These remarks are preparatory to presenting a con¬ ception of philosophy; namely, that philosophy is inher¬ ently criticism, having its distinctive position among various modes of criticism in its generality; a criticism of criticisms, as it were. Criticism is discriminating judg¬ ment, careful appraisal, and judgment is appropriately termed criticism wherever the subject-matter of discrimi¬ nation concerns goods or values. Possession and enjoy¬ ment of goods passes insensibly and inevitably into apprai¬ sal. First and immature experience is content simply to enjoy. But a brief course in experience enforces reflec¬ tion; it requires but brief time to teach that some things sweet in the having are bitter in after-taste and in what they lead to. Primitive innocence does not last. Enjoy¬ ment ceases to be a datum and becomes a problem. As a problem, it implies intelligent inquiry into the conditions and consequences of a value-object; that is, criticism. If values were as plentiful as huckleberries, and if the huckle¬ berry-patch were always at hand, the passage of apprecia¬ tion into criticism would be a senseless procedure. If one thing tired or bored us, we should have only to turn to another. But values are as unstable as the forms of clouds. The things that possess them are exposed to all the contingencies of existence, and they are indiffer¬ ent to our likings and tastes.
Good things change and vanish not only with changes in the environing medium but with changes in ourselves. Continued perception, except when it has been cultivated through prior criticism, dulls itself; it is soon satiated, exhausted, blase. The infinite flippancy of the natural man is a standing theme for discourse by shrewd observers of human nature. Cultivated taste alone is capable of prolonged appreciation of the same object; and it is capable of it because it has been trained to a discriminat¬ ing procedure which constantly uncovers in the object new meanings to be perceived and enjoyed. Add to exhaustion of the organs of perception and enjoyment, all the other organic causes which render enjoyed objects unstable, and then add the external vicissitudes to which they are subjected, and there is no cause to wonder at the evanescence of immediate goods; nor at the so-called paradoxes of pleasure and virtue, according to which they are not secured by aiming at them but by attention to other things; — a fact however, which is not a paradox in a world where nothing is attained in any other way than by attention to its causal conditions.
When criticism and the critical attitude are legitimately distinguished from appreciation and taste, we are in the presence of one case of the constant rhythm of “perchings and flights” (to borrow James’ terms), characteristic of alternate emphasis upon the immediate and mediate, the consummatory and instrumental, phases of all conscious experience. If we are misled into ignoring the omni¬ presence in all observations and ideas of this rhythm, it is largely because, under the influence of formal theories, we attach too elaborate and too remote a signification to “appreciation” and “criticism.” Values of some sort or other are not traits of rare and festal occasions; they occur whenever any object is welcomed and lingered over; whenever it arouses aversion and protest; even though the lingering be but momentary and the aversion a pas¬ sing glance toward something else.
Similarly, criticism is not a matter of formal treatises, published articles, or taking up important matters for consideration in a serious way. It occurs whenever a moment is devoted to looking to see what sort of value is present; whenever instead of accepting a value-object wholeheartedly, being rapt by it, we raise even a shadow of a question about its worth, or modify our sense of it by even a passing estimate of its probable future. It is well upon the whole that we use the terms “appreciation” and “criticism” honorifically, to designate conspicuous instances. But it is fatal to any understanding of them to fail to note that formally emphatic instances are of exactly the same nature as the rhythmic alternation between slight agreeable acceptances, annoyed rejec¬ tions and passing questionings and estimates, which make up the entire course of our waking experience, whether in revery, in controlled inquiry or in deliberate management of affairs.
The rhythmic succession of the two modes of percep¬ tion suggests that the difference is one of emphasis, or degree. Critical appreciation, and appreciative, warmly emotionalized criticism occur in every matured sane experience. After the first dumb, formless experience of a thing as a good, subsequent perception of the good con¬ tains at least a germ of critical reflection. For this rea¬ son, and only for this reason, elaborate and formulated criticism is subsequently possible. The latter, if just and pertinent, can but develop the reflective implications found within appreciation itself. Criticism would be the most wilful of undertakings if the possession and enjoy¬ ment of good objects had no element of memory and fore¬ sight in it; if it lacked all circumspection and judgment. Criticism is reasonable and to the point, in the degree in which it extends and deepens these factors of intelligence found in immediate taste and enjoyment.
