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 EXISTENCE AND VALUE EXISTENCE AND VALUE 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 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE 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 EXISTENCE AND VALUE EXISTENCE AND VALUE 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 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE 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 EXISTENCE AND VALUE EXISTENCE AND VALUE 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 proper- EXPERIENCE AND NATURE ties of the empirically physical and psycho-physical becomes a peculiar kind of existence, called metaphysical.
There are also philosophies, rarer in occurrence, which allege that the ideal is too sacredly ideal to have any point of contact whatever with existence; they think that contact is contagion and contagion infection. At first sight such a view seems to display a certain nobility of faith and fineness of abnegation. But an ideal realm that has no roots in existence has no efficacy nor relevancy. It is a light which is darkness, for shining in the void it illumines nothing and cannot reveal even itself. It gives no instruction, for it cannot be translated into the meaning and import of what actually happens, and hence it is barren; it cannot mitigate the bleakness of existence nor modify its brutalities. It thus abnegates itself in abjuring footing in natural events, and ceases to be ideal, to become whimsical fantasy or linguistic sophistication.
These remarks are made not so much by way of hostile animadversion as by way of indicating the sterility of wholesale conceptions of the relation of existence and value. By negative implication, they reveal the only kind of doctrine that can be effectively critical, taking effect in discriminations which emancipate, extend, and clarify. Such a theory will realize that the meanings which are termed ideal as truly as those which are termed sensuous are generated by existences; that as far as they continue in being they are sustained by events; that they are indications of the possibilities of existences, and are, therefore, to be used as well as enjoyed; used to inspire action to procure and buttress their causal conditions. Such a doctrine criticizes particular occurrences by the particular meanings to which they give rise; it criticizes EXISTENCE AND VALUE EXISTENCE AND VALUE also particular meanings and goods as their conditions are found to be sparse, accidental, incapable of conservation, or frequent, pliant, congruous, enduring; and as their consequences are found to afford enlightenment and direc¬ tion in conduct, or to darken counsel, narrow the horizon of vision, befog judgment and distort perspective. A good is a good anyhow, but to reflection those goods approve themselves, whether labelled beauty or truth or righteousness, which steady, vitalize and expand judg¬ ments in creation of new goods and conservation of old goods. To common-sense this statement is a truism. If to philosophy it is a stumbling-block, it is because tra¬ dition in philosophy has set itself in stiff-necked fashion against discriminations within the realm of existences, on account of the pluralistic implications of discrimination. It insists upon having all or none; it cannot choose in favor of some existences and against others because of prior commitment to a dogma of perfect unity. Such dis¬ tinctions as it makes are therefore always hierarchical; degrees of greater and less, superior and inferior, in one homogeneous order.
I gladly borrow the glowing words of one of our greatest American philosophers; with their poetry they may succeed in conveying where dry prose fails. Justice Holmes has written: “The mode in which the inevitable comes to pass is through effort. Consciously or uncon- sciously we all strive to make the kind of world that we like. And although with Spinoza we may regard critic¬ ism of the past as futile, there is every reason for doing all that we can to make a future such as we desire.” He then goes on to say, “there is every reason also for trying to make our desires intelligent. The trouble is that our EXPERIENCE AND NATURE ideals for the most part are inarticulate, and that even if we have made them definite we have very little experi¬ mental knowledge of the way to bring them about.” And this effort to make our desires, our strivings and our ideals, (which are as natural to man as his aches and his clothes) articulate, to define them (not in themselves which is impossible) in terms of inquiry into conditions and consequences is what I have called criticism; and when carried on in the grand manner, philosophy. In a further essay, Justice Holmes touches upon the relation of philos¬ ophy (thus conceived) to our scientific and metaphysical insight into the kind of a world in which we live.
“When we come to our attitude toward the universe I do not see any rational ground for demanding the super¬ lative for being dissatisfied unless we are assured that our truth is cosmic truth, if there is such a thing.
If a man sees no reason for believing that significance, consciousness and ideals are more than marks of the human, that does not justify what has been familiar in French sceptics; getting upon a pedestal and professing to look with haughty scorn upon a world in ruins. The real conclusion is that the part cannot swallow the whole. • • • • If we believe that we came out of the uni¬ verse, not it out of us, we must admit that we do not know what we are talking about when we speak of brute matter.
We do know that a certain complex of energies can wag its tail and another can make syllogisms. These are among the powers of the unknown, and if, as may be, it has still greater powers that we cannot understand...why should we not be content? Why should we employ the energy that is furnished to us by the cos¬ mos to defy it and to shake our fist at the sky? It seems to me silly.”
EXISTENCE AND VALUE “That the universe has in it more than we understand. that the private soldiers have not been told the plan of campaign, or even that there is one...has no bearing on our conduct. We still shall fight — all of us because we want to live, some, at least, because we want to realize our spontaneity and prove our powers, for the joy of it, and we may leave to the unknown the supposed final valuation of that which in any event has value to us. It is enough for us that the universe has produced us and has within it, as less than it, all that we believe and love.
