All philosophies employ empirical subject-matter, even the most transcendental; there is nothing else for them to goby. But in ignoring the kind of empirical situation to which their themes pertain and in failing to supply direc¬ tions for experimental pointing and searching they be¬ come non-empirical. Hence it may be asserted that the final issue of empirical method is whether the guide and standard of beliefs and conduct lies within or without the shareable situations of lifg. The ultimate accusation ' levelled against professedly non-empirical philosophies is that in casting aspersion upon the events and objects of experience, they deny the power of common life to develop its own regulative methods and to furnish from within itself adequate goals, ideals, and criteria. Thus in effect they claim a^private access to truth and deprive the things of common experience of the enlightenment and guidance that philosophy might otherwise derive from them. The transcendentalist has conspired with his arch-enemy, the sensualist, to narrow the acknowledged.
sub ject-matter of experience and to lessen its potencies for a wider and directed reflective choice. Respect for experience is respect for its possibilities in thought and knowledge as well as an enforced attention to its joys and sorrows. Intellectual piety toward experience is a pre¬ condition of the direction of life and of tolerant and gener¬ ous cooperation among men. Respect for the things of experience alone brings with it such a respect for others, the centres of experience, as is free from patronage, dom¬ ination and the will to impose.
CHAPTER TWO Existence as Precarious and as Stable It was suggested in the last chapter that experience has its equivalents in such affairs as history, life, culture. Reference to these other affairs enables us to put to one side the reminiscences which so readily give the word experience a sectarian and provincial content. Accord¬ ing to Tylor, culture is “that complex whole which in¬ cludes knowledge, belief, art, morals, custom, and any other capabilities acquired by a man as a member of society.” It is, in some sense, a whole, but it is a com¬ plex, a diversified whole. It is differentiated into re¬ ligion, magic, law, fine and useful art, science, philosophy, language, domestic and political relations, etc. Con¬ sider the following words of an anthropologist and ask if they do not fairly define the problem of philosophy, although intended for another purpose. “Cultural reali¬ ty is never wholly deterministic nor yet wholly accidental, never wholly psychological nor yet wholly objective, never wholly of yesterday nor yet wholly of today, but combines all of these in its existential reality.
A reconstructive synthesis re-establishes the synthetic unity necessarily lost in the process of analytic dismem¬ berment.”1 I do not mean that philosophy is to be merged in an anthropological view of culture. But in a different context and by a different method, it has the task of analytic dismemberment and synthetic reconstruction of experience; the phenomena of culture as presented by 1 Goldenweiser.
the anthropologist provide, moreover, precious material to aid the performance of this office, material more pertinent to the task of philosophizing than that of psychology isolated from a theory of culture.
A feature of existence which is emphasized bv cultural «- C"* phenomena is the precarious and perilous. Sumner refers to Grimm as authority for the statement that the Germanic tribes had over a thousand distinct savings.
proverbs and apothegms, _ concerning luck. Time is brief, and this statement must stand instead of the dis¬ course which the subject deserves. Man finds himself living in an aleatory world: his existence involves, to put ty'*’ it baldly, a gamble. The world is a scene of risk: it is uncertain, unstable, uncannily unstable. Its dangers are irregular, inconstant, not to be counted upon as to their times and seasons. Although persistent, they are spora¬ dic, episodic. It js_ darkest just before dawn; pride goes before a fall: the moment of greatest prosperity is the moment most charged with ill-omen, most opportune for the evil eye. Plague, famine, failure of crops, disease, death, defeat in battle, are always just around the corner, and so are abundance, strength, victory, festival and song.
Luck is proverbially both good and bad in its distribu¬ tions. The sacred and the accursed are potentialities of the same situation; and there is no category of things which has not embodied the sacred and accursed: per¬ sons, words, places, times, directions in space, stones, winds, animals, stars.
Anthropologists have shown incontrovertiblv the part played by the precarious aspect of the world in generating religion with its ceremonies, rites, cults, myths, magic; and it has shown the pervasive penetration of these affairs into morals, law, art, and industry. Beliefs and dispositions connected with them are the background out of which philosophy and secular morals slowly de¬ veloped, as well as more slowly those late inventions, art for art’s sake, and business is business. Interesting and instructive as is this fact, it is not the ramifications which here concern us. We must not be diverted to consider the consequences for philosophy, even for doctrines reigning today, of facts concerning the origin of philosophies. We confine ourselves to one outstanding fact: the evidence that the world of empirical things includes the uncertain, unpredictable, uncontrollable. and hazardous.
