CHAPTER II

THE RECONSTRUCTIVE FUNCTION OF PHILOSOPHY

I

Epistemologs

Now there are a great many people who will feel no thrill at all at the mention of philosophy,--who will rather consider themselves excused by the very occurrence of the word from continuing on the road which this discussion proposes to travel. No man dares to talk of philosophy in these busy days except after an apologetic preface; philosophers themselves have come to feel that their thinking is so remote from practical endeavor that they have for the most part abandoned the effort to relate their work to the concrete issues of life. In the eyes of the man who does things philosophy is but an aërial voyaging among the mists of transcendental dialectic, or an ineffective moralizing substitute for supernatural religion. Philosophy was once mistress of all the disciplines of thought and search; now none so poor to do her reverence.

There is no way of meeting this indictment other than to concede it. It is true. It is mild. Only a lover of philosophy can know--with the intimacy of a _particeps criminis_--how deeply philosophy has fallen from her ancient heights. Looking back to Greece we find that philosophy there was a real pursuit of wisdom, a very earnest effort to arrive by discussion and self-criticism at a way of life, a _philosophia vitæ magistra_, a knowledge of the individual and social good and of the means thereto, a conscious direction of social institutions to ethical ends; philosophy and life in those days were bound up with one another as mechanics is now bound up with efficient construction. Even in the Middle Ages philosophy meant coördinate living, synthetic behavior; with all their reputation for cobweb-spinning, the Scholastics were much closer to life in their thinking than most modern philosophers have been in theirs.

The lapse of philosophy from her former significance and vitality is the result of the exaggerated emphasis placed on the epistemological problem by modern thinkers; and this in turn is in great part due to the difficulties on which Descartes stumbled in his effort to reconcile his belief in mechanism with his desire to placate the Jesuits. How minor a rôle is played by the problems of the relation between subject and object, the validity of knowledge, epistemological realism and idealism, in a frankly mechanist philosophy, appears in Bacon, Hobbes, and Spinoza;[298] these men--deducting Bacon’s astute obeisance to theology--know what they want and say what they mean; they presume, with a maturity so natural as to be mistaken for _naïveté_, that the validity of thought is a matter to be decided by action rather than by theory; they take it for granted that the supreme and ultimate purpose of philosophy is not analysis but synthesis, not the intellectual categorizing of experience but the intelligent reconstruction of life. Indeed, as one pursues this clew through the devious--almost stealthy--course of modern speculation it appears that no small part of the epistemological development has been made up of the oscillations, compromises, and obscurities natural in men who were the exponents and the victims of a painful transition. Civilization was passing from one intellectual basis to another; and in these weird epistemologs the vast process came uncomfortably to semiconsciousness. They were old bottles bursting with new wine; and their tragedy was that they knew it. They clung to the old world even while the new one was swimming perilously into their ken; they found a pitiful solace in the old phrases, the old paraphernalia of a dead philosophy; and in the suffering of their readjustment there was, quite inevitably, some measure of self-deception.

And that is why they are so hard to understand. Even so subtle a thinker as Santayana finds them too difficult, and abandons them in righteous indignation. There is no worse confounding of confusion than self-deception: let a man be honest with himself, and he may lie with tolerable intelligibility and success; but let him be his own dupe and he may write a thousand critiques and never get himself understood. Indeed, some of them do not want to be understood, they only want to be believed. Hegel, for example, was not at all surprised to find that no one understood him; he would have been surprised and chagrined to find that some one had. Obscurity can cover a multitude of sins.

Add to this self-befoggery the appalling _historismus_ (as Eucken calls it), the strange lifeless interest in the past for its own sake, the petty poring over problems of text and minutiæ of theory in the classics of speculation;--and the indictment of philosophy as a useless appanage of the idle rich gains further ground. We do not seem to understand how much of the past is dead, how much of it is but a drag on the imaginative courage that dares to think of a future different from the past, and better. Philosophy is too much a study of the details of superseded systems; it is too little the study of the miraculous living moment in which the past melts into the present and the future finds creation. Most people have an invincible habit of turning their backs to the future; they like the past because the future is an adventure. So with most philosophers to-day; they like to write analyses of Kant, commentaries on Berkeley, discussions of Plato’s myths; they are students remembering, they have not yet become men thinking. They do not know that the work of philosophy is in the street as well as in the library, they do not feel and understand that the final problem of philosophy is not the relation of subject and object but the misery of men.

