The Unity of Being
Part I Section 4
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Section 4
Assumption or Principles of Method
1. The Nature of a Philosophical Assumption.
The only “assumptions” which perhaps ought to be made in philosophy are — as we have suggested in the section heading — those which are really implied in the very undertaking of philosophy, as a rational inquiry into the meaning of life as a whole. If life as a whole has no meaning, then philosophy discovering this will proceed to endow it with the degree of meaning attaching to the words — “no meaning.” In any case, what is assumed is the self-awareness of a living experience seeking to “understand” itself and its contents — in other words, to determine how it should relate these contents in and to itself, or, putting it in another fashion, how it shall best make real to itself their natures and connections. Since philosophy is a social activity, it seems absurd for it to consider the existence of personal individuals, capable of intercourse with one another, as a matter to be put in doubt for any philosophical purpose.
In short philosophy naturally assumes its own existence. Whatever it attempts to do, it asserts that that attempt is real — and the chief problem is for the philosopher to determine more explicitly what his aspiration is really directed towards, and what its very existence implies. For many purposes, doubtless, and purposes which [61] may well be called philosophical, such a self-examination of the inquiring activity is not what is mainly in point. Certainly, for example, in a philosophy of history, this could hardly be the case. Arid in a philosophical survey of the sciences, it is perfectly admissible to undertake a criticism of the categories and hypotheses of science without having first demonstrated the existence of a coherent body of scientific or reliable data, through an inquiry into the validity of memory, perception and the like. Nevertheless, in so far as philosophy is a last stand of the reason, a final return of knowledge from the region of possible error to the assured certainty which it enjoys in the possession of itself, as the self-verifying source and ground of all inquiry, in so far it is the philosopher’s task to display the whole structure of probable and relative knowledge as standing firm (in its genuine probability or relative truth) upon the inalienable powers and privileges of the knowing mind.1 From this point of view, at least, the primary assumption of philosophic inquiry is not an assumption in any proper sense. It is just knowledge. As Hegel well puts it:
“It may seem as if philosophy, in order to start on [62] its course, had, like the rest of the sciences, to begin with a subjective presupposition. The sciences postulate their respective objects, such as space, number, or whatever it be; and it might be supposed that philosophy had also to postulate the existence of thought. But the two cases are not exactly parallel. It is by the free act of thought that it occupies a point of view, in which it is for its own self, and thus gives itself an object of its own production. Nor is this all. The very point of view, which originally is taken on its own evidence only, must in the course of the science be converted to a result, — the ultimate result in which philosophy returns into itself and reaches the point where it began. This is in short the one single aim, action, and goal of philosophy — to arrive at the notion of its notion, and thus secure its return and its satisfaction.”
Opposed to such a conception of the ground on which philosophy stands is the essentially false view that knowledge must begin with a “leap in the dark” — must assume something it does not know. If this were so it could not even know when its leap had taken place, but must make another leap for the purpose. The simple truth is that to know is not merely to believe or to infer from premisses. It is at bottom to see, to possess, to hold inalienably within oneself.
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2. Inconsistency as the Test of Falsity.
Even granting this, we are left with the problem: what can be elicited by the mind as the content and implications of its inherent self-knowledge. Must it not assume principles of analysis or of inference? The answer would appear to be, as before, no. The principle upon which mind proceeds is that it knows what it wants and can tell when it gets it — can see when its self-analysis is giving it its own nature. This principle is not an arbitrary assumption. To suppose so is such an assumption. On the contrary, mind may very well possess an insight into its own goal which enables it to know when it is progressing toward that goal. There has been much analysis of the idea of self-evidence — analysis which is often critical but which is sometimes at the same time put forward as self-evident or indubitable. In the present essay, we will take it that the basis of philosophy is an insight belonging to mind into the success of its own combinations of meanings to serve its own fundamental or unitary purpose: into, in other words, the consistency of its ideas.2 This insight is imperfect in a very real sense — but it cannot be a sheer assumption.
