judges concerning the true outcome of the philosophy and theoretical physics of these last twenty-five years, and therefore concerning the standing of seventeenth-century ideas at the bar of twentieth-century thought—which in any event, it is perhaps seemly to recall, is not necessarily identical with the bar of Eternal Justice. Descartes has been dethroned; his sovereignty in the philosophy of science has been at last decisively vindicated. The dualism of subjective appearance and objective reality is ‘‘a passed mode, an outworn theme’; the same dualism is the corner-stone of the new physics. It is now demonstrable that there are no “psychic additions to nature’; it has now been demonstrated that a far greater part of the content of experience than had ever before been imagined consists of “psychic additions.’’ Not even the secondary qualities of perceived things are subjective; not even the primary qualities of perceived things are objective. The scheme of ideas devised “by mathematicians for mathematicians” in the seventeenth century has at length been seen to be inherently incredible ; a revision and extension of the same scheme of ideas, devised “by mathematicians for mathematicians” in the twentieth century, is the culminating triumph of modern thought. The abstractions and rigidity of the mechanical conception of the physical world have been finally overcome; a purely geometrical conception of the physical world, yet more abstract and rigid, has been definitively established.

I have thought it pertinent to begin with these reminders of the curious and piquant opposition of tendencies in contemporary Opinion with respect to the issues mentioned; for it partly defines

8 La Déduction relativiste, p. 135.

® Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 1924, p. 33. 10 Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics, p. 2.

the topic of this book, in its historical as distinct from its purely logical aspect. Whether the main assumptions of the principal and most representative seventeenth-century philosophies of nature and theories of knowledge have been justified or overthrown by the reflection of our time, is a question to which in the end we shall seek an answer. Our immediate concern, however, is with the manner in which the revolt against the two forms of “Cartesian dualism” broke out, and with certain confusions of issues and objectives which characterized its outset-—confusions which it is important to eliminate from our own consideration of the matter from the start.

Whatever be the truth or falsity of the essential doctrine, the specific forms which were given both to epistemological and to psychophysical dualism by Descartes and most of the older realistic philosophers were undeniably and, indeed, notoriously, confused and incompletely excogitated. The traditional phrase, for example, for describing the status or locus of sense-data and other “ideas” was “in the mind’”—an expression devoid of any clear meaning, which is happily disappearing, though it has not yet quite wholly disappeared, from the vocabulary of philosophy and psychology. And since the Cartesian dichotomy of the universe assigned “ideas” to the mental part of reality and declared this to be distinguished from the physical part by lacking the attribute of extension, sense-data seemed to be denied that attribute—though there is nothing that more certainly has position and extension in space—that is to say, in some space—than the visual and tactual content of perception, from which all our notions of extension and position are derived. This confusion was at once facilitated and complicated by the curious neglect of many generations of philosophers and psychologists, following Descartes’ example, to distinguish sharply in their terminology between the —ings and the —eds (to adopt an expression of Professor 5. Alexander’s)—between the terms “sensation,” “perception” or “thought” as signifying the event, function or act of sensing, perceiving, thinking, efc., and the same terms as signifying the items sensed, perceived or thought. Even “consciousness” tended to be confused with content, that which we are conscious of. The result of this was that characteristics which could at least plausibly be ascribed to the —ings were often, without any feeling of incongruity, transferred to the —eds, to which they appear (when the distinction is made) manifestly inapplicable.

These unnecessary aberrations of the early and long-accepted forms of dualism in modern philosophy and psychology had some part, I think, in provoking the twentieth-century insurrection against those doctrines; they, and in particular the confusion last mentioned, at all events determined the initial objectives of the attack. It was the bold raising of the standard of revolt by William James in his famous essay “Does Consciousness Exist?” twentysix years ago, and by G. E. Moore in his “Refutation of Idealism,’ a year earlier, that gave the revolutionary movement its first great impetus in America and Great Britain respectively— though neither writer was the earliest to denounce the supposed Cartesian usurpation.1t And both of these essays were primarily attacks upon the confusion of “consciousness” and “content” ; in the discovery that this was a confusion, the polemic against the older sort of realism won its first skirmish—which, as is usual in the early days of all wars, was by many mistaken for something more than a skirmish. And—what is a curious feature of the recent history of philosophy—from the same discovery were simultaneously drawn precisely opposite conclusions by these two pioneers of the anti-dualistic campaign. Once clearly realize the logical distinction between “thought” as a supposed psychic state or process and “thoughts” as concrete data, between —ing and —ed—said James in substance—and you will see that the former is a fiction. “Consciousness as a kind of impalpable inner flowing,” a “bare Bewusstheit or Bewusstsein tiberhaupt,’ evaporates to the “estate of pure diaphaneity” ; it is, in short, not introspectively discoverable, and therefore does not exist. “Experience has no such inner duplicity.’”’ Once clearly realize the same logical distinction—said Mr. Moore in substance—and you will necessarily perceive that experience has an inner duplicity, that there is introspectively discoverable an element which ‘“‘is as if it were diaphanous,” a simple unanalyzable activity or state of “consciousness” or “awareness,” present in a uniform way in all perception and cognition, and entirely separate from any content upon which it may be directed—in short, a Bewusstheit iiberhaupt.