It is an old saying that the gods were born of fear. The saying is only too likely to strengthen a misconcep¬ tion bred by confirmed subjective habits. We first endow man in isolation with an instinct of fear and then we imagine him irrationally ejecting that fear into the environment, scattering broadcast as it were, the fruits of his own purely personal limitations, and thereby creating superstition. But fear, whether an instinct or an acquisition, is a function of the environment. Man fears because he exists in a fearful, an awful world. The world is precarious and perilous. It is as easily accessible and striking evidence of this fact that primi¬ tive experience is cited. The voice is that of early man; but the hand is that of nature, the nature in which we still live. It was not fear of gods that created the gods.
For if the life of early man is filled with expiations and propitiations, if in his feasts and festivals what is enjoyed is gratefully shared with his gods, it is not because a belief in supernatural, powers created a need for expiatory, propitiatory and communal offerings. Everything that man achieves and possesses is got by actions that mav involve him in other and obnoxious conse¬ quences in addition to those wanted and enjoyed. His acts are trespasses upon the domain of the unknown; and hence atonement, if offered in season, may ward off direful consequences that haunt even the moment of prosperity — or that most haunt that moment. While unknown consequences flowing from the past dog the present, the future is even more unknown and perilous: the present by that fact is ominous. If unknown forces that decide future destiny can be placated, the man who will not study the methods of securing their favor is incredibly flippant. In enjoyment of present food and companionship, nature, tradition and social organization have cooperated, thereby supplementing our own endeav¬ ors so petty and so feeble without this extraneous rein¬ forcement. Goods are bv grace not of ourselves. He is a dangerous churl who will not gratefully acknowledge by. means of free-will offerings the help that sustains him.
These things are as true today as they were in the days of early culture. It is not the facts which have changed, but the methods of insurance, regulation and acknowledgment. Herbert Spencer sometimes colored his devotion to symbolic experiences with a fact of direct experience. When he says that every fact has two opposite sides, “the one its near or visible side and the other its remote or invisible side.” he expresses a per¬ sistent trait of every object in experience. The visible is set in the invisible; and in the end what is unseen decides what happens in the seen; the tangible rests precariously upon the untouched _ and _ungrasped. The contrast and the potential maladjustment of the im¬ mediate, the conspicuous and focal phase of things, with those indirect and hidden factors which determine the origin and career of what is present, are indestructible features of any and every experience. We may term the way in which our ancestors dealt with the contrast super¬ stitious, but the contrast is no superstition. It is a pri¬ mary datum in any experience.
We have substituted sophistication for superstition, at least measurably so. But the sophistication is often as irrational and as much at the mercy of words as the superstition it replaces. Our magical safeguard against the uncertain character of the world is to deny the existence of chance, to mumble universal and necessary law, the ubiquity of cause and effect, the uniformity of nature, universal progress, and the inherent rationality of the universe. These magic formulae borrow their potency from conditions that are not magical. Through science we have secured a degree of power of prediction and of control; through tools, machinery and an ac¬ companying technique we have made the world more conformable to our needs, a more secure abode. We have heaped up riches and means of comfort between ourselves and the risks of the world. We have professionalized amusement as an agency of escape and for¬ getfulness. But when all is said and done, the funda¬ mentally hazardous character of the world is not seriously modified, much less eliminated. Such an incident as the last war and preparations for a future war remind us that it is easy to overlook the extent to which, after all, our attainments are only devices for blurring the disagreeable recognition of a fact, instead of means of altering the fact itself.
What has been said sounds pessimistic. But the con¬ cern is not with morals but with metaphysics, with, that is to say, the nature of the existential world in which we live. It would have been as easy and more comfortable to emphasize good luck, grace, unexpected and unwon joys, those unsought for happenings which we so signi¬ ficantly call happiness. We might have appealed to good fortune as evidence of this important trait of hazard in nature. Comedy is as genuine as tragedy. But it is traditional that comedy strikes a more superficial iiofe than tragedy. And there is an even better reason for appealing to misfortunes and mistakes as evidence of the precarious nature of the world. The problem of evil is a well recognized problem, while we rarely or nevgr hear of a problem of good. Goods we take for granted: they are as they should be; they are natural and proper. The good is a recognition of our deserts. When we pull out a, plum we treat it as evidence of. the real order of cause and effect in the world. For this reason it is diffi¬ cult for the goods of existence to furnish as convincing evidence of the uncertain character of nature as do evils. It is the latter we term accidents, not the former, even when their adventitious character is as certain.