The mind that should suppose it were so, could [64] succeed in doing this only by failing to really apply the principle involved to its own case. We cannot admit that we can never know when we contradict ourselves — when we mean something and also mean not to mean it — and we likewise know very well, when this is so, by a fashion the reverse of guess-work, that we are not getting what we seek under the word “truth.”
3. Realism and Certitude. If the question be asked how we ultimately know that the inconsistent cannot be, the only answer that presents itself is to admit that being and consistency are known as somehow in an identity, so that we are implicitly aware that the first without the second is the first without an essential element of its nature. Whatever the implications of this may be, if we ask: what is the final evidence that forces us to admit the significance of contradiction with regard to truth, several answers may be attempted. We may suppose that the identity of truth and consistency, reality and compatibility, is self-evident, or immediately perceived. If, however, this be the case, we must certainly possess a considerable insight into the nature of “truth” and of “reality” or “being” as such. In philosophies which declare truth to be an indefinable qualia of propositions (Mr. Russell) such insight appears in very little evidence. The same is true if we consider “being” — which is likewise, as we have noted, “internally” related to consistency. Professor Spaulding, indeed, appears to [65] define it as: “That which can be consistently thought.” But here he falls into an implication of idealism — which he wishes no doubt to avoid. Thought, with its internal consistency gives the meaning of being, and the latter hence includes thought as part of what it essentially or logically is.
If being and truth be defined in terms of propositions and their relations, then the proposition as a whole is prior to the entities composing a proposition, and the atomism of such systems falls.
In philosophies which define truth as correspondence of idea and object, the conviction that two conflicting ideas cannot apply to one and the same object, is really indefensible on a realistic basis. Why should they not both apply? Because then the object could not be one and the same. But how do we know what constituted individuality or identity — why should it not consist in two conflicting elements standing each other off as it were? As a fact it seems apparent that our conviction here is based on the fact that in destroying one idea with another, we are making no progress, that, to put it in a fitting colloquialism, “it isn’t getting us anything.” Our ideas nullify each other and we are left in darkness. But the question to be put is: is this a darkness purely relative to us, one in which the object may continue nonetheless to exist for all our being unable to think it in its inconsistency, — or does [66] the object vanish also at this point. The only answer, of course, is in the affirmative, — but for the clear reason that the “object” is only what we are able to mean by that word. We can only mean by it what we do mean; and if, contradicting ourselves, we mean nothing — then nothing is our object, and that alone. The object must be consistent because the object is defined as object, as something opposed to mind and meant by it.
In short the idealistic argument, that without subject there can be no object, is no fallacy of definition by initial predication, but is the only genuine explanation of the basis of knowledge.3 The quality of meanings, as reinforcing and fulfilling, or frustrating one another, is foundational to the universe. And in the end we agree with Mr. Bradley (Essays — Introduction) and the entire school of pragmatists in viewing the decisive rejection of inconsistency explicable only in terms of meaning as expressive of purpose. We know we are safe in insisting upon harmony among meanings because short of such harmony the good we seek is not attained.
Truth and the success of thought in [67] getting what it wants, must be seen as one; and all ideation admitted as either instrumental or in some sense valuational. The certain insight into the conflict of meanings rests on the fact that insight and object are here in one — that our meanings are what we make them to be, in terms of the self-illuminated purposes or values of the life of mind.4
Thus we believe that even the working principles or underived knowledge, of philosophy — can best be understood on an idealistic and valuational view of reality. But we do not assume this as a premiss in the argument — outline. The point of the discussion here is that we do not deny the assertion of pragmatism that value is essential to the meaning of truth. We urge only that contradiction be admitted as an appearance of failure in the purpose in hand, and that the doctrine of truth as successful valuation be held absolutely free from any suggestion that valuation is necessarily subjective or relative to the selfish and peculiar interests of the individual.