If we think of our existence not as that of a little god outside, but as that of a ganglion within, we have the infinite behind us. It gives us our only but our adequate significance. If our imagination is strong enough to accept the vision of ourselves as parts inseparable from the rest, and to extend our final interest beyond the boundary of our skins, it justifies even the sacrifice of our lives for ends outside of ourselves. The motive to be sure is the common wants and ideals that we find in man. Philosophy does not furnish motives, but it shows men that they are not fools for doing what they already want tojk). It opens to the forlorn hopes on which we throw ourselves away, the vista of the farthest stretch of human thought, the chord of a harmony that breathes from the unknown.”
Men move between extremes. They conceive of them¬ selves as gods, or feign a powerful and cunning god as an ally who bends the world to do their bidding and meet their wishes. Disillusionized, they disown the world that disappoints them; and hugging ideals to themselves as their own possession, stand in haughty aloofness apart from the hard course of events that pays so little heed to EXPERIENCE AND NATURE our hopes and aspirations. Rut a mind that, has opened itself to experience and that has ripened through its discipline knows its own littleness and impotencies; it_ knows that its wishes and acknowledgments are not final measures of the universe whether in knowledge or in con¬ duct, and hence are, in the end, transient. But it also knows that its juvenile, assumption of power and achieve¬ ment is not a dream to be wholly forgotten. It implies a unity with the universe that is to be preserved. The belief, and the effort of thought and struggle which it inspires are also the doing of the universe, and they in some way, however slight, carry the universe forward. A chastened sense of our importance, apprehension that it is not a vard-stick bv which to measure the whole, is consistent with the belief that we and our endeavors are significant not only for themselves but in the whole.
Fidelity to the nature to which we belong, as parts however weak, demands that we cherish our desires and ideals till we have converted them into intelligence, revised them in terms of the ways and means which nature makes possible. When we have used our thought to its utmost and have thrown into the moving unbalanced balance of things our puny strength, we know that though the universe slay us still we may trust, for our lot is one with whatever is good in existence. We know that such thought and effort is one condition of the coming into existence of the better. As far as we are concerned it is the only condition, for it alone is in our power. To ask more than this is childish; but to ask less is a recreance no less egotistic, involving no less a cutting of ourselves from the universe than does the expectation that it meet and satisfy our every wish. To ask in good faith as much EXISTENCE AND VALUE as this from ourselves is to stir into motion every capacity of imagination, and to exact from action every skill and bravery.
While, therefore, philosophy has its source not in any special impulse or staked-off section of experience, but in the entire human predicament, this human situation falls wholly within nature. It reflects the traits of nature; it gives indisputable evidence that in nature itself quali¬ ties and relations, individualities and uniformities, finali¬ ties and efficacies, contingencies and necessities are inex¬ tricably bound together. The harsh conflicts and the happy coincidences of this interpenetration make experi¬ ence what it consciously is; their manifest apparition creates doubt, forces inquiry, exacts choice, and imposes liability for the choice which is made. Were there complete harmony in nature, life would be spontaneous efflorescence. If disharmony were not in both man and nature, if it were only between them, man would be the ruthless overlord of nature, or its querulous oppressed subject. It is precisely the peculiar intermixture of support and frustration of man hy nature whirli rnngtj- tutes experience. The standing antitheses of philosophic thought, purpose and mechanism, subject and object, necessity and freedom, mind and body, individual and general, are all of them attempts to formulate the fact that nature induces and partially sustains meanings and goods, and at critical junctures withdraws assistance and flouts its own creatures.
The striving of man for objects of imagination is a con¬ tinuation of natural processes; it is something man has learned from the world in which he occurs, not something which he arbitrarily injects into that world. When he EXPERIENCE AND NATURE adds perception and ideas to these endeavors, it is not after all he who adds; the addition is again the doing of nature and a further complication of its own domain. To act, to enjoy and suffer in consequence of action, to reflect, to discriminate and make differences in what had been but gross and homogeneous good and evil, according to what inquiry reveals of causes and effects; to act upon what has been learned, thereby to plunge into new and unconsidered predicaments, to test and revise what has been learned, to engage in new goods and evils is human, the course which manifests the course of nature. They are the manifest destiny of contingency, fulfillment, qualitative individualization and generic uniformities in nature. To note, register and define the constituent structure of nature is not then an affair neutral to the office of criticism. It is a preliminary outline of the field of criticism, whose chief import is to afford understanding of the necessity and nature of the office of intelligence.