What of it all, it may be asked? In the sense in which an assertion is true that uncontrolled distribution of good and evil is evidence of the precarious, uncertain nature of existence, it is a truism, and no problem is forwarded by its reiteration. But it is submitted that j ust this predicament of the inextricable mixtur.e_of stability and uncertainty gives rise to philosophy, and that it is reflected in all its recurrent problems and issues.
If classic philosophy says so much about unity and so little about unreconciled diversity, so much about the eternal and permanent, and so little about change (save as something to be resolved into combinations of the permanent), so much about necessity and so little about contingency, so much about the comprehending universal and so little about the recalcitrant particular, it may well be because the ambiguousness and ambivalence of reality are actually so pervasive. Since these things form the problem, solution is more apparent, (although not more actual) in the degree in which whatever of stability and assurance the world presents is fastened upon and asserted.
Upon their surface, the reports of the world which form our different philosophies are various to the point of stark contrariness. They range from spiritualism to materialism,, from absolutism to relativistic pheno¬ menalism, from transcendentalism to positivism, from rationalism to sensationalism, from idealism to realism, from subjectivism to bald objectivism, from Platonic realism to nominalism. The array of contraditions is so imposing as to suggest to sceptics that the mind of man has tackled an impossible job, or that philosophers have abandoned themselves to vagary. These radical op¬ positions in philosophers suggest however another con¬ sideration. They suggest that all their different philos¬ ophies have a common premise, and that their diversity is due to acceptance of a common premise. Variant philosophies may be looked at as different wavs of sup¬ plying recipes for denying to the universe the character of contingency which it possesses so integrally that its denial leaves the reflecting mind without a clew, and puts subsequent philosophising at the mercy of tempera¬ ment, interest and local surroundings.
Quarrels among conflicting types of philosophy are thus family quarrels. They go on within the limits of a too domestic circle, and can be settled only by venturing further afield, and out of doors. Concerned with im¬ puting complete, finished and sure character to the world of real existence, even if things have to be broken into two disconnected pieces in order to accomplish the result, the character desiderated can plausibly be found in reason or in mechanism; in rational conceptions like those of mathematics, or brute things like sensory data; in atoms or in essences; in consciousness or in a physical externality which forces and overrides consciousness.
As against this common identification of reality with what is sure, regular and finished, experience in unsophis¬ ticated forms gives evidence of a different world and points to a different metaphysics. We live in a world which is an impressive and irresistible mixture of suf¬ ficiencies, tight completenesses, order, recurrences which make possible prediction and control, and singularities, ambiguities, uncertain possibilities, processes going on to consequences as yet indeterminate. They are mixed not mechanically but vitally like the wheat and tares of the parable. We may recognize them separately but we cannot divide them, for unlike wheat and tares they grow from the same root. Qualities have defects as neces¬ sary conditions of their excellencies; the instrumentalities of truth are the causes of error; change gives meaning to permanence and recurrence makes novelty possible. A_ world that was wholly risky would be a world in which adventure is impossible, and only a living world can in¬ clude death. Such facts have been celebrated by think¬ ers like Heracleitus and Laotze; they have been greeted by theologians as furnishing occasions for exercise of divine grace; they have been elaborately formulated by various schools under a principle of relativity, so de¬ fined as to become itself final and absolute. They have rarely been frankly recognized as fundamentally signifi¬ cant for the formation of a naturalistic metaphysics.
Aristotle perhaps came the nearest to a start in that direction. But his thought did not go far on the road, though it may be used to suggest the road which he failed to take. Aristotle acknowledges contingency, but he never surrenders his bias in favor of the fixed. certain and finished. His whole theory of forms and ends is a theory of the superiority in Being of roundedout fixities. His physics is a fixation of ranks or grades of necessity and contingency so sorted that necessity measures dignity and equals degree of reality, while con¬ tingency and change measure degrees of deficiency of Being. The empirical impact and sting of the mixture of universality and singularity and chance is evaded by parcelling out the regions of space so that they have their natural abode in different portions of nature. His logic is one of definition and classification, so that its task is completed when changing and contingent things are distinguished from the necessary, universal and fixed, by attribution to inferior species of things. Chance ap¬ pears in thought not as a calculus of probabilities in pre¬ dicting the observable occurrence of any and every event, but as marking an inferior type of syllogism. Things that move are intrinsically different from things that exhibit eternal regularity. Change is honestly recognized as a genuine feature of some things, but the point of the recognition is avoided by imputing altera¬ tion to inherent deficiency of Being over against com¬ plete Being which never changes. Changing things be¬ long to a purgatorial realm, where they wander aimlessly until redeemed by love of finality of form, the acquisi¬ tion of which lifts them to a paradise of self-sufficient Being. With slight exaggeration, it may be said that the thoroughgoing way in which Aristotle defined, dis¬ tinguished and classified rest and movement, the finished and the incomplete, the actual and potential, did more to fix tradition, the genteel tradition one is tempted to add, which identifies the fixed and regular with reality of Being and the changing and hazardous with deficiency of Being than ever was accomplished by those who took the shorter path of asserting that change is illusory. I His philosophy was closer to empirical facts than most modern philosophies, in that it was neither monistic nor dualistic but openly pluralistic. His plurals fall however, within a grammatical system, to each portion of which a corresponding cosmic status is allotted. Thus his pluralism solved the problem of how to have your cake and eat it too, for a classified and hierarchically ordered set of pluralities, of variants, has none of the sting of the miscellaneous and uncoordinated plurals of our actual world. In this classificatory scheme of separation he has been followed, though perhaps unwittingly, by many philosophers of different import. Thus Kant assigns all that is manifold and chaotic to one realm, that of sense, and all that is uniform and regular to that of reason. A single and all embracing dialectic problem of the combination of sense and thought is thereby substituted for the concrete problems that arise through the mixed and varied union in existence of the variable and the con¬ stant, the necessary and that which proceeds uncertainly.