Conscience in morals, taste in fine arts and conviction in beliefs pass insensibly into critical judgments; the latter pass also into a more and more generalized form of criticism called philosophy. How is the assertion of “canons” of taste and criticism compatible with the declaration that there is no discussing tastes? What is meant by a distinction between apparent good and real good? How can the distinction between seeming and being be capable of application to what is good? Is criti¬ cal appraisal possible without a standard measure of values? Is the standard of values itself a value? Is it derived from the value-objects to which it is. applied? If so, what authority does it possess over and beyond that of particular cases? What right has it to pass judgment upon its own source and authors? Does a standard exist transcendentally in independence of concrete cases judged? If so, what is its source, and what is the ground and guarantee of its applicability to alien material? Is taste, immediate appreciation, sense and moral sense, ultimate, its own final judge in every case as it arises? What, in that event, saves us from chaotic anarchy? Is there among men a common measure of value? If so, is it grounded outside of man, in an independent objective form of Being?
Such questions as these, which may be multiplied as one pleases, indicate that no great difficulty would attend an effort to derive all the stock issues of philosophy from the problems of value and their relationship to critical judgment. Whether it be a question of the good and bad in conviction and opinion, or in matters of conduct, or in appreciated scenes of nature and art, there occurs in every instance a conflict between the immediate valueobject and the ulterior value-object: the given good, and that reached and justified by reflection; the now appar¬ ent and the eventual. In knowledge, for example there are beliefs de facto and beliefs de jure. In morals, there are immediate goods, the desired, and reasonable goods, the desirable. In esthetics, there are the goods of an undeveloped or perverted taste and there are the goods of cultivated taste. With respect to any of these dis¬ tinctions, the true, real, final, or objective good is no more good as an immediate existence than is the contrast¬ ing good, called false, specious, illusory, showy, meretrici¬ ous, le faux bon. The difference in adjectives designates a difference instituted in critical judgment; the validity of the difference between good which is approved and that which is good (immediately) but is judged bad, depends therefore upon the value of reflection in general, and of a particular reflective operation in especial. Even if good of the reflective object is different from that of the good of the non-reflective object, it does not follow that it is a better good, much less that it is such a difference in goodness as makes the non-reflective good bad: — except upon one proviso, namely, that there is something unique in the value or goodness of reflection.
Either, then, the difference between genuine, valid, good and a counterfeit, specious good is unreal, or it is a differ¬ ence consequent upon reflection, or criticism, and the significant point is that this difference is equivalent to that made by discovery of relationships, of conditions and consequences. With this conclusion are bound up two other propositions: Of immediate values as such, values which occur and which are possessed and enjoyed, there is no theory at all; they just occur, are enjoyed, possessed; and that is all. The moment we begin to discourse about these values, to define and generalize, to make distinc¬ tions in kinds, we are passing beyond value-objects them¬ selves; we are entering, even if only blindly, upon an inquiry into causal antecedents and causative consequents, with a view to appraising the “real,” that is the eventual, goodness of the thing in question. We are criticizing, not for its own sake, but for the sake of instituting and perpetuating more enduring and extensive values.
The other proposition is that philosophy is and can be nothing but this critical operation and function become aware of itself and its implications, pursued deliberately and systematically. It starts from actual situations of belief, conduct and appreciative perception which are characterized by immediate qualities of good and bad, and from the modes of critical judgment current at anygiven time in all the regions of value; these are its data, its subject-matter. These values, criticisms, and critical methods, it subjects to further criticism as comprehen¬ sive and consistent as possible. The function is to regulate the further appreciation of goods and bads; to give greater freedom and security in those acts of direct selection, appropriation, identification and of rejection, elimination, destruction which enstate and which exclude objects of belief, conduct and contemplation.