If I mistake not, the actual animus of subjectivity in modern philosophy is not where its antagonists have placed it. Its actual animus and its obnoxious burden are exemplified in the doctrine of its hostile critics. For they assign to knowledge alone valid reference to existence. Desires, beliefs, “practical” activity, values are attrib¬ uted exclusively to the human subject; this division is what makes subjectivity a snare and peril. The case of belief is crucial. For it is admitted that belief involves a phase of acquiescence or assertion, it presents qualities which involve personal factors; and (whatever definition of value be employed) value. A sharp line of demarca¬ tion has therefore to be drawn between belief and knowl¬ edge, for the latter has been defined in terms of pure objec- EXISTENCE AND VALUE EXISTENCE AND VALUE tivity. The need to control belief is admitted; knowledge figures, even though according to these theories only per accidens, as the organon of such control. Practically then, in effect, knowledge, science, truth, is the method of criticizing beliefs. It is the method of determining right participation in beliefs on the part of personal factors. Why then keep up any other distinction between knowl¬ edge and beliefs, save that between methodical agencies, efficacious instrumentalities, and the accepted objects which being conclusions, are hence marked by characters due to the method of their production, in contrast with objects of belief blindly and accidentally generated? Why perturbation at the intimation that science is inher¬ ently an instrument of critically determining what is good and bad in the way of acceptance and rejection?
I can see but one answer. The realm of desire, belief, search, choice is thought of as “subjective” in a sense which isolates it from natural existence and which makes it an inexplicable irruption. This is the reason for sharp separation of belief and knowledge. Aversion to making science a means of determining the right operation of per¬ sonal factors, just as the technical and material apparatus of a painter determines his product, is well grounded if the personal is outside of nature. Made a means to something personal conceived in this sense, science loses its objectivity, and becomes infected with the traits which characterize the merely private and arbitrary.
There is involved, however, in the conclusion an unex¬ amined and uncriticized assumption. The reason for isolating doubt, striving, purpose, the variegated colored play of goods and bads, rejections and acceptances, is they do not belong in the block universe which forms the EXPERIENCE AND NATURE object of generalized knowledge, whether the block be conceived as mechanical or as rational in structure. The argument thus moves in a vicious circle; the question is begged at the outset. If individualized qualities, status arrests, limiting “ends,” and contingent changes charac¬ terize nature, then they manifest themselves in the uses, enjoyments and sufferings, the searchings and strivings which form conscious experience. These are as realistic, as “objectively” natural, as are the constituents of the object of cognitional experience. There is then no ground for denying or evading the full import of the fact that the latter are the means and the only means of regulative appraisals of values, of their revision, rectification, of their regulated generation and fortification.
The habitual avoidance in theories of knowledge of any reference to the fact that knowledge is a case of belief, operates as a device for ignoring the monstrous conse¬ quences of regarding the latter as existentially subjective, personal and private. No such device is available in dealing with esthetic and moral goods. Here the obnoxi¬ ous one-sided conception operates in full force. The usual current procedure is to link values with likings as merely personal affairs, ignoring the inconvenient fact that the theory logically thereby makes all beliefs also matters of arbitrary, undiscussable preference. It is no cause for wonder therefore that there is next to no consen¬ sus in esthetic and moral theories. Since their subject- matter is totally segregated from that of science, since they are assigned to independent non-participating realms of existence, the only possible method of achieving agree¬ ment has been exiled in advance.
EXISTENCE AND VALUE EXISTENCE AND VALUE Practically this consequence is intolerable; accordingly it is rarely faced. “Standards” of value suddenly make their appearance to serve as criteria of taste and con¬ science. The distinction between likings and that which is worth liking, between the desired and the desirable, between the is and the ought, descends out of the blue. There are, it seems, immediate values, but there also are standard values, and the latter may be used to judge and measure immediate goods and bads. Thus the reflective distinction between the true and the false, the genuine and the spurious is brought upon the scene. In strict logic, however, it enters only to disappear. For if the standard is itself a value, then it is by definition only another name for the object of a particular liking, on the part of some particular subjective creature. If the liking for it con¬ flicts with some other liking, the strongest wins. There is no question of false and true, of real and seeming, but only of stronger and weaker. The question of which one should be stronger is as meaningless as it would be in a cock-fight.
Such a conclusion puts an end to all attempt at con¬ sistency and organization and calls out in reaction an opposite theory. The “standard” is not, it is decided, for us at least, a good. It is rather a principle rationally apprehended. It is that which is “right” rather than that which is good; and since it is the right, it is the stand¬ ard for judging all goods. If right is also good, the identi¬ fication subsists in some transcendental realm; in some eternal, non-empirical realm of Being which is also a realm of values. The standard of good thus conceived as a principle of reason and as a form of supreme Being, is set over against the outside of actual desires, striving, EXPERIENCE AND NATURE satisfactions and frustrations. It ought to enter into their determination but for the most part it does not. The distinction between is and ought is one of kind, and a separation. It is not surprising that the wheel com¬ pletes a full circle, and that the finale is a retort that the alleged standard is itself but another dignified disguise for some one’s arbitrary liking — the ipse dixit of some one accidentally clothed with extraneous authority.