CHAPTER ONE Experience and Philosophic Method As Mr. Ralph Perry has said, experience is a weasel word. Its slipperiness is evident in an inconsistency characteristic of many thinkers. On the_ane hand they eagerly claim an empirical method; they foreswear the a priori and transcendent; they are sensitive to the charge that they employ data unwarranted by experience. On the other hand, they are given to deprecating the concep¬ tion of experience; experience, it is said, is purely subjec¬ tive, and whoever takes experience for his subject-matter is logically bound to land in the most secluded of idealisms.
Interesting as the theme is, it is aside from our purpose to account for this contradictory attitude. It may be surmised, however, that those guilty of the contradiction think in two insulated universes of discourse. In adher¬ ence to empirical method, they think of experience in terms of the modern development of scientific method; but their idea of experience as a distinctive subject matter is derived from another source — introspective psychology as it was elaborated in the nineteenth century.1 But we must make a choice. If the identification of experience with purely mental states is correct, then the last tiling one should profess is acceptance of empirical method as the scientific road to the understanding of the natural l“ Psychological: Consciousness as a process taking place in time.” This is the primary definition given in Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philoso¬ phy and Psychology.
2 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE and social world in which we live. And if scientific method is intrinsically empirical, then the subject-matter of experience cannot be what introspective psychologists have told us it is.
Whether or no this suggestion is correct, recognition of the inconsistency is of use in enabling us, writer and reader alike, to trap and hold the slippery idea of experience, whenever it is proposed to set forth the implications of experience for philosophy; especially when, as in this dis¬ cussion, its implications for a theory of nature, of the world* of the universe, form the issue. And I know of no better way of warning the reader against misconception of this purpose than to remind him that, as he reads the statement, he should interpret “experience” in the sense in which he himself uses the term when he professes to be faithful to the empirical method, not in the sense in which he uses it when he implies that experience is momentary, private and psychical.
There are two avenues of approach to the goal of philos¬ ophy. We may begin with experience in gross, experi- ence in its primary and crude forms, and by means of its distinguishing features and its distinctive trends, note something of the constitution of the world which generates and maintains it. Or. we may begin with refined selec-...tive products, the most authentic statements of com- mended methods of science, and work from them back to the primary facts of life. The two methods differ in starting point and direction, but not in objective or evenpetent knowledge, and those who start from the latter must somehow journey back to the homely facts of daily existence.
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 3 Each way of approach has its advantages and its dan¬ gers. Those who are able to pursue the road of that technical and refined knowledge called science are fortu¬ nate. Put the history of thought shows how easy it is for ' them to forget that science is after all an art, amatterjof *- perfected skill in conducting inqui£y; while it reveals that i those who are not directly engaged in the use of this art readily take science to be something finished, absolute in itself, instead of the result of a certain technique. Con¬ sequently “scientific” philosophies have over and over again made the science of their own day the premises of philosophy only to have them undermined by later science And even when reasonably sure foundations are provided by the science of a period, a philosopher has no guarantee save his own acumen and honesty that he will not em¬ ploy them in such a way as to get lost on a bypath. Professed scientific philosophers have been wont to employ the remoter and refinished products of science in ways which deny, discount or pervert the obvious and im- mediate factsof gross experience, unmindful that thereby philosophy itself commits suicide.
On the other hand, the method which se.tg._out_with macroscopic experience requires unusual candor and pa¬ tience. The subiect-matter of science, for better or worse, is at least “there;” it is a definite body of facts and princi¬ ples summed up in books and having a kind of independ¬ ent external existence. Butcoar§ej.nd vital experience is Protean; a thing of moods and tenses. To. seise and report it is the task of an artist as well as of an informed technician. As the history of thought shows, the usual thing, a thing so usual as probably to be in some measure inevitable, is for the philosopher to mix with his reports 4 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE of direct experience interpretations of it made by previous [thinkers. Too often, indeed, the professed empiricist only (Substitutes a dialectical development of some notion about I experience for an analysis of experience as it is humanly lived.