It must not be assumed that interest or purpose need be lacking in [68] a capacity to appreciate values in an objective and self-less fashion, as good not because they serve oneself, but as serving oneself because they are good. To be good may in fact be the highest service anything can do us — be it a person or a sunset. During the earlier sections of the argument, until the section on Value, we shall indeed assume that such a disinterested appreciation, enjoyment, or valuation is at least conceivable. For our object in the earlier steps of the argument will be to show the unique power of consistent application to the problems of the ultimate categories possessed by such view of value in contrast to the inconsistencies more or less radically attaching — we shall hope to show — to alternate views, and especially to all pluralisms without a genuine Ultimate Ground or Monistic Foundation.
4. “Assumptions” Adopted. We begin our list of “assumptions” then as follows:
(a) Consistency. That consistency is a legitimate criterion of truth.
(b) The Meaning of “Valuation” That valuation is capable of appraising an object in terms of a worth possessed as such by the object in substantial independence of the appraising or of any particular finite mind. (This assumption will be specifically defended in Section 12, and has already been discussed in some aspects throughout the introduction).
It will be used prior to Section 12 only [69] as a possible hypothesis to supplant those which in the earlier sections we shall be endeavoring to disprove.
(c) Transferability of Ideas and Their Truth. That maximum ease and reliability of transference of thought from one mind to another is not a primary test either of the truth or even of the philosophic value of these ideas. That consistency is the primary test in metaphysics as the science which investigates the nature of Being as such. It is the crucial test to be applied in the present essay in that field.
Consistency, and in the end therefore, nothing but truth, being the primary object, it will be no fatal defect in the execution of the design undertaken if maximum communicability with reference to all intelligent and technically trained minds, (whatever their cast of experience and character may be) is not represented. The maximum communicability of a given truth is to be desired; but the truth must be found first, and not predefined in terms of the most convenient and readily transferable ideas. The degree of universal intelligibility attainable with respect to any idea is doubtless sufficiently far above that ordinarily attained to properly induce humility among defenders of any school. Idealists have too much written for each other, or even in some cases, as Santayana says, too much for themselves, and the following pages may prove very far from the exception.
[70] On the other hand we cannot but repeat that if the groundwork of things is not merely ingenious complex or intricate but also spiritual and a realm of values, the possibility of philosophic truth may depend upon patience, humility, and the character of one’s experience of values, as well as upon technique. And if this is so, then there is no way of ensuring that it should become not so — or of compelling the universe to become a picture puzzle of abstractions in answer to our desire for perfect intellectual explicitness and glib transferability.
On a view of life indeed which seems to us to sum up and contain all that man has and is, the only concrete conceptions are those of a personal, ethical, aesthetic, or spiritual character. Upon this view, a philosophy which culminates not in the mere surrender of the abstracting intellect, nor in its self-enthronement as sufficient — which it is not — but in its indicating both the need for more concrete and profoundly experiential concepts and the direction in which they are to be sought5 and found, if they are to be found at all, — is a philosophy of a very considerable value; while a philosophy which permanently distracts and alienates thought from the concrete and experiential, that is to say — according to the religious [71]
Point of view at least — from the realm of the personal and spiritual, is so far quite the reverse. It has almost every defect except that of difficulty in transference — which is poor compensation for the doubtful value which it has to offer.
On the other hand, the inevitability of some uncertainty and difficulty in the transfer of ultimate ideas appears to attach reasonably only to ideas which are concrete — and thus more than bare logical outlines or relations. As we have defined Monism in general (i.e., as an outline of Being conceivable apart from any particular meaning or inner nature assigned to the One) our arguments for this view from the more abstract categories at least, ought not to appear obscure. If, however, as unfortunately may here and there or in many instances, prove to be the case, they do so appear, we cannot pretend to exempt the mode of expression adopted from censure justly based upon this fact. On the other hand, in view of the fate — so far as many students are concerned — of the masters of philosophic thought and expression, who have already expressed themselves, upon the present problem, in many cases with what is to us manifest conclusiveness, there remains always the possibility of viewing our fault as primarily the mere attempt to succeed where those infinitely more qualified, have in a measure failed — to the extent, that is, of their failure to secure universal conviction and [72] understanding. We can only remain in our faith that understanding here is conviction, and leave the matter to whatever judgment may be passed upon it, adding only, as the sole explanation or apology which can be offered in behalf of our perhaps barren and feeble repetitions of old views, that it is the thus exhibited ensemble or total pictures of a single seldom so sharply isolated although comprehensive and fundamental philosophical theory, together with its rational justification, that imparts to our program whatever significance and appropriateness it may have.