Such a conclusion wears an air of strangeness. It may appear to indicate an attempt by a dialectic trick to make the category of good-and-bad supreme in its jurisdiction over intellectual life and over all objects. This impression will, I think, be readily dissipated by consideration of the actual meaning of what is said. Ob¬ jects of belief and of refusals to believe are value-objects; for each object is some thing acquiesced in, accepted, adopted, appropriated. This is the same as saying it is found good or satisfactory to believe or disbelieve; truis¬ tically, whatever is accepted is as such and in so far good. There is no occult significance in this statement; it is not preliminary to an argument which shall sweep away the properties which objects possess independent of their being objects of belief, or of their being values. It does not annihilate the difference among beliefs; it does not set up the fact that an object believed in is per¬ force found good as if it were a reason for belief. On the contrary: the statement is preliminary. The all-im¬ portant matter is what lies back of and causes acceptance and rejection; whether or no there is method of discrimina¬ tion and assessment which makes a difference in what is assented to and denied. Properties and relations that entitle an object to be found good in belief are extraneous to the qualities that are its immediate good; they are causal, and hence found only by search into the antecedent and the eventual. The conception that there are some objects or some properties of objects which carry their own adequate credentials upon their face is the snare and delu¬ sion of the whole historic tradition regarding knowledge, infecting alike sensational and rational schools, objective realisms and introspective idealisms.
Concerning beliefs and their objects taken in their immediacy “non-disputandum” holds, as truly as it does concerning tastes and their objects. If a man believes in ghosts, devils, miracles, fortune-tellers, the immutable certainty of the existing economic regime, and the supreme merits of his political party and its leaders, he does so believe; these are immediate goods to him, precisely as some color and tone combinations are lovely, or the mis¬ tress of his heart is charming. When the question is raised as to the “real” value of the object for belief, the appeal is to criticism, intelligence. And the court of appeal decides by the law of conditions and consequences. Inquiry duly pursued leads to the enstatement of an object which is directly accepted, good in belief, but an object whose character now depends upon the reflective operations whose conclusion it is. Like the object of dogmatic and uncritical belief, it marks an “end,” a static arrest; but unlike it, the “end” is a conclusion; hence it carries credentials.
Were not objects of belief immediate goods, false beliefs would not be the dangerous things which they are. For it is because these objects are good to believe, to admit and assert, that they are cherished so intolerantly and unre¬ mittingly. Beliefs about God, Nature, society and man are precisely the things that men most cling to and most ardently fight for. It is easier to wean a miser from his hoard, than a man from his deeper opinions. And the tragedy is that in so many cases the causes which lead to the thing in question being a value are not reasons for its being a good, while the fact that it is an immediate good tends to preclude that search for causes, that dispassion¬ ate judgment, which is pre-requisite to the conversion of goods de facto into goods de jure. Here, again and pre¬ eminently, since reflection is the instrumentality of secur¬ ing freer and more enduring goods, reflection is a unique intrinsic good. Its instrumental efficacy determines it to be a candidate for a distinctive position as an immediate good, since beyond other goods it has power of replen¬ ishment and fructification. In it, apparent good and real good enormously coincide.
In traditional discussion the fact is overlooked that the subject-matter of belief is a good, since belief means assimilation and assertion. It is overlooked that its imme¬ diate goodness is both the obstacle to reflective examination and the source of its necessity. The “true” is indeed set up along with the good and the beautiful as a transcend¬ ent good, but the role of empirical good, of value, in the sweep of ordinary beliefs is passed by. The counterpart of this error, which isolates the subject-matter of intellect from the scope of values and valuations, is a corresponding isolation of the subject-matter of esthetic contemplation and immediate enjoyment from judgment. Between these two realms, one of intellectual objects without value and the other of value-objects without intellect, there is an equivocal mid-country in which moral objects are placed, with rival claimants striving to annex them either to the region of purely immediate goods (in this case termed pleasures) or to that of purely rational objects. Hence the primary function of philosophy at present is to make it clear that there is no such difference as this division assumes between science, morals, and esthetic appreciation. All alike exhibit the difference between immediate goods casually occurring and immediate goods which have been reflectively determined by means of critical inquiry. If bare liking is an adequate determi¬ nant of values in one case, it is in the others. If intelli¬ gence, criticism, is required in one, it is in the others. If the end to be attained in any case is an enhanced and puri¬ fied immediate appreciative, experienced object, so it is in the others. All cases manifest the same duality and pre¬ sent the same problem; that of embodying intelligence in action which shall convert casual natural goods, whose causes and effects are unknown, into goods valid for thought, right for conduct and cultivated for appreciation.
