The problems of philosophy

Preface

Professor Hoffding of Copenhagen is one of the wisest, as well as one of the most learned of living philosophers. His " Psychology," his " Ethics," and his "History of Modern Philosophy" have made his name known and respected among English readers, though his admirable "Philosophy of Religion" still calls for a translator. The following little work is, so to speak, his philosophical testament. In it he sums up in an extraordinarily compact and pithy form the result of his lifelong reflections on the deepest alternatives of philosophical opinion. The work, to my mind, is so pregnant and its conclusions so sensible — or at least so in accordance with what I regard as sensible — that I have had it translated as a contribution to the education of our English- reading students.

vi Preface

Rationalism in philosophy proceeds from the whole to its parts, and maintains that the connection between facts must at bottom be intimate and not external: the universe is a Unit, and the parts of Being must be interlocked continuously. Empiricism, on the other hand, goes from parts to whole, and is willing to allow that in the end some parts may be merely added to others, and that what the word 'and' stands for may be a part of real Being as well as of speech. For radical rationalism, Reality in itself is eternally complete, and the confusions of experience are our illusion. For radical empiricism, confusion may be a category of the Real itself, and "ever not quite" a permanent result of our attempts at thinking it out straighter. Professors of Philosophy are almost always rationalists ; and the student, passing from the street into their lecture- rooms, usually finds a world presented to him, so abstract, pure, and logical, and perfect, that it is hard for him to see in it any resemblance of char-

Preface vii

acter to the struggling and disjointed sum of muddy facts which he has left behind him, outside.

Now the peculiarity of Professor HofTding is that whereas he has the manner of a rationalistic professor of Philosophy, being as abstract and technical in his style of exposition as any one can wish, his results, nevertheless, keep in touch with the temperament of concrete reality, and he allows that 'ever not quite' may be the last word of our attempts at understanding life rationally.

The word 'rationally' here denotes certain definite connections which Professor Hoffding also sums up under the name of 'continuities.' He opposes to them the notion of the 'irrational,' as that residuum of crude or 'alogicaP fact, 'mere* fact, that may remain over when our attempts to establish logical continuity among things have reached their limit. The conjunction ' and ' would be the only bond here between the continuous and the irrational portion viii Preface

of Reality. Professor Hoffding is in short an empiricist and pluralist, although he prefers to call himself a 'critical Monist.' He means by the word 'critical,' here, to indicate that the continuity and unity of Reality are at no time complete, but may be yet in process of completion. Our thought, which is itself a part of Reality, is surely incomplete; but in endeavoring to make itself ever more continuous and to see the world as ever more rational, it works in the direction of more continuity; and the whole of Creation may analogously be in travail to get itself into an ever more continuous and rational form.

Empiricist matter presented in a rationalist's manner — this to my mind gives their distinction to the pages that follow. They form a multum in parvo so well calculated to impress and influence the usual rationalistic- minded student of philosophy, that I put them forth in English for his benefit.

It takes, I confess, sdme little knowledge

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of philosophic literature to appreciate the far-reaching significance of some of our author's paragraphs, and to distribute emphasis properly among them. They are too brief and abstract for the unguided beginner. For his benefit let me barely indicate some of the book's positions which seem to me particularly noteworthy.

I have spoken of the notion that since the world is incomplete anyhow, so far as our thought goes, it may also in other ways be only approaching perfection. Perfection, in other words, may not be eternal; rather are things working toward it as an ideal; and God himself may be one of the co-workers. Time, on this view, must be real, and cannot, Professor Hoffding says, be banished, as ultra-rationalists pretend, from absolute reality.

With this general position goes what our author calls the ' dynamic ' notion of Truth, as opposed to the 'static' notion. I should interpret this as equivalent to saying that 'knowledge' is a relation of our thinking x Preface

activities to reality, and that those activities are ' truest ' which work best — the term 'work' being taken in the widest possible number of senses. Thought is thus an instrument of adaptation to, and eventually of modification of, its objects. Its duty may, but need not always, be merely to copy the latter. In all this, Professor Hoffding aligns himself with the 'economical' school of scientific logicians, and (if I mistake not) with the recent 'humanistic' and ' pragmatistic ' literature of our own language.

Professor Hoffding's 'critical' (as opposed to absolute) Monism means that although you cannot exhaustively account for any item of fact by referring to the whole of which it is a member, yet so much of what we call a fact consists of its relations to other facts, that we are equally unable to see any fact as wholly independent. The part in itself remains for us an abstraction, and from a whole which itself is for us a mere ideal. Neither is given in

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experience, nor can either be adequately supplied by our reason; so that, both above and below, thought fails to continue, and terminates against an 'irrational.' This in the end may mean that Being is really incomplete, in any sense in which our logic apprehends completeness.