(d) Indefinablism Not Accepted. Although imperfectly communicable formulas and ideas appear to us of genuine value in philosophy, — inasmuch as it is better for a fair degree of cooperation to accompany us in a direction which may lead to truth6 than for philosophy to be limited at the start to a type of formulation which relatively all students might perhaps learn to comprehend, but which cannot be known in advance to lead toward the important truths we seek,7 yet on the other hand, we equally refuse to be limited by another and almost opposite assumption or dogma.
This is, namely, the oft-repeated [73] assertion that in any system of thought some ideas must be left wholly undefined. The argument for this assertion seems sufficiently loose and ill-conceived. It is held to be supported by the argument that if we necessarily define one thing in terms of another, either we can never complete the process, or else we must be guilty of the circular procedure of defining A in terms of B (directly or indirectly) and subsequently B in terms of A. Now the answer is, why should we not do so? Because we seek to illuminate our concept of A, by defining its relation to the concept of B, we cannot therefore infer that concept A has no meaning for us except as we view it in such connection with B. Both concepts may, indeed must, have a meaning of their own prior to the comparison of A and B, or else they are not concepts but merely words. Such terms as thought, feeling, self, value — all have a meaning for us, whether we have formulated any definition of one in terms of others, or of anything else, or not. All are aspects of experience with an actual content of their own. But in the case of all, this content is more fully apprehended the more we seek to define their exact interrelations with each other.
The reason for this may be that all concepts are the expression of a common principle or life — which we grasp with greater or less fullness in the case of each one. Thus “cognition” may be a relatively barren or partial conception of a process or actuality more fully and ade-[74]quately to be described as an act of evaluation.8 To assume that no such relation can obtain between concepts is to assume that monism in any significant form is inconceivable. For without such a scale of ascending concreteness among concepts, the One would be a mere word, as much of one nature as of another, equally and indifferently everything and nothing. The only question is: can it be shown there is such a hierarchy? If so, the dogmatic assumption there can not be may be neglected.
It is to be noted that in defining thought, e.g., in terms of evaluation we do not define it properly speaking in terms of “something else.” Wedefine it in terms of a concept which repeats the distinctive element given in bare “thought,” “cognition,” or “awareness” (these words again having their community and their differences), but adds a further element actually present as a fact, it may be, in every real thought or awareness, but not quite brought into attention by the abstract terms or concepts mentioned.
[75] The matter cannot be discussed fully here. But we deny the self-evident rationality of the dogma of indefinablism,9 and substitute for it the view that very few concepts can be fully, completely, and with all clearness and communicability defined; but that every concept (even “blueness”) can be defined to an extent sufficient to throw genuine light upon its essential nature. It tray be added that the attempt to banish all imperfectly communicable or definable concepts from a fundamental place has its own revenge in an outcome essentially in contradiction to that intention. In new realism for example we are rendered totally incapable of signifying the kind of thing that any of the myriad atomic entities postulated actually is. For any definition that really indicated the nature of a thing would of course accomplish this only by introducing internal complexity into the term besides showing it to be the embodiment of a universal as a reality both within and without the term, thus destroying the latter as a sheerly independent entity.
We may mention in passing Professor Spaulding’s contention that ultimately there must be simple terms, since otherwise complexity is impossible.