Yet both these opposed conclusions, based upon the same initial distinction, were promptly turned to pretty much the same use; they seemed almost, if not quite, equally serviceable as weapons against the usual dualistic kind of realism. Since there is no “consciousness,” argued James, all the data of perception must consist of the self-same independent physical things of which the real world is composed; when “experienced,” these have merely entered into certain transitory and unessential relations to

11 Among other early manifestations of the tendency should especially be mentioned Professor Kemp Smith’s Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy, 1902, and Professor R. B. Perry’s “Conceptions and Misconceptions of Consciousness,” Psychological Review, XI, 1904, pp. 284-296.

other things of the same kind, and there is no mental image, as the “representative” theories of perception suppose, intervening between the percipient organism and its objects; we ‘“‘see the room and the book immediately just as they physically exist.” Since there is a consciousness, argued Mr. Moore, but a consciousness which is purely diaphanous, a mere psychical function of being-aware, then also the data of perception consist of the independent realities of which the external world is composed. There is thus “no question of how we are to get outside the circle of our ideas and sensations. Merely to have a sensation is already to be outside of that circle. It is to know something which is as truly and really not a part of my experience, as anything which I can ever know.” 12 We have therefore “no reason for supposing that there are such things as mental images at all.”

As is known to all who have any acquaintance with recent philosophy, the division of counsels thus apparent at the outset of the new movement has persisted. From those early days of the century to the present, the attack upon dualism has been carried on by two distinct philosophical groups, operating from different positions—one of these groups, the less radical one, being active chiefly though not exclusively in Great Britain, the other chiefly though not exclusively in the United States. The former, following the original doctrine of Mr. Moore, has continued to admit the reality of “consciousness” or “awareness” as a unique, non-physical type of phenomenon, and thus retains a residuum of psychophysical dualism; while the other party, following James in rejecting “consciousness” altogether, has, in so far as its program has become clear-cut and consistent (as it was not in the case of James himself), tended towards behaviorism or materialism. (I disregard, for the present, the fact that both movements have been further divided through the growth of powerful heretical sects who would elevate the objects of sense-perception itself

In die schonen Regionen Wo die reinen Formen wohnen, making of the patch of color I see at a definite place in my visual field, or the musical tone I fleetingly hear, eternal Platonic essences.) Into the internal dissension between the right and left wings of monistic realism I do not, in this lecture, intend to enter. It is only the contention common to both that we are here to consider. This contention, pending further analysis, can be ex-

12 Philosophical Studies, p. 27.

pressed only in an ambiguous phrase, as the theory of the objectivity of all content; but in the first phase, at least, of the revolt this has usually meant two propositions of a somewhat less equivocal character: viz. (a) that all that is known is apprehended directly and not through intermediaries, either mental or physical, and (b) that all perceptual content consists of parts of the physical world. The latter view may be called, for short, contentmaterialism. While the point of difference between the two schools is assuredly important, it is less important than the point in which they agree. If all the contents of perception are independent physical reals, the result, for a large part of the theory of science and the philosophy of nature, is the same, whether we say that these reals, when experienced, have entered without modification into a transient external relation to a bodily organism, or that they have, equally without modification, been transiently contemplated in an otiose “psychic act” of awareness.

The more significant issue, and the one specifically before us, being thus distinguished, it is worth noting that the arguments with which the anti-dualistic movement began were really irrelevant to that issue, that the opening assault was misdirected. Neither James’s denial of the existence of consciousness as psychic process nor G. E. Moore’s assertion of the existence of a consciousness which is pure psychic process had, in strictness, any implications whatever as to the “independence” of immediate data or their identity with parts of the “physical world.” It is perfectly possible to conceive of the existence of psychic content dependent on the physiological act of perception without admitting any “impalpable inner flowing” that never has the status of content. Indeed, even a phenomenalist might without inconsistency agree with James’s rejection of a Bewusstsein iiberhaupt—might, in other words, adopt the theory that experience, and therefore what is knowable of reality, consists of “thoughts’’ in their concreteness, and includes no such insensible stuff as pure thinking. This, in fact, would have been the more natural outcome of the argument; a subjectivist or a dualist, for whom all content is “mental’’ ab initio, surely has less need to supplement it by a bare awareness than has one by whom the supposition that extraexperiential material things directly “get reported” (in James’s phrase) must be rendered intelligible. It is equally possible to admit that experience discloses or presupposes a “diaphanous’’ activity of awareness without inferring from this that the objects directly apprehended must or can exist outside the total situation of which this awareness is an element.