No one better than Professor Hoffding in these pages has shown how all our attempted definitions of the Whole of things, are made by conceiving it as analogous in constitution to some one of its parts which we treat as a type-phenomenon. No one has traced better the logical limitations of this sort of speculation. We never can absolutely prove its validity. We can only paint our more or less plausible pictures; and philosophy thus must always be something of an art as well as of a science.

The fundamental type- phenomenon is the fact that we can, to some degree at any rate, make things mentally intelligible. Being and our mental forms are thus not incongruent. And as our mental forms xii Preface

act in us as unifying forces, so we must suppose that the energy in Being that tends toward unity in the thought-part oj Being, tends, by analogy, toward unity elsewhere also. This puts Professor Hoffding in a general attitude of harmony with idealistic ways of thinking. But he still insists that Being can never be expressed in thought without some blind remainder.

In Ethics the same antinomy or conflict between part and whole occurs which we find in the other problems. The single act or agent must have independent value, yet must also be a means toward farther values. Neither from any whole or any parts concretely given can we deduce a continuous ethical system. Such a system is still a vacant abstraction; and both in Being and in concrete thinking the kingdom of goods must be regarded as still engaged in the making.

Our author's conception of religion is one of his best strokes, in my opinion. He defines it as a belief in the ultimate 'con-

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servation of values,' or rather of what has value. This seems to me to cover more facts in the concrete history of human religions than any definition with which I am acquainted. Yet one easily sees how experience may change our ideas of what the most genuinely ideal values are; so the * philosophy' of religion, less than any other philosophy perhaps, is entitled to become dogmatic. The belief in the conservation of values has itself a value, for it can give an energy to life. Being so vital a function, it will always be sure to find some form for itself functionally equivalent to the religions of the past, whether that form be called by the name of religion, or be called by some other name.

An unfinished world then, with all Creation, along with our thought, struggling into more continuous and better shape — such is our author's general view of the matter of Philosophy. I have doubtless emphasized the points that appealed most to my own personal interests. Others — and there xiv Preface

are many which are fundamental — I must leave the reader to find out. I need only add that I have carefully revised the translation, and that (though it may not be elegant) it is, I believe, faithful to the author's meaning throughout.

WILLIAM JAMES.

Harvard University.

1. Problem and method 1 16

2. Metaphysic as an art 126 /'

3. First type-phenomenon (unity or plurality?) . 130

4. Second type-phenomenon (spirit or matter?) . 138

5. Third type-phenomenon (rest or development?) 144

xv xvi Contents

CHAPTER IV The Problem of Values PAGE

I. Introduction .153

A. The Ethical Problem

158 158 165 165 171

(a) Ethical work ....

2. The principle of continuity in ethics

(b) The rationality of ethical valuations

3. The conflict of ideal values

4. The diversity of individual conditions

B. The Religious Problem

5. The principle of continuity in the philosophy of

religion 173

6. The psychological position of religion . .176

7. Historical forms of religion . . . .181

THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY

Introduction

'HILOSOPHICAL ideas, as the history of philosophy shows, may have a double significance. They may attempt to propound, to discuss, or to solve certain problems; and they may represent symptoms of certain tendencies of the intellectual life of man. Between these two phases of philosophy a constant interaction takes place; for the fact that a problem is propounded and treated in a certain way, may be considered as a symptom of a peculiar intellectual movement ; and, on the other hand, the sting of problems excites intellectual movements which otherwise would not arise. In this interaction we discover an intimate connection between personal life and scientific inquiry. This connection prevails to a greater or less degree in all branches of science; but from the nature of the case it is brought out especially as we approach the border-lines of human knowledge. It appear* more clearly in mental than in natural science, and most clearly in philosophy, whose problems are essentially border-problems.

There is a current opinion that personality and scientific research are antagonistic. Hence, on the one hand, the student would fain doff his personality when he thinks scientifically; and, on the other, he lives as if scientific methods and results had no significance for the freer side of his personal development. I myself, in my youth, swore allegiance to such a view, under the overpowering influence of S. Kierkegaard. If I have finally broken its hold on me, I venture to say that that is because I have become better acquainted with both science and the personal life.

