The Unity of Being
Part I Section 5
[82]
Section 5
Plan and Divisions of the Outline
1. Division by Categories. The argument is divided according to categories. Each division represents a phase of the necessity for a Monistic view of Being — the first of the categories considered — a necessity which becomes apparent when any category is sought to be applied in accordance with a pluralistic view of the category of Being. The inconsistencies arising in each case prove to be insuperable unless that view be abandoned.
2. The Order of Succession. The advance from category to category is from the abstract to the concrete — understanding this distinction in the main as it has been dealt with in a foregoing section. For, as every universal category is ultimately an aspect of the one ultimate idea — the idea of the Absolute Being — every category is thus infinitely concrete in its ultimate reference, and will appear so when its meaning becomes subject to an adequate apprehension. Nevertheless, in their proximate reference, in the degree to which their ordinary employment involves such an apprehension of essential meaning, categories undoubtedly vary widely. Such words as “being”or “quality” in ordinary use are mysteriously devoid of almost any meaning over and above an intuitive ability to employ them correctly, a fact which strongly suggests the purely pragmatic interpretation of concepts. Yet, aside from that interpretation, [83] a meaning of another sort there must be.
In the series of categories which follows — Being, Individuality, Quality,Relation, Space and Time, Knowledge, Value, and Perfection — the order is in general intended to be such that each category should render more explicit than the previous ones, its own ultimate character as an aspect of Being, hence also should throw the nature of the latter into clearer light and aid in the interpretation of the previous categories as in their own way likewise functions of the One. In each case the reference to an Ultimate One, or the truth of the Monistic thesis, will appear as substantiated independently of the earlier or later divisions. In each case also the particular interpretation of Monism which is to be defended by the argument as a whole, and which will appear as the specific conclusion of the argument in the section on Perfection (and, to a large extent also, in the sections on Knowledge and Value), will, in the earlier sections be employed as a suggested hypothesis to supplant the pluralistic conceptions subjected to attack on the score of inconsistency..
The advantages — if there are such — of the order adopted, are thus as follows:
In the earlier steps, dealing as we there do with highly abstract conceptions, the logical requirements involved can be rendered with the greater precision, and the more elusive concrete conceptions of knowledge and value [84] which are to follow will thus appear, in presenting their requirements, not as imposing their more dubious demands upon matters subject the most definitive logical determinations, but rather as providing with these demands, pragmatic and interested as they may appear to be,1 precisely the concrete meanings required to fulfill the more abstract outline already exhibited as necessary. Instead of value calling upon logic to bow itself to the needs of life, as best it may, we shall find logic confessing its status as merely the ordering of those needs, and as referring in all its abstractions to the central and all-pervasive fact of worth or the good. In a purely metaphysical inquiry into the nature and meaning of the category of Being, such a priority of abstract logic seems more in order, than an effort to achieve a theory of Being from the standpoint of the actual wealth of scientific, ethical and epistemological, data and principles, considering with a view to their unification. For as the ultimate demonstration of the knowledge, so far as such be possible, philosophy must begin with the most indubitable of data and principles.
We must show that doubts of the validity of science, ethics, and [85] the religious or ultimate hopes of man, are precisely as intolerable, when fully thought out, to the mode of rational reflection which gives rise to these doubts, as they are to the ethical or practical or scientific or aesthetic or religious interests brought into question. Thus all modes of reflection, all faculties — if we may use the word — or all powers of the mind, will be shown to unite in a single ultimate attitude, affirmation, or consciousness of truth. Human nature will recognize itself as, in the end, a unity — as incapable of division against itself except by a species of self-deception or illusion. The “war between the head and the heart” will exhibit itself as possible only because of an imperfect development or internal disharmony existing in each. We shall know that it is “with his whole soul” that man turns toward the truth, whether as the good, or as the merely factual, and that, in the end, it is the same fact-of-the-good, or goodness of the comprehensive fact, that he encounters and possesses.
3. The Last Starting Point of Knowledge. In our view of the basis of philosophy as the mind’s self-knowledge, the manner of attaining such an assured outcome2 is indicated. The mind flees from all its doubts to discover itself as anterior to doubt and therefore indubitable.
It finds, [86] moreover, in the very texture of such doubts or questionings, certain recurrent or fundamental meanings, or at least words. Upon the meanings which these words do or do not have depends whatever significance is to attach to the questions which they enable the mind to formulate. At first glance, the meanings in question appear obscure and unattainable. Nevertheless, the mind may make the discovery that certain alternatives can be clearly detected in terms of the conceivable relations between the various root-ideas or categories. Thus taking Being (“is”), Individuality (“thing”) quality (“kind” or “nature”) and Relation, it may ask: is the being of a thing, of such and such a nature, (at least) its sustaining such and such a relation to One Ultimate or Universal Being — and must the sustaining of such a relation enter into the nature of Being and register itself as a difference there entirely containing, or at least reflecting the nature of the thing in question? Or, may a thing be, without effecting any universally identical object or reference of the word “is” in such a representative fashion. In short, it is possible to see that the doubt, for instance, as to the “existence” and nature of a world over and above the mind which is undergoing the doubt, may depend in part upon the meaning of existence in relation to “world” as a set or system of objects or things upon whether existence is something which includes all somethings in terms of its own nature as their necessary standard and locus of being, or [87] whether it is not. For starting, as final reflection does, with reflection itself, as the rock which shatters but which cannot itself be wrecked or destroyed, it is obvious to such reflection that if “to be” is to fall within an all-inclusive principle in terms of which all entities and natures must be characterized, then this Ultimate Being must be capable of representing in its own nature, the quality or nature of reflection itself — which is absolutely known to be.3 This fact may enable us to characterize “existence” or “being” if only we can discover it as universal in the Monistic fashion described.