And so it is well that philosophy, such as it chiefly is in these days, should be scorned as a busy idler in a world where so much work is asking to be done.

Philosophy was vital in Plato’s day; so vital that some philosophers were exiled and others put to death. No one would think of putting a philosopher to death to-day. Not because men are more delicate about killing; but because there is no need to kill that which is already dead.[299]

II

Philosophy as Control

But after all, this is not a subject for rhetoric so much as for resolution. Here we are again in our splendid library; here we sit, financially secure, released from the material necessities of life, to stand apart and study, to report and help and state and solve; under us those millions holding us aloft so that we may see for them, dying by the thousand so that we may find the truth that will make the others free; and what do we do? We make phrases like “_esse est percipi_,” “synthetic judgments _à priori_,” and “being is nothing”; we fill the philosophic world with great Saharas of Kantiana; we write epistemology for two hundred years. Surely there is but one decent thing for us to do: either philosophy is of vital use to the community, or it is not. If it is not, we will abandon it; if it is, then we must seek that vital use and show it. We have been privileged to study and think and travel and learn the world; and now we stand gaping before it as if there were nothing wrong, as if nothing could be done, as if nothing should be done. We are expert eyes, asked to point the way; and all that we report is that there is nothing to see, and nowhere to go. We are without even a partial sense of the awful responsibility of intelligence.

It is time we put this problem of knowledge, even the problem of the validity of knowledge, into the hands of science. How we come to know, what the process of knowledge is, what “truth” is,--all these are questions of fact; they are problems for the science of psychology, they are not problems for philosophy. This continual sharpening of the knife, as Lotze put it, becomes tiresome--almost pathetic--if, after all, there is no cutting done. Like Faust, who found himself when, blinded by the sun, he turned his face to the earth, so we shall have to forget our epistemological heaven and remember mother earth; we shall have to give up our delightful German puzzles and play our living part in the flow of social purpose. Philosophers must once more learn to live.

To make such a demand for a new direction of philosophy to life is after all only a development of pragmatism, turning that doctrine of action as the test and significance of thought to uses not so individual as those in which William James found its readiest application. If philosophy has meaning, it must be as life become aware of its purposes and possibilities, it must be as life cross-examining life for the sake of life; it must be as specialized foresight for the direction of social movement, as reconstructive intelligence in conscious evolution. Man finds himself caught in a flux of change; he studies the laws operating in the flux; studying, he comes to understand; understanding, he comes to control; controlling, he comes face to face with the question of all questions, For what? Where does he wish to go, what does he want to be? It is then that man puts his whole experience before him in synthetic test; then that he gropes for meanings, searches for values, struggles to see and define his course and goal; then that he becomes philosopher. Consider these questions of goal and course as questions asked by a society, and the social function of philosophy appears. Science enlightens means, philosophy must enlighten ends. Science informs, philosophy must form. A philosopher is a man who remakes himself; the social function of philosophy is to remake society.

Have we yet felt the full zest of that brave discovery of the last century,--that purpose is not in things but in us? What a declaration of independence there is in that simple phrase, what liberation of a fettered thought to dare all ventures of creative endeavor! Here at last is man’s coming-of-age! Well: now that we have won this freedom, what shall we do with it? That is the question which freedom begets, often as its Frankenstein; for unless freedom makes for life, freedom dies. Once our sloth and cowardice might have pleaded the uselessness of effort in a world where omnipotent purpose lay outside of us, superimposed and unchangeable; now that we can believe that divinity is in ourselves, that purpose and guidance are through us, we can no longer shirk the question of reconstruction. The world is ours to do with what we can and will. Once we believed in the unchangeable environment--that new ogre that succeeded to the Absolute--and (as became an age of _laissez-faire_) we thought that wisdom lay in meeting all its demands; now we know that environments can be remade; and we face the question, How shall we remake ours?