Philosophic discourse partakes both of scientific and literary discourse. Like literature, it is a comment on nature and life in the interest of a more intense and just appreciation of the meanings present in experience. Its business is reportorial and transcriptive only in the sense in which the drama and poetry have that office. Its primary concern is to clarify, liberate and extend the goods which inhere in the naturally generated functions of experience. It has no call to create a world of “reality’ de novo, nor to delve into secrets of Being hidden from common-sense and science. It has no stock of informa¬ tion or body of knowledge peculiarly its own; if it does not always become ridiculous when it sets up as a rival of science, it is only because a particular philosopher hap¬ pens to be also, as a human being, a prophetic man of science. Its business is to accept and to utilize for a pur¬ pose the best available knowledge of its own time and place. And this purpose is criticism of beliefs, institu¬ tions, customs, policies with respect to their bearing upon good. This does not mean their bearing upon the good, as something itself attained and formulated in philoso¬ phy. For as philosophy has no private score of knowledge or of methods for attaining truth, so it has no private access to good. As it accepts knowledge of facts and principles from those competent in inquiry and discovery, so it accepts the goods that are diffused in human experi¬ ence. It has no Mosaic nor Pauline authority of revela¬ tion entrusted to it. But it has the authority of intelli¬ gence, of criticism of these common and natural goods.
At this point, it departs from the arts of literary dis¬ course. They have a freer office to perform— to perpetu¬ ate, enhance and vivify in imagination the natural goods; all things are forgiven to him who succeeds. But philo¬ sophic criticism has a stricter task, with a greater measure of responsibility to what lies outside its own products. It has to appraise values by taking cognizance of their causes and consequences; only by this straight and narrow path may it contribute to expansion and emancipation of values. For this reason the conclusions of science about matter-of-fact efficiencies of nature are its indis¬ pensable instruments. If its eventual concern is to render goods more coherent, more secure and more signifi¬ cant in appreciation, its road is the subject-matter of natural existence as science discovers and depicts it.
Only in verbal form is there anything novel in this con¬ ception of philosophy. It is a version of the old saying that philosophy is love of wisdom, of wisdom which is not knowledge and which nevertheless cannot be without knowledge. The need of an organon of criticism which uses knowledge of relations among events to appraise the casual, immediate goods that obtain among men is not a fact of philosophy, but of nature and life. We can con¬ ceive a happier nature and experience than flourishes among us wherein the office of critical reflection would be carried on so continuously and in such detail that no par¬ ticular apparatus would be needed. But actual experi¬ ence is such a jumble that a degree of distance and de¬ tachment are a pre-requisite of vision in perspective. Thinkers often withdraw too far. But a withdrawal is necessary, unless they are to be deafened by the immediate clamor and blinded by the immediate glare of the scene. What especially makes necessary a generalized instru¬ ment of criticism, is the tendency of objects to seek rigid non-communicating compartments. It is natural that nature, variegatedly qualified, should exhibit various trends when it achieves experience of itself, so that there is a distribution of emphasis such as are designated by the adjectives scientific, industrial, political, religious, artis¬ tic, educational, moral and so on.
But however natural from the standpoint of causation may be the institutionalizing of these trends, their separa¬ tion effects an isolation which is unnatural. Narrowness, superficiality, stagnation follow from lack of the nourish¬ ment which can be supplied only by generous and wide interactions. Goods isolated as professionalism and insti¬ tutionalization isolate them, petrify; and in a moving world solidification is always dangerous. Resistant force is gained by precipitation, but no one thing gets strong enough to defy everything. Over-specialization and divi¬ sion of interests, occupations and goods create the need for a generalized medium of intercommunication, of mutual criticism through all-around translation from one separated region of experience into another. Thus philos¬ ophy as a critical organ becomes in effect a messenger, a liason officer, making reciprocally intelligible voices speak¬ ing provincial tongues, and thereby enlarging as well as rectifying the meanings with which they are charged.