But it may be replied [76] to this that individuality may in the end be relative to the point of view, except in the case of individuals as unities for themselves, or as unique psychic “centers” or “foci” of experience. In any other case, perhaps, there is no end to possible differentiation from some point of view or other. On the other hand, if one takes internal relations as essential to an entity this does not destroy its oneness from the standpoint from which it is regarded as one individual — whatever this standpoint may be. If by “a point” I mean essentially, such-and-such-a-factor or aspect-of-space, then the point does not, as a point, become two, or multiple because this belonging to space is an internal relation of “point.” For by our one individual point we mean just one particular “here-now” of spatial experience. The relations being involved in the individual destroy it as an “independent” ultimate simple; but they do not disturb its unity as a single member in the system of spatial positions. (For further discussion the reader is referred to the conclusions of Sections 8 and 10).
Our assumption is, then, that there is no impossibility in a genuine definition of all categories, and that if the “circularity” involved rendered the definitions idle or superfluous this must imply either that the fundamental concepts have a completely clear meaning to everyone, and need no definition; or that at least some of them have [77] no meaning at all except upon explicit relation to, or definition in terms of, other terms or conceptions. Either assumption appears to us monstrous, and certainly far from self-evident. It is once more a case of prejudging the monistic issue in order to combat it; and once more the procedure is not only dogmatic, but appears to us to result in a manifest absurdity or untruth. To define “will” partly in terms of “feeling” and feeling partly in terms of will seems to us perfectly rational and significant — inasmuch as with both concepts there is a manifest element of meaning we are not quite sure of at first in the case of the other, but which may appear to belong also to the other, although as an aspect subordinated in it to others. If feeling involves, as McDougal holds, the presence in it, of the “striving” of the ever-active self; and on the other hand, if volition is unthinkable except as in part at least a relation among elements of positive or negative affectivity, then circularity seems quite clearly to yield results and to be so far from pernicious as to constitute precisely what is desired in definition.
If, finally, we close upon a set of kindred or practically synonymous concepts, as expressing the Principle involved in, and serviceable as roughly defining, all others, and on the other hand if, when challenged, we resort to definitions of this ultimate principle in terms again of the subordinate concepts, there is no inconsistency or [78] absurdity involved. For we are thus using concepts both as explicitly attended with some meaning-value, however vague, of their own, and as deriving their full significance from the concrete and complete state of apprehension enjoyed by the mind employing them in connection with each other, in order to build up a total apprehension or realization of the Living Principle expressed in and organizing all concepts. It is as a clue to the employment of ideas together that ultimate ideas are of use, and on the other hand the method of comprehending these ideas themselves is accordingly to discover the place of the remaining ideas in the idea-system which implicitly — (and, by means of definition, explicitly) the ultimate idea is in addition to its quality of apparent, intrinsic meaning — i.e., the degree to which meaning aspects which might be brought out by employing other terms denoting these aspects in detail, are already — to most minds — awakened by the word in question. What “love” or “interest” denotes to a given person may be an open question — but in any case we can secure the meaning we like — if the other person’s experience is equally comprehensive — by emphasizing the aspects of “unselfishness” or of “sympathy” and the like, which we wish to be included.10
[79] Ultimately the definition of all things in terms of an Ultimate Principle and of the principle in terms of all things, carried out in an imperfect fashion, but so as to bring all ideas into some genuine and illuminating relation to the entire scheme, is so far from the hypostacizing of a concept as to be precisely the use of a leading idea in order to set all ideas in their proper place in the life of mind, not as the mere juggler of concepts, but as the appreciative being which apprehends and possesses reality not as composed of concepts, but as delivered into its hands through the use of concept-terms as stimuli to a properly awakened sense of the value of things — an enjoyment or possession which takes place in the midst of the succession of concepts but is the pervading life only partially expressed and realized in each, and fully itself only in the direct intuition of value which is something superior to and the foundation of all mere conception. Its full reality must lie in a valuation not dependent upon concepts or discursive thinking at all, but upon immediate comprehension or experience of all values — “the Divine Good” as it is called in our title. In short to know what Being is, is simply to know what values should be ascribed to it in relation to the various types of realities that may have being, and this ascription or sense of values is mediated by concepts, and by their interrelations, no matter [80] how circular.11
The entire matter will receive illustrations and development in the section on value, and therefore must not be carried further here. We may say only that the possibility of some degree of definition in all cases appears to us open to no conclusive objection, and that any view which brings us to a dead stop before an essentially and irremediably mysterious conception or quality is so far infected with weakness. As Plato pointed out (Theatetus: 203, 206 — Jowett) long ago, if we know things only in terms of parts or elements which are indefinable, then all our knowledge is in the end a compounding of bits of ignorance. The phrase “knowledge by acquaintance” cannot obviate the inconsistency of a view of entities which we know, and know that we know, and yet are in principle incapable of telling in the least what we know them to be. We may well as a fact be so incapable,12 but that the very nature of knowledge and of reality should imply [81] the impossibility of a knowledge of what things, in their natures, are — seems to us absurd, and the contradiction of knowledge as the characterization of things in terms of the natures which belong to them.