This is preëminently a problem in philosophy; it is a question of values. If the world is to be remade, it will have to be under the guidance of philosophy.

III

Philosophy as Mediator between Science and Statesmanship

But why philosophy?--some one asks. Why will not science do? Philosophy dreams, while one by one the sciences which she nursed steal away from her and go down into the world of fact and achievement. Why should not science be called upon to guide us into a better world?

Because science becomes more and more a fragmentated thing, with ever less coördination, ever less sense of the whole. Our industrial system has forced division of labor here, as in the manual trades, almost to the point of idiocy: let a man seek to know everything about something, and he will soon know nothing about anything else; efficiency will swallow up the man. Because of this shredded science we have great zoölogists talking infantile patriotism about the war, and great electricians who fill sensational sheets with details of their trips to heaven. We live in a world where thought breaks into pieces, and coördination ebbs; we flounder into a chaos of hatred and destruction because synthetic thinking is not in fashion.

Consider, for example, the problem of monopoly: we ask science what we are to do here; why is it that after we have listened to the economist, and the historian, and the lawyer, and the psychologist, we are hardly better off than before? Because each of these men speaks in ignorance of what the others have discovered. We must find some way of making these men acquainted with one another before they can become really useful to large social purposes; we must knock their heads together. We want more uniters and coördinators, less analyzers and accumulators. Specialization is making the philosopher a social necessity of the very first importance.

This does not mean that we must put the state into the hands of the epistemologists. Hardly. The type of philosopher who must be produced will be a man too close to life to spend much time on merely analytical problems. He will feel the call of action, and will automatically reject all knowledge that does not point to deeds. The essential feature of him will be grasp: he will have his net fixed for the findings of those sciences which have to do, not with material reconstructions, but with the discovery of the secrets of human nature. He will know the essentials of biology and psychology, of sociology and history, of economics and politics; in him these long-divorced sciences will meet again and make one another fertile once more. He will busy himself with Mendel and Freud, Sumner and Veblen, and will scandalously neglect the Absolute. He will study the needs and exigencies of his time, he will consider the Utopias men make, he will see in them the suggestive pseudopodia of political theory, and will learn from them what men at last desire. He will sober the vision with fact, and find a focus for immediate striving. With this focus he will be able to coördinate his own thinking, to point the nose of science to a goal; science becoming thereby no longer inventive and instructive merely, but preventive and constructive. And so fortified and unified he will preach his gospel, talking not to students about God, but to statesmen about men.

For we come again--ever and ever again--to Plato: unless wisdom and practical ability, philosophy and statesmanship, can be more closely bound together than they are, there will be no lessening of human misery. Think of the learning of scientists and the ignorance of politicians! You see all these agitated, pompous men, making laws at the rate of some ten thousand a year; you see those quiet, unheard of, underpaid seekers in the laboratories of the world; unless you can bring these two groups together through coördination and direction, your society will stand still forever, however much it moves. Philosophy must take hold; it must become the social direction of science, it must become, strange to say, applied science.

We stand to-day in social science where Bacon stood in natural science: we seek a method first for the elucidation of causes, and second for the transformation, in the light of this knowledge, of man’s environment and man. “We live in the stone age of political science,” says Lester Ward; “in politics we are still savages.”[300] Our political movements are conceived in impulse and developed in emotion; they end in fission and fragmentation because there is no thought behind them. Who will supply thinking to these instincts, direction to this energy, light to this wasted heat? Our young men talk only of ideals, our politicians only of fact; who will interpret to the one the language of the other? What is it, too, that statesmen need if not that saving sense of the whole which makes philosophy, and which philosophy makes? Just as philosophy without statesmanship is--let us say--epistemology, so statesmanship without philosophy is--American politics. The function of the philosopher, then, is to do the listening to to-day’s science, and then to do the thinking for to-morrow’s statesmanship. The philosophy of an age should be the organized foresight of that age, the interpreter of the future to the present. “Selection adapts man to yesterday’s conditions, not to to-day’s”;[301] the organized foresight of conscious evolution will adapt man to the conditions of to-morrow. And an ounce of foresight is worth a ton of morals.