Introduction 3

The desire to investigate things is a special form of the striving after consistency with one's self under all one's manifold and changing experiences. This effort manifests itself in formal as well as in real science, — in the impulse to form series of concepts in which one member develops itself by inner necessity out of the preceding, as well as in the effort to combine our actual experiences into the closest and richest forms of continuity. Personality consists preeminently in the inner unity and connection of all our ideas, feelings, and strivings. It does not abdicate its life when it devotes itself to research. It begets, on the contrary, in science, as in art, an objective image of itself. Only thus can we understand the inner character which the passion for knowledge assumes, that amor intellectualis felt by the seeker as he works up to the pinnacle from which the particulars disclose themselves as parts of one great whole. That holy fire, which, in spite of all smothering and repression ever anew sets thought ablaze, finds in this its only explanation.

But personality in turn needs refining by the scientific process, since it must bend to the objective connections of thought, the fixed order of things within which every individual being has its appointed place. Freedom is won through hard obedience to the truth. It is the noble prerogative of personality that it can discover the great laws that condition its own conservation, that rightly determine its desires, and fix the conditions for their realization. There is a science of the personal life as of everything else; like all other sciences it is, no doubt, incomplete, but in every earnest investigation into the form and demands of the personal life, it is presupposed. Among present day philosophers, Charles Renouvier lays the greatest stress on the antithesis between the demands of thought and personality. 1 Yet even he calls for a rational conception of personality, and cannot reject all the analogies between the two.

Introduction 5

Such an analogy is thrown into clear relief when one tries to formulate the chief problems with which philosophical inquiry is concerned. These problems arise from the side of personality as well as from the side of science.

In my " History of Modern Philosophy" I have tried to show, in a purely historical way, that there are four such chief problems, namely: I. The problem of the nature of consciousness (the psychological problem); II. The problem of the validity of knowledge (the logical problem); III. The problem of the nature of being (the cosmological problem); and IV. The problem of value (the moral and religious problem 2 ). In this treatise my task is to point out the inner connection between these problems. At bottom, they are one and the same problem, appearing in different forms and applications.

The motives which may induce philosophical inquiry are very various. Often the motive is ethico-religious ; consequently, practical and personal. If so, one would begin with the fourth problem. It soon becomes plain, however, that its consideration demands insight into the nature of consciousness, into the conditions of knowledge, and into the constitution of that existence which the ethical personality shares with other things. If, on the other hand, an interest in observation impels one, one will begin with the psychological problem, as has happened in the empiricist philosophy under its various forms. But if what we seek is rather to distinguish between what we can know and what we cannot know, we shall begin with the problem of knowledge, the path travelled by the critical philosophy. If, finally, one has full confidence in the possibility of thought and seeks a rounded world-view, one will follow the lead of the dogmatic and speculative schools and begin with the problem of Being. It naturally has not a little bearing on the form and kind of treatment, which problem one begins with; for one problem is easily

Introduction 7

overshadowed by another. In a study of comparative problems, to which in these pages I make a contribution, it is important to give each problem due recognition. Accordingly, it is my purpose — in harmony with the above indicated analogy between personality and science — to begin with the psychological problem, and then proceed to the examination of the nature of scientific knowledge, and to the problem of knowledge in general. If one puts the problem of Being third in the series, the transition to it comes quite naturally, either from personality, which is one part of all being, or from science, whose function it is to lead us to a view of the existing world. The three problems thus far named would be set for us if man were only a purely intellectual, cognitive being. The fourth problem arises on account of the relation in which man, as a feeling and willing creature, stands to Being. Thus are the chief problems of thought linked with the theoretical and practical interests of man.

More important than the question as to the order of the problems, is the question whether or not they can be reduced to one underlying problem. Such a possibility seems to me to lie in the significance which the relation between continuity and discontinuity bears to each one of these problems. This relationship involves the deepest interests of personality as well as of science. In both realms there is, as already noted, a striving after unity and connectedness, and, in so far, the discontinuous appears as an insurmountable obstacle. On the other hand, it is discontinuity (distinction of time, of degree, of place, difference of quality, of individuality) which more than anything else brings new content, releases locked powers, and opens up the greatest tasks in the realm of life no less than in the realm of science. Thus it would appear that neither of the two elements is the only accredited one. It will be of unquestionable interest to follow out their relations to each other under the four points of view furnished by our four chief problems.