The device is characteristic of a conversion such as has already been commented upon of a moral insight to be made good in action into an antecedent meta¬ physics of existence or a general theory of knowledge. The_striving to make stability of meaning prevail over the | instability of events is the main task of intelligent human effort. But when the function is dropped from the province of art and treated as a property of given things, whether cosmological or logical, effort is rendered use¬ less, and a premium is put upon the accidental goodfortune of a class that happens to be furnished by the toil of another class with products that give to life its dignity and leisurely stability.
The argument is not forgetful that there are, from Heracleitus to Bergson, philosophies, metaphysics, of change. One is grateful to them for keeping alive a sense of what classic, orthodox philosophies have whisked out of sight. But the philosophies of flux also indicate the intensity of the craving for_the sure and fixed. They have deified change by making it universal, regular, sure. To say this is not, I hope, verbal by-play. Consider the wholly eulogistic fashion in which Hegel and Bergson, and the professedly evolutionary philosophers of becom¬ ing, have taken change. With Hegel becoming is a rational process which defines logic although a new and strange logic, and an absolute, although new and strange, God. With Spencer, evolution is but the transitional process of attaining a fixed and universal equilibrium of harmonious adjustment. With Bergson, change is the creative operation of God, or is God — one is not quite sure which. The change of change is not only cosmic pyrotechnics, but is a process of divine, spiritual, energy. We are here in the presence of prescription, not descrip¬ tion. Romanticism is an evangel in the garb of meta¬ physics. It sidesteps the painful, toilsome labor of understanding and of control which change sets us, by glorifying it for its own sake. Flux is made something to revere, something profoundly akin to what is best within ourselves, will and creative energy. It is not, as it is in experience, a call to effort, a challenge to investi¬ gation, a potential doom of disaster and death.
If we follow classical terminology, philosophy is love of wisdom, while metaphysics is cognizance of the generic traits of existence. In this sense of metaphysics, incom¬ pleteness and precariousness is a trait that must be given footing of the same rank as the finished and fixed. Love of wisdom is concerned with finding its implica¬ tions tor the conduct of life, in devotion to what is good. On the cognitive side, the issue is largely that of measure, of the ratio one bears to others in the situations of life. On the practical side, it is a question of the use to be made of each, of turning each to best account. Man is naturally philosophic, rather than metaphysical or coldly scientific, noting and describing. Concerned with pru¬ dence if not with what is honorifically called wisdom. man naturally prizes knowledge only for the sake of its bearing upon success and failure in attaining goods and avoiding evils. This is a fact of our structure and nothing is gained by recommending it as an ideal truth, and equally nothing is gained by attributing to intellect an intrinsic relationship to pure truth for its own sake or bare fact on its own account. The first method en¬ courages dogma, and the second expresses a myth. The love of knowledge for its own sake is an ideal of morals; it is an integral condition of the wisdom that rightly conceives and effectually pursues the good. For wisdom as to ends depends upon acquaintance with conditions and means, and unless the acquaintance is adequate and fair, wisdom becomes a sublimated folly of self-deception.