In only a few points will this conclusion be employed as a premiss of argument, and the fact will there be noted. But it seems to us a decided advantage that our system not only owes nothing to the dogma of Indefinablism, but is able to reach and illustrate the opposite view: that definition, while always incomplete and in many cases rough and approximate in high degree, is nevertheless, in principle, a universal possibility.
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Endnotes
1. Thus Schelling: “The affirmation There are things outside of us, will therefore be certain for the transcendental philosopher, solely because of its identity with the affirmation I am.” (Rand: Modern Classical Philosophers, p. 539)
2. If it be asked whether we must assume the mind to have such insight, the reply must be: no, we see it to have it and that he who lays no claim to such perception, must refrain from attaching any significance to thought or argument of any kind, so far as he is concerned.
3. If the realist asserts a direct insight into the necessary consistency of reality, he must admit: (a) That we perceive the nature of reality or being as such, and (b) That being is internally related throughout by a relation of consistency. Otherwise to the question why blue may not be both exactly the same as and yet different from green; or, if he is an atomist, why a logical simple could not be both one and many at once, there seems to be no answer on realistic premisses.
4. The introduction of the value-concept here may appear superfluous — and is admittedly hasty. Nothing is made to depend upon it, however. The advantage of construing meaning as value here is (1) that meaning is otherwise a blind concept throwing with it vagueness little light on our certain knowledge of the consistency of meanings — whereas to purpose is clearly to know in some degree at least, what we purpose; and (2) that the loyalty of the mind to truth is also better accounted for.
5. Thus it succeeds in retaining the situation under its control — in the only sense in which this is feasible or desirable.
6. Even if to a truth not so readily and perfectly controllable as is truth attained in mathematics or other highly abstract inquiries.
7. Indeed to many appears quite certainly to lead away from any complete or fundamental idea of truth.
8. A word subject to its own further illumination or definition. If this is secured in part by a backward reference to “awareness” in order to avoid any interpretation of “valuation” as a process carried on blindly, there seems no fatal circularity here. “Awareness” communicates some meaning without its definition (as we offer it) in terms of value. And “value” likewise conveys something in isolation. But the full meanings of all words depend on a full consciousness of their relations, as forming the system in which, as functions of the One Mind, they are organized — expressing one ultimate and all-pervading purpose which in this system (as brought out by “circular” definition) is revealed to and apprehended by the Mind.
9. Or of the viciousness of circular definition — a process which is vicious in fact only upon pluralistic assumptions under which the only form of interrelation of A and B which can illuminate the nature of either is where the other is a simple atomic part of it in a sense which cannot be reciprocal.
10. On the other hand, nothing involved in “love” may be found to be lacking completely or in principle in what is intended by sympathy. The difference may be in the degree to which some aspect is present in a developed or in an undeveloped form.
11. The circularity of geometrical definitions — “point” in terms of “line” and vice versa, leaves us with no great sense of advance because we already know by our spatial intuitions the general relations of these concepts with each other. What we do not know, and our ignorance of which leaves us dissatisfied and with a sense of mystery, is the relations of point and line to space as a whole and of that to non-spatial characters of experience. Only the circle or system of all ideas can yield a definition as satisfactory as it is circular.
12. If without analytic training for example.
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