Introduction 9

In the philosophy of the nineteenth century the significance of the problem of continuity was thrown into prominence by the fact that the various schools fought over it in turn. In the first half of the century, philosophical idealism after its fashion asserted the continuity of being and looked down on experimental science on account of its fragmentary character. Meanwhile, Positivism (as Comte and Stuart Mill expounded it) emphasized the discontinuity of different groups of phenomena. Now, toward the end of the century, realism, supported by the evolutionary hypothesis, champions continuity, while the idealistic school is inclined to emphasize the unavoidable discontinuity of our cognition. 3 So the schools change places in the great arena on which the battle of truth must be fought out. Whenever a point of view ceases to yield significant results, the inquiry involuntarily seeks out a new one, and thus from ever-changing points of view thought advances to clearness. The different schools replace one another, like runners at the ancient torch festival, but the torch remains ever the same. And if none of the schools hitherto active has fully laid bare the central core of all these philosophical problems, there is all the more reason for us to work in order that greater clearness may be shed.

CHAPTER I THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS jF we begin the discussion of philosophical problems with the examination of the concept of personality, we enter into psychology, and have to determine first of all the relation of psychology to philosophy. We can here certainly pass by the notion maintained by Herbart and Lotze, that psychology, on account of the outlook over the problem of being to which it leads, is dependent on metaphysics or cosmology. On all sides there is a strenuous effort to-day to establish the independence of psychology. But even where this effort is most pronounced, opinions as to the place of psychology are diverse.

Some think that psychology is identical with philosophy in general, and that epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics are its different parts. Fries and Beneke took this view, and at the present time Th. Lipps maintains it. 4 But it is an untenable position, partly because the personal life is only one of the subjects which the philosopher can pursue, and partly also because psychology, in common with all other sciences, presupposes the general forms and principles of knowledge. The problem of consciousness necessarily points beyond itself to the problem of being and the problem of knowledge. In spite of all its independence, psychology is only one branch of the tree of knowledge. Psychology can therefore not include the whole of philosophy, but can only remain one of its parts. It is, however, entirely proper to begin with psychology, since it describes the place and the presuppositions from which we take our bearings in being.

But, after all, does psychology belong to philosophy? Is it not a special science, which has no more to do with philosophy than has natural science or history? The special methods — the experimental, the physiological, and the historical — which the most recent psychological research employs, appear to indicate, — do they not ? — that psychology stands at the very point of becoming a special science, and that it must, therefore, be sundered from philosophy ! To this I reply that in spite of all its special methods, psychology always presupposes the capacity of self-observation. It is subjective, descriptive, and analytic psychology which sets their several problems to the special methods. Here we come upon what psychology as a special science and philosophy have in common. Philosophy must lean upon some general idea of the nature of conscious life, in order to be in a position to treat her problems of knowledge, of being, and of value. It is from personality experienced as knowing, as estimating worth, and as constituting a part of all being, that these problems emerge. A conception of personality is thus presupposed, which special methods cannot yield. These methods investigate single manifestations of the conscious life, and their investigations must be coordinated before a conception of personality can exist.

But forthwith arises the basic problem of the psychological realm: Is it possible to arrive at a conception of personality by way of experience? Does our conscious life form a totality, a continuum, a little world for itself, or is it only an aggregate, a sum of elements and fragments? This is the question which philosophical psychology (or the philosophy of psychology, if you will) throws out. In handling it, psychology avails itself partly of self-observation and inner description, partly of the results of the experimental, physiological, and historical methods.

Experience shows us longer or shorter breaks in our conscious life; there are unconscious intervals between the conscious states. Upon closer examination of the single states of consciousness, we can discern within them different elements, which are repeated in other states, so that the single state no less than the collective consciousness would appear to be a union of elements or fragments, and these elements would seem to be the underlying reality. Consciousness would then be an aggregate or synthesis of single rays. It would not exhibit a psychical continuum such as is presupposed in the conception of personality.

Right here it should be noted that we can never determine with entire certainty whether or not the analysis has really probed to the bottommost elements. There is always the possibility that the elements before which we halt and out of which we are inclined to think consciousness is composed, are themselves, in turn, composite. And thus if we could pierce down to yet simpler elements, of the second or third order, we should discover a continuity which cannot be proved so long as we go no further than the elements of the first order. Our sensations, which we have been inclined to consider a kind of psychical atoms, have been shown by recent researches of various kinds to bear traces of processes of composition of a still more elementary sort than those processes which observation more directly shows us. 5 This is, however, only a preliminary survey, leading to no decisive results, since a champion of discontinuity could very well use it to show that all apparent continuity is only provisional. But it is a fact of more decisive significance that the so-called psychical elements are always determined by the relations in which we find them, and that it is a pure abstraction to attribute to them, apart from these relations, an individuality which they only possess when thus related. This is the fundamental idea on which my own account of Psychology is built. All psychic life works in naive fashion, and directly and involuntarily gives birth to connected phenomena and events, which analysis afterwards with more or less skill tries to break up into 'elements.' For the truth about sensations we can appeal to Fechner's law and the law of contrast, according to which the intensity and the quality of each sensation is determined by the whole connection in which it stands.