The philosophy which since the seventeenth century has almost achieved a monopoly of the title “empiricism” strikingly illustrates this danger. Not safely can an “ism” be made out of experience. For any interpretation of experience must perforce simplify; simplifications tend in a particular direction; and the direction may be set by custom which one assumes to be natural simply because it is traditionally congenial. For at least two hundred years many interests, religious, industrial, political, have centered about the status of the individual. Hence the drift in all systems save the classic traditional schopl, has been to think in ways that make individuality something isolated as well as central. When the notion of experi¬ ences is introduced, who is not familiar with the query, uttered with a crushingly triumphant tone, “Whose experi¬ ence?” The implication is that experience is not only always somebody’s, but that the peculiar nature of “some¬ body” infects experience_so pervasively that experience is merely somebody’s and hence of nobody and nothing else.
The dialectical situation which results may be illus¬ trated by a quotation which is selected because it is typical of much contemporary philosophizing. “When I look at a chair, I say I experience it. But what I actually experience is only a very few of the elements that go to make up a chair, namely, that color that belongs to the chair under these particular conditions of light, the shape which the chair displays when viewed from this angle, PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 5 etc.” The man who has the experience, as distinct from a philosopher theorizing about it, would probably say that he experienced the chair most fully not when looking at it but when meaning to sit down in it, and that he can mean to sit down in it precisely because his experience is not limited to color under specific conditions of light, and angular shape. He would probably say that when he looks at it, instead of experiencing something less than a chair he experiences a good deal more than a chair: that he lays hold of a wide spatial context, such as the room where the chair is, and a spread of its history, including the chair’s period, price paid for it, consequences, public as well as personal, which flow from its use as household furniture, and so on.
Such remarks as these prove nothing. But they sug- gest how far away from the everyday sense of experience a certain kind of philosophic discourse, although nomi¬ nally experiential, has wandered. Interesting results can be had by developing dialectically such a notion of experi¬ ence as is contained in the quotation; problems can be made to emerge which exercise the ingenuity of the theo- rizer, and which convince many a student that he gets nearer to the reality of experience the further away he gets from all the experience he has ever had. The exer- cise would be harmless, were it not finally forgotten that, the conclusions reached have but a dialectical status, being an elaboration, of premises arrived, at by technical analysis from a specialized physiological point of view. Consequently, I would rather take the behavior of the dog of Odysseus upon his master’s return as an example of the sort of thing experience is for the philosopher than trust to such statements. A physiologist may for his 6 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE special purpose reduce Othello’s perception of a hand¬ kerchief to simple elements of color under certain condi¬ tions of light and shapes seen under certain angular con¬ ditions of vision. But the actual experience was charged with history and prophecy; full of love, jealousy and vil¬ lainy, fulfilling past human relationships and moving fatally to tragic destiny.
The excuse for saying obvious things is that much that now passes for empiricism is but a dialectical elaboration of data taken from physiology, so that it is necessary for any one, who seriously sets out to philosophize empirically, to recall to attention that he is talking about the sort of thing that the unsophisticated man calls experience, the life he has led and undergone in the world of persons and things. Otherwise we get a stencilled stereotype in two dimensions and in black and white instead of the solid and many colored play of activities and sufferings which is the philosopher’s real datum.
The way of approach that sets out from that which is closest at hand, instead of from refined products of science no more signifies beginning with the results of psychologi¬ cal science than it does with those of physical science. Indeed the former material is further away from direct experience than that of physics. It signifies beginning back of any science, with experience in its gross and macro¬ scopic traits. Science will then be of interest as one of the phases of human experience, but intrinsically no more so than magjc, myth, politics, painting, poetry and peniten¬ tiaries. The domination of men by reverie and desire is as pertinent for the philosophic theory of nature as is mathematical physics; imagination as much to be noted as ^refined observation. It is a fact of experience that some PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 7 men, as Santayana has pointed out concerning Shelley, are immune to “experience” retaining intact the attitude of childhood. And for a thoroughgoing empiricist, the ^ most transcendental of philosophies is an empirical phe¬ nomenon. It may not prove intellectually what its origi¬ nator supposed it to demonstrate, but it shows something about experience, something possibly of immense value ^ for a subsequent interpretation of nature in the light of experience. • ' ^ experience. • ' ^ Hence it is that experience is something quite other -; than “consciousness,” that is, that which appears quali- T " tatively and focally at a particular moment. The com¬ mon man does not need to be told that ignorance is one of the chief features of experience; so are habits skilled and certain in operation so that we abandon ourselves to them without consciousness. Yet ignorance, habit, fatal implication in the remote, are just the things which pro¬ fessed empiricism, with its reduction of experience to states of consciousness, denies to experience. It is impor¬ tant for a theory of experience to know that under certain circumstances men prize the distinct and clearly evident.