The difficulty is that philosophy, even when professing catholicity, has often been suborned. Instead of being a free messenger of communication it has been a diplomatic agent of some special and partial interest; insincere, because in the name of peace it has fostered divisions that lead to strife, and in the name of loyalty has promoted unholy alliances and secret understandings. One might say that the profuseness of attestations to supreme devo¬ tion to truth on the part of philosophy is matter to arouse suspicion. For it has usually been a preliminary to the claim of being a peculiar organ of access to highest and ultimate truth. Such it is not; and it will not lose its esoteric and insincere air until the profession is dis¬ claimed. Truth is a collection of truths; and these constituent truths are in the keeping of the best available methods of inquiry and testing as to matters-of-fact; methods, which are, when collected under a single name, science. As to truth, then, philosophy has no pre-eminent status; it is a recipient, not a donor. But the realm of meanings is wider than that of true-and-false meanings; it is more urgent and more fertile. When the claim of meanings to truth enter in, then truth is indeed pre¬ eminent. But this fact is often confused with the idea that truth has a claim to enter everywhere; that it has monopolistic jurisdiction. Poetic meanings, moral mean¬ ings, a large part of the goods of life are matters of rich¬ ness and freedom of meanings, rather than of truth; a large part of our life is carried on in a realm of meanings to which truth and falsity as such are irrelevant. And the claim of philosophy to rival or displace science as a pur¬ veyor of truths seems to be mostly a compensatory ges¬ ture for failure to perform its proper task of liberating and clarifying meanings, including those scientifically authenticated. For, assuredly, a student prizes historic systems rather for the meanings and shades of meanings they have brought to light than for the store of ultimate truths they have ascertained. If accomplishment of the former office were made the avowed business of philoso¬ phy, instead of an incidental by-product, its position would be clearer, more intelligent and more respected.
It is sometimes suggested, however, that such a view of philosophy derogates from its dignity, degrading it into an instrument of social reforms, and that it is a view con¬ genial only to those who are insensitive to the positive achievements of culture and over-sensitive to its evils. Such a conception overlooks outstanding facts. “Social reform” is conceived in a Philistine spirit, if it is taken to mean anything less than precisely the liberation and expansion of the meanings of which experience is capable. No doubt many schemes of social reform are guilty of precisely this narrowing. But for that very reason they are futile; they do not succeed in even the special reforms at which they aim, except at the expense of intensifying other defects and creating new ones. Nothing but the best, the richest and fullest experience possible, is good enough for man. The attainment of such an experience is not to be conceived as the specific problem of “reformers” but as the common purpose of men. The contribution which philosophy can make to this common aim is criti¬ cism. Criticism certainly includes a heightened conscious¬ ness of deficiencies and corruptions in the scheme and distribution of values that obtains at any period.
No just or pertinent criticism in its negative phase can possibly be made however, except upon the basis of a heightened appreciation of the positive goods which human experience has achieved and offers. Positive con¬ crete goods of science, art and social companionship are the basic subject-matter of philosophy as criticism; and only because such positive goods already exist is their emancipation and secured extension the defining aim of intelligence. The more aware one is of the richness of meanings which experience possesses, the more will a generous and catholic thinker be conscious of the limits which prevent sharing in them; the more aware will he be of their accidental and arbitrary distribution. If instru¬ mental efficacies need to be emphasized, it is not for the sake of instruments but for the sake of that full and more secure distribution of values which is impossible without instrumentalities.