Denial of an inherent relation of mind to truth or fact for its own sake, apart from insight into what the fact or truth exacts of us in behavior and imposes upon us in joy and suffering; and simultaneous affirmation that devotion to fact, to truth, is a necessary moral demand, involve no inconsistency. Denial relates to natural events as independent of choice and endeavor; affirma¬ tion relates to choice and action. But choice and the reflective effort involved in it are themselves such con¬ tingent events and so bound up with the precarious un¬ certainty of other events, that philosophers have too readily assumed that metaphysics, and science of fact and truth, are themselves wisdom, thinking thus to avoid the necessity of either exercising or recognizing choice. The consequence is that conversion of un¬ avowed morals or wisdom into cosmology, and into a ^metaphysics of nature, which was termed in the last chapter the philosophic fallacy. It supplies the for¬ mula of the technique by which thinkers have relegated the uncertain and unfinished to an invidious state of unreal being, while they have systematically exalted the assured and complete to the rank of true Being.
Upon the side of wisdom, as human beings interested in good and bad things in their connection with human conduct, thinkers are concerned to mitigate the instability of life, to introduce moderation, temper and economy and when worst comes to worst to suggest consoiations and compensations. They are concerned with rendering more stable good things, and more unstable bad things; they are interested in how changes may be turned to account in the consequences to which they contribute. The facts of the ungoing, unfinished and ambiguously potential world give point and poignancy to the search for absolutes and finalities. Then when philosophers have hit in reflection upon a thing which is stably good in quality and hence worthy of persistent and continued choice, they hesitate, and withdraw from the effort and struggle that choice demands:— namely, from the effort to give it some such stability in observed existence as it possesses in quality when thought of. Thus it becomes a refuge, an asylum for contemplation, or a theme for dialectical elaboration, instead of an ideal tn inspire and guide conduct.
Since thinkers claim to be concerned with knowledge of existence, rather than with imagination, they have to make good the pretention to knowledge. Hence they transmute the imaginative perception of the stably good object into a definition and description of true reality in contrast with lower and specious existence, which, being precarious and incomplete, alone involves us in the necessity of choice and active struggle. Thus they remove from actual existence the very traits which generate philosophic reflection and which give point and bearing to its conclusions. In briefest formula, “reality” becomes what we wish existence to be, after we have analyzed its defects and decided upon what would re¬ move them; “reality” is what existence would be if our reasonably justified preferences were so completely ejv; tablished in nature as to exhaust and define its entire being and thereby render search and struggle unneces; sary. What is left over, (and since trouble, struggle, conflict, and error still empirically exist, something is left over) being excluded by definition from full reality is assigned to a grade or order of being which is asserted to be metaphysically inferior; an order variously called appearance, illusion, mortal mind, or the merely em¬ pirical, against what really and truly is. Then the prob¬ lem of metaphysics alters: instead of being a detection and description of the generic traits of existence, it be¬ comes an endeavor to adjust or reconcile to each other two separate realms of being. Empirically we have just what we started with: the mixture of the precarious and problematic with the assured and complete. But a classificatory device, based on desire and elaborated in reflective imagination, has been introduced by which the two traits are torn apart, one of them being labelled reality and the other appearance. The genuinely moral problem of mitigating and regulating the troublesome factor by active employment of the stable factor then drops out of sight. The dialectic problem of logical reconciliation of two notions has taken its place.
The most widespread of these classificatory devices, the one of greatest popular appeal, is that which divides existence into the supernatural and the natural. Men may fear the gods but it is axiomatic that the gods have nothing to. fear. They lead a life of untroubled serenity, the life that pleases them. There is a long story between the primitive forms of this division of objects of experi¬ ence and the dialectical imputation to the divine of omnipotence, omniscience, eternity and infinity, in con¬ trast with the attribution to man and experienced nature of finitude, weakness, limitation, struggle and change. But in the make-up of human psychology the later history is implicit in the early crude division. One realm is the home of assured appropriation and posses¬ sion; the other of striving, transiency and frustration. How many persons are there today who conceive that they have disposed of ignorance, struggle and disappoint¬ ment by pointing to man’s “finite” nature — as if finitude signifies anything else but an abstract classificatory naming of certain concrete and discriminable traits of nature itself— traits of nature which generate ignorance, arbitrary appearance and disappearance, failure and striving. It pleases man to substitute the dialectic exercise of showing how the “finite” can exist with or within the “infinite” for the problem of dealing with the contingent, thinking to solve the problem by distin¬ guishing and naming its factors. Failure of the exercise is certain, but the failure can be flourished as one more proof of the finitude of man’s intellect, and the need¬ lessness because impotency of endeavor of “finite” creatures to attack ignorance and oppressive fatalities.
Wisdom then consists in administration of the temporal, finite and human in its relation to the eternal and in¬ finite, by means of dogma and cult, rather than in regula¬ tion of the events of life by understanding of actual conditions.