But it is no more important than it is to know that under other circumstances twilight, the vague, dark and mysteri¬ ous flourish. Because intellectual crimes have been ^ committed in the name of the subconscious is no reason for refusing to admit that what is not explicitly present makes up a vastly greater part of experience than does the conscious field to which thinkers have so devoted them¬ selves.
When disease or religion or love, or knowledge itself is experienced, forces and potential consequences are im¬ plicated that are neither directly present nor logically 8 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE implied. They are “in” experience quite as truly as are present discomforts and exaltations. Considering the r61e which anticipation and memory of death have played in human life, from religion to insurance companies., what, can be said of a theory which defines experience in such a wayjthat it logically follows that death is never a matter of experience? Experience is no stream, even though the stream of feelings and ideas that flows upon its surface is the part which philosophers love to traverse. Experi¬ ence includes the enduring banks of natural constitution and acquired habit as well as the stream. The flying moment is sustained by an atmosphere that does not fly, even when it most vibrates.
When we say that experience is one point of approach to an account of the world in which we live, we mean then by experience something at least as wide and deep and full as all history on this earth, a history which, since history does not occur in the void, includes the earth and the physical relatives of man. When we assimilate experi¬ ence to history rather than to the physiology of sensations, we note that history denotes both objective conditions, forces, events and also the human record and estimate of these events. Similarly experience denotes whatever is experienced, whatever is undergone and tried, and also processes of experiencing. As it is the essence of “his- \tory” to have meanings termed both subjective and objective, so with “experience.” As William James has •) said, it is a “double-barrelled” fad;.2 Without sun, moon and stars, mountains and rivers, forests and mines, soil, rain and wind, history would not be. These things are not just external conditions of history and experience; they 2 Lloyd Morgan, Instinct and Experience, pp. 126-128.
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 9 are integral with them. But also without the human attitude and interest, without record and interpretation, these things would not be historical.
There is an obvious retort to this plea to take the con¬ ception of experience with the utmost of naivete and catholicity, as the common man takes it when he experi¬ ences illness and prosperity, love, marriage, and death. The objection is that experience is then made so inclusive and varied as to be useless for philosophic purposes. Experience, as we are here told to conceive it, includes just everything and anything, actual or potential, that we think of and talk about. So we might just as well start with everything and anything and drop out the idea and word, “experience.” The traditional notion of experience, which has been disowned, may be erroneous. But at least it denotes something specific, differential; something which may be set in contrast with other things and may thus serve as a principle of criticism and estimate. But the whole wide universe of fact and dream, of event, act, desire, fancy and meanings, valid or invalid, can be set in contrast to nothing. And if what has been said is taken literally, “experience” denotes just this wide universe.
Here is indeed a vulnerable spot in experience as a guiding method for philosophy. It is presented to us as a catholic and innocent neutral, free from guile and parti¬ sanship. But then unwittingly there is substituted for this free, full, unbiased and pliable companion of us all, a simplified and selected character, which is already pointed in a special direction and loaded with preferred_conclu- sions. So often does this occur, that one does well to ex¬ ercise a wary scepticism whenever an inquirer insistently 10 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE professes that he keeps to an empirical method. And when this biased course, (easy to fall into as the history of thought testifies), is avoided, the alternative seems to be everything without discrimination, so that experience ceases to have a meaning.
The objection uncovers the exact meaning of a truly empirical method. For it reveals the fact that experi- ence for philosophy is method, not distinctive subjectmatter. And it also reveals the sort of method that philosophy needs. Experience includes dreams, insanity,*^ illness, death, labor, war, confusion, ambiguity, lies and error; it includes transcendental systems as well as empiri¬ cal ones; magic and superstition as well as science. It includes that bent which keeps one from learning from experience as well as that skill which fastens upon its faint hints. This fact convicts upon sight every philoso¬ phy that professes to be empirical and yet assures us that some especial subject-matter is experience and some other The value of experience as method in philosophy id t^a* , "it compels us to note that denotation comes first and last, so that to settle any discussion, to still any doubt, to answer any question, we must go to some thing pointed to, denoted, and find our answer in that thing. As method it has a contrast which it does not possess as pr subject matter, that with “rationalism,” understanding by rationalism method which assumes the primacy and ultimacy of purely logical thought and its findings. There . are two kinds of demonstration: that of logical reasoning ' from premises assumed to possess logical completeness, A and that of showing, pointing, coming upon a thing. The - latter method is that which the word experience sums up, PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 11 generalizes, makes universal and ulterior. To_say that the right method is one of pointing and showing, not of meeting intellectual requirements or logical derivation from rational ideas, doesjnot, although it is non-rational, * imply a preference for irrationality. For one of the things that is pointed out, found and shown, is deduction, and the logic that governs it. But these things have also to be found and shown, and their authority rests upon the perceived outcome of this empirical denotation. The utmost in rationality has a sanction and a position that, according to taste, may be called sub-rational or supra- rational.