If philosophy be criticism, what is to be said of the rela¬ tion of philosophy to metaphysics? For metaphysics, as a statement of the generic traits manifested by existences of all kinds without regard to their differen¬ tiation into physical and mental, seems to have nothing to do with criticism and choice, with an effective love of wisdom. It begins and ends with analysis and definition. When it has revealed the traits and characters that are sure to turn up in every universe of discourse, its work is done. So at least an argument may run. But the very nature of the traits discovered in every theme of discourse, since they are ineluctable traits of natural existence, forbids such a conclusion. Qualitative individuality and constant relations, contingency and need, movement and arrest are common traits of all existence. This fact is source both of values and of their precariousness; both of immediate possession which is casual and of reflection which is a precondition of secure attainment and appro¬ priation. Any theory that detects and defines these traits is therefore but a ground-map of the province of criticism, establishing base lines to be employed in more intricate triangulations.
If the general traits of nature existed in water-tight compartments, it might be enough to sort out the objects and interests of experience among them. But they are actually so intimately intermixed that all important issues are concerned with their degrees and the ratios they sustain to one another. Barely to note and register that contingency is a trait of natural events has nothing to do with wisdom. To note, however, contingency in connection with a concrete situation of life is that fear of the Lord which is at least the beginning of wisdom. The detection and definition of nature’s end is in itself barren. But the undergoing that actually goes on in the light of this discovery brings one close to supreme issues: life and death.
The more sure one is that the world which encompasses human life is of such and such a character (no matter what his definition), the more one is committed to try to direct the conduct of life, that of others as well as of him¬ self, upon the basis of the character assigned to the world. And if he finds that he cannot succeed, that the attempt lands him in confusion, inconsistency and darkness, plunging others into discord and shutting them out from participation, rudimentary precepts instruct him to sur¬ render his assurance as a delusion; and to revise his notions of the nature of nature till he makes them more adequate to the concrete facts in which nature is em¬ bodied. Man needs the earth in order to walk, the sea to swim or sail, the air to fly. Of necessity he acts within the world, and in order to be, he must in some measure adapt himself as one part of nature to other parts.
In mind, thought, this situation, this predicament becomes aware of itself. Instead of the coerced adapta¬ tion of part to part with coerced failure or success as con¬ sequence, there is search for the meaning of things with respect to acts to be performed, plans and policies to be formed; there is search for the meaning of proposed acts with respect to objects they induce and preclude. The one cord that is never broken is that between the energies and acts which compose nature. Knowledge modifies the tie. But the idea that knowledge breaks the tie, that it inserts something opaque between the interactions of things, is hardly less than infantile. Knowledge as science modifies the particular interactions that come within its reach, because it is itself a modification of inter¬ actions, due to taking into account their past and future. The generic insight into existence which alone can define metaphysics in any empirically intelligible sense is itself an added fact of interaction, and is therefore subject to the same requirement of intelligence as any other natural occurrence: namely, inquiry into the bearings, leadings and consequences of what it discovers. The universe is no infinite self-representative series, if only because the addition within it of a representation makes it a different universe.
By an indirect path we are brought to a considera¬ tion of the most far-reaching question of all criticism: the relationship between existence and value, or as the problem is often put, between the real and ideal.
Philosophies have usually insisted upon a wholesale relationship. Either the goods which we most prize and which are therefore termed ideal are identified completely and throughout with real Being; or the realms of existence and of the ideal are wholly severed from each other. In the European tradition in its orthodox form the former alternative has prevailed. Ens and verum, bonum are the same. Being, in the full sense, is perfection of power to be; the measure of degrees of perfection and of degrees of reality is extent of power. Evil and error are impoten¬ ces; futile gestures against omnipotence — against Being. Spinoza restated to this effect medieval theology in terms of the new outlook of science. Modern professed ideal¬ isms have taught the same doctrine. After magnifying thought and the objects of thought, after magnifying the ideals of human aspiration, they have then sought to prove that after all these things are not ideal but are real — real not as meanings and ideals, but as existential being. Thus the assertion of faith in the ideal belies itself in the making; these “idealists” cannot trust their ideal till they have converted it into existence — that is, into the physical or the psychical, which, since it lacks the properties of the empirically physical and psycho-physical becomes a peculiar kind of existence, called metaphysical.