The connection cannot be conceived as the product of the psychical elements, since they only exist as the sensations which they are by virtue of their connection. If they were in another connection, they would not be the same sensations. An analogous case is the behavior of ideas. The association of ideas finds its final explanation in the fact that the isolation of single ideas is unnatural. There is always a tendency — the livelier the consciousness, the stronger the tendency — toward a rounding out or widening, by means of which the single ideas enter into combination with other ideas according to fixed laws. The so-called association-psychology (among whose adherents I have sometimes been unjustly numbered) conceives the single ideas as independent atoms, which in a purely external, mechanical fashion are brought into combination. The fact is just the reverse: in the process of association it is the connected whole which exercises its power over the single ideas. The ideas never appear in a complete isolation such that their union could stand as a mechanical product. Here, also, we see that analysis always presupposes synthesis. This also appears clearly in thought, properly so called, if we compare the formation of judgments with that of concepts. They always presuppose one another; since our judgments, which are but combinations of concepts, can only be complete when the combined concepts are complete; while on the other hand, the formation of a concept presupposes a series of judgments, by which the mutual relations of its different elements is determined. Here, again, it is evident that the whole and the parts mutually determine one another. There are no thoroughly isolated concepts which only afterward allow themselves to be bound together into judgments.

Here crops out an antinomy which is closely connected with the existence of consciousness, and is peculiar to the concept of personality. Consciousness and personality can as little be explained as the products of previously given elements, as organic life can be explained as the product of unorganic elements. On the other hand, consciousness and personality, just like organic life, come into being through a perpetual synthesis of elements not originally begotten by themselves. It is this antinomy which makes the genesis of life and of personality so great a riddle. 6

So far, we have only considered the more formal connections of consciousness. But in every consciousness there is a goal that is striven towards, a dominant interest that makes or tries to make everything else subservient to itself. This dominant interest — call it the main purpose if you will — may change at different periods of life; but the tendency for it to develop will always be present, and it will in greater or less degree stamp its impress upon all the elements of consciousness and give them their bent. This interest in the main purpose constitutes the soul of the individual, if we understand by mind the more formal intellectual part of him.

The relationships thus far examined demonstrate that the concept of personality must always constitute the central thought of psychology. When analysis and special methods make their dissections, and attempt to isolate single elements or instants, we should grant that they are justified, just as mathematicians are justified in determining an irrational number by adding decimal to decimal. But the irrational relation of the whole to the elements remains.

In the idealistic camp there has often been an inclination to consider the concept of personality as settled, and to operate with

.it in cosmological speculation. This is to overlook the fact, emphasized especially by the Positivist school, that what we are so industriously working for is just to build up a concept of personality, just to spell out a psychological conception of the whole, even as biology is spelling away at a definition of life. But just as biology, in spite of its recognition of the individuality of the living organism, knows no other method than to seek, by means of observation, experiment, and analysis, to understand the complex processes through the simpler; so in like manner psychology, however earnestly it may assert the synthetic character of consciousness, can only bring into play the methods common to all sciences, — observation, experiment, and analysis. The concept of personality stands as the ideal toward which we steer, as the enduring problem to whose elucidation all special methods contribute. 7

The irrational here as everywhere not only places the limit, but also sets us the task, the ever new task. Descriptive psychology especially tends to lay stress on the connected whole in and with which the psychical manifestation appears. It will always — but especially in respect to the higher or more developed manifestations of consciousness — preserve its independence and significance as over against experimental psychology. In fact, experimental psychology invariably has its tasks set for it by descriptive psychology. At the same time, descriptive psychology serves as a corrective to experimental psychology which, by its very methods, easily tends to overisolate single elements, to neglect the spontaneity of the conscious life, and to overemphasize the external symptoms of inner states. 8 On the other hand, descriptive psychology can levy tribute from experimental psychology, turning whatever light it may yield as to the more elementary psychological processes, by analogy, upon the nature of the higher processes, and thus giving greater completeness and accuracy to the description.