The value, I say of the notion of experience for philoso- V phy is that it asserts the finality and comprehensiveness of~t.he_met.hod of pointing, finding, showing, and the necessity of seeing what is pointed to and accepting what is found in good faith and without discount. Were the denotative method universally followed by philosophers, then the word and the notion of experience might be dis¬ carded; it would be superfluous, for we should be in posses¬ sion of everything it stands for. But as long as men pre¬ fer in philosophy, (as they so long preferred in science) to define and envisage “reality” according to esthetic, moral or logical canons, we need the_notion of experience Mo remind us that “reality” includes whatever is deno_I&- i tivelv found.
When the varied constituents of the wide universe, the unfavorable, the precarious, uncertain, irrational, hate¬ ful, receive the same attention that is accorded the noble, honorable and true, then philosophy may conceivably dis¬ pense with the conception of experience. But till that day arrives, we need a cautionary and directive word, 12 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE like experience, to remind us thjit the world which is lived, suffered and enjoyed as well as logically thought, of. -ft has the last word in all human inquiries and surmises. This is a doctrine of humility: but it is also a. doctrine o_f direction. For it tells us to open the eyes and ears of the mind, to be sensitive to all the varied phases of life and history. Nothing is more ironical than that philosophers who have so professed universality have so often been one¬ sided specialists, confined to that which is authentically and surely known, ignoring ignorance, error, folly and the common enjoyments and adornments of life; disposing of these by regarding them as due to our “finite” natures — a blest word that does for moderns what “non-being” was made to do for the Greeks.
The history of thought sufficiently manifests the need for a method of procedure that sets pointing, finding and showing, ahead of methods that substitute ratiocina¬ tion and its conclusions for things that are done, suffered and imagined. Philosophers are yyont to start with highly #■ simplified premises. They do this not inadvertently, but with pride, as evidence that they really understand philo¬ sophic business. Absolute certainty in knowledge of Q things and absolute security in the ordering of life have often been assumed to be the goal of philosophic, search: consequently philosophers have set out with data and principles sufficiently simple to yield what is sought. When some historic religion is ceasing to confer upon men o a sense of certainty and security men especially resort to philosophy for a substitute. So they did in Greece: in Europe in the seventeenth century, and so we do today. Forms and essences, inner introspective facts, mathemati¬ cal truths may be resorted to. This is a varying matter PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 13 of the temporal scene. The constantfisldemandVor assur- 1 ance and order, and the demand is met only by ignoring ai vast number of the things that nature presents to us.
When we look for instances of a simplifying procedure exercised in this bias, we think perhaps most readily of Descartes with his certainty of thinking, of Spinoza with his conviction that a true idea carries truth intrinsically in itself so whatever must be thought, must — and alone must — be. But thinkers who profess empiricism also afford examples: there is Locke with his “simple idea,” Hume with his “impression.” And I do not see that con¬ temporary hankering after ultimate “sense-data,” or con¬ viction that mathematical logistic is at last to open to philosophy the arcana of ultimate truth, differ in principle.
Now the notion of experience, however devoid of differ¬ ential subject-matter — since it includes all subject-mat¬ ters —, at least tells us that we must not start with arbi¬ trarily selected simples, and from them deduce the complex and varied, ^assigning what cannot be thus deduced to an inferior realm of bemg. It warns us that the tangled and. complex is what we primarily findj that we work from and within it to discriminate, reduce, analyze; and that we must keep track of these activities, pointing to them, as well as to the things upon which they are exercised, and to their refined conclusions. When we contemplate their fruits we are not to ignore the art by which they are pro¬ duced. There is a place for polishers of stones and for those who put the stones together to make temples and palaces. But “experience” reminds us that a stone was once part of some stratum of the earth, and that a quarry- man pried it loose and another workman blew the massive rock to smaller pieces, before it could be smooth-hewn and / 0 14 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE fitted into an ordered and regular structure. Empirical method warns us that systems which set out from things o said to be ultimate and simple have always worked with loaded dice; their premises have been framed to yield desired conclusions.