4. Being and Existence. As to the distinction between Being and Existence, it is irrelevant here; since the question is, in reference to this or that type of world or object: is there such a thing or is there not? — and Being thus covers all possible entities with which we are concerned. The question of existence as contrasted with Being will receive some notice in our time and space section.
5. The Arguments Independent Yet Cumulative. It has been said that each section on Division reaches its monistic conclusion independently of all the others. This is true as already noted, only in so far as the conclusion is limited in its concreteness to the point in the series [88] of progressively more concrete categories.
Monism is — it is hoped — subject to proof in each case, but the valuational interpretation of the Monistic outline is only indicated; with more and more explicitness and directness, until it becomes the very conclusion necessitated by the argument. This occurs, not by way of hypothesis or conceivable explanation of things merely, but by the final attainment of a point of view from which the denial of a given hypothesis is seen as implying a contradiction in the hypothesis, while on the other hand the consistency of the hypothesis appears necessitated by the consistency of thought as such — so that all thinking appears as necessarily andradically absurd unless the hypothesis in question be regarded as true. Such is the ambitious scope of the outline.
It may be said, finally, that although each phase or division is intended as an internally complete course of reasoning to a definitive conclusion (Monism as such, and, in later sections, in a more and more definitive form) there is nevertheless a cumulative development in that each shows itself capable of incorporating the preceding as a more abstract or relatively blind expression of the same truth, and in that the conclusion in each case directly necessitated tends to become, as already indicated, more and more concrete — or, on the advocated view of concreteness more and more explicitly and richly in terms of value.
Metaphysics thus appears, not as a congeries of [89] abstractions irrelevant to life, and to reality as given in the admittedly valuational phases of life, but as the inquiry which determines in a manner subject to no ulterior doubt, — to none that is, not based upon a hypothetical failure of the inquiry to utilize correctly its own intrinsic principles, the precise scope and validity, from the ultimate standpoint of truth and reality, of the most general forms assumed by the consciousness of value.
6. The “Outline” Form of the Argument. A few remarks should be added in explanation of the use of the word “Outline.” The purpose of this word is of course in general to prepare the reader for a somewhat summary mode of statement; but also and in particular for on the one hand a subordination of the historical and current formulations and fortunes of the problems to what is taken to be their essential logical skeleton, and on the other for a comparative neglect of issues which it seems unnecessary to determine in order to exhibit the major logical motives which bespeak a Monistic, or a Teleologically Monistic theory of the mature of Being. The aim is above all to set forth the comprehensiveness of the argument for an Ultimate and Spiritual Unity, the completeness with which every great discovery, by a constructive thinker, of ultimate logical connections or relations of categories, is included and incorporated in the argument against the various aspects of an ultimately pluralistic view of things. We cannot [90] endeavor to meet in advance every possible objection to the mode of formulation adopted, but must rest content with pointing out the contradictions which appear to us involved in the disjointed or anti-spiritualistic conception of the universe, and leave the reader to develop his own mode of evasion or counter-attack, with reference to these alleged contradictions, if he feels so impelled. We have already noted that philosophy cannot be final in the sense of rendering counter-attack illegitimate, or beyond all reason absurd. On the other hand, so far as the bare or logical conception of Monism or Unity is concerned, the work of Plato and of the great successors of Plato who have accepted the chief results of his reasoning upon this problem, seem to us to have accomplished a demonstration against which all objections are of exceptionally little weight and relevance — even though advanced in the name of Modern Logic. Considerations of convenience4 and a dogmatic denial or suppression of the inconsistencies long ago revealed in an unqualified or unmediated pluralism, seem to us the basis for all such objections.
The history of philosophy seems to us to have a meaning, and that meaning to be the gradually deepened, reinforced, and enriched perception or [91] rational discovery of the self-dependence and all-inclusiveness of Life, Mind, or Spirit, — as in its own inward or self-apprehended unity the very being of things, and the principle of all their organization and connection. A system of philosophy becomes thus the mind discovering the place of things in the universal Life of Mind, not a vain attempt to deal with them as they might be merely among themselves. Such isolated entities, matter, or what-not, have been seen as abstractions affirmed as complete in the face of their manifest abstractness or relativity, and the derivation of all meaning from the central activity or self-realization of mind, functioning for its own ends in the form of concepts or of values which it creates only in and for itself, has been grasped with inalienable and calm assurance by the great succession of the most earnest and gifted minds who have devoted themselves to metaphysics. It is the logical foundations of this assurance as we see them, which in the large or in outline fashion we desire to set forth, exhibiting on the one hand the rational justification for this primary conviction of philosophers; and, on the other, the plausibility, which at least on one mode of interpreting it, appears to us from every point of view, to attach to it, as a conception of life and reality.
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Endnotes
1. Although having, in truth, a genuine logic or consistency of their own, which cannot be denied save on pain of contradiction. Nevertheless, this consistency is more difficult to determine and more effectively subject to the suspicion of bias in its exposition.
2. Subject to the difficulties and obscurities of the final concepts taken in their concrete or fully explicated meanings.
3. And to be as reflection. Cf. Section 13.
4. For the purpose primarily of maximum communicability and fixity of concepts — a matter already discussed, and arraigned as at least perilously close to a begging of the question.