Professed sceptics rarely fare better, whether they con¬ sistently maintain the attitude, or whether they employ doubt in order to discover a triumphant exit into certitude. Man is naturally a credulous animal. It is well„ to be which, before they command acceptance, should exhibit credentials. But some things, things of action and suffer¬ ing, are not matters of belief at all; they just are. No one ever doubted birth, death, love or hate, no matter how much theories about them justly provoke doubts. Philos¬ ophers have exhibited proper ingenuity in pointing out holes in the beliefs of common sense, but they have also displayed improper ingenuity in ignoring the empirical things that every one has; the things that so denote them¬ selves that they have to be dealt with. No wonder Hume’s doubts vanished when he played backgammon and made merry with his friends. Not that many of his doubts of doctrines were not suitable, but that in his companionships he was involved in another world from that to which he confined his philosophizing. Merri¬ ment and sorrow are not of the same order as beliefs, /; impressions and ideas. The advice of Epictetus to a fel¬ low-slave whose master adhered to the school of sceptics, ji_jto rub his master with a curry-comb and anoint him with pepper-sauce is irrelevant to doubt about systema¬ tized beliefs, but it is a pertinent reminder that whatever things we are compelled to pay heed to, things of jov and PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 15 suffering, cannot have their existence honestly called in_ question.
When a thinker ventures to begin with things which are too crude and coarse to come within the ken of intellec- tualists, he finds, moreover, that as an empiricist he is not obliged to face the miscellaneous world en masse. Things are pointed to in kinds, possessed of order and arrange¬ ment. Pre-philosophic selections and arrangings may not be final for reflective thought, but they are significant for it. The bias they manifest is not that of the closet or library, but of men who have responded to the one-sided pressures of natural events. The key to the trends Qf nature is found in the adjectives that are commonly pre-w^ fixed to experience. Experience is political, religious, esthetic, industrial, intellectual, mine, yours.
J The adjectives denote that things present themselves in characteristic contexts, with different savors, colors, weights, tempos and directions. Experience as method warns us to give impartial attention to all of these diver¬ sifications. Non-empirical method sets out with the as¬ sumption that some one of these groupings of things is \/ privileged; that it is supreme of its own right, that it furnishes a standard by which to measure the significance and real quality of everything else. The sequel is then but a dialectic. Philosophers deduce results in accord¬ ance with what is logically implied in their own choice of standard and measure.
Philosophy is a branch of that phase of things which is qualified by the adjective “intellectual,” Since it is the express and proper business of the philosopher to subject things to reflection with a view to knowledge (to justifiable belief), he is prone to take the outcome of reflection for 16 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE something antecedent. That is to say, instead of seeing that the product of knowing is statement of things, he is given to taking it as an existential equivalent _pf what things really are “in themselves^” so that the subject-matter of other modes of experience are deviations, shortcomings, or trespasses — or as the dialectical philosopher puts it, mere “phenomena.” The experiential or denotative*/ method tells us that we must go behind the refinements and elaborations of reflective experience to the gross and compulsory things of our doings, enjoyments and suffer¬ ings — to the things that force us to labor, that satisfy needs, that surprise us with beauty, that compel obedi¬ ence under penalty. A common divisor is a convenience, and a greatest common divisor has the greatest degree of convenience. But there is no reason for supposing that its intrinsic “reality” or truth is greater than that of the numbers it divides. The objects of intellectual experi¬ ence are the greatest common divisor of the things of other modes; they have that remarkable value, but to convert them into exclusive reality is the sure road to arbitrary divisions and insoluble problems.
Not all philosophies have assumed that reflective experi¬ ence, with logic as its norm, is the standard for experien¬ tial, religious, esthetic, industrial, social objects. Many thinkers haveconcluded that dialectic ends in an impasse; that it involves us in contradictory statement^. Then they have appealed to something which they assert is higher than thought. But it is significant that they think of this higher recourse as a higher kind of knowledge, as intuition, or immediate insight, mystical certainty of the trulyjreal. Thus the thinker still shows his inability to take things as he has to take them as a human being, as PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 17 things to pay heed to under penalty of death and defeat, things to use and enjoy, to master and submit to. The notion still lurks that in their intrinsic being they are